The well-being of young Americans is "falling off a cliff," according to a new study. Concretely, the United States ranking is now ranking 23rd in Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre's Happiness Report, which surveys the happiness of citizens of all age groups in over 100 countries.
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the Oxford economist who helps steer the World Happiness Report, has warned that America's youth well-being crisis isn't a blip, but a pattern. The University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre and a professor at Saïd Business School, he pointed out a steep deterioration in how young Americans rate their lives to CNBC.
The World Happiness Report relies on Gallup World Poll data and tracks life evaluations across more than 140 countries, making it one of the most closely watched international gauges of subjective well-being.
The 2026 Happiness Report found that in North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than they were 15 years ago. It also found that youth well-being has fallen only in the NANZ countries (The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and in Western Europe, both in absolute terms and relative to adults. In a ranking of happiness changes for people under 25, those four English-speaking countries sat near the bottom, between 122 and 133 out of 136 countries.
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The United States dropped out of the top 20 for the first time in the 2024 edition of the World Happiness Report. Americans under 30 ranked far below older Americans, with the report noting that U.S. rankings for people 60 and older were more than 50 places higher than for those under 30. When countries were ranked by youth happiness, the United States sank to 62nd.
The warning did not fade then. The 2025 report showed that the United States had fallen again, to 24th, its lowest position in the report's history at the time, and De Neve said the erosion was being driven especially by Americans below 30. "Life satisfaction of young people in the U.S. has declined," he said.
The 2026 report says heavy users of social media are particularly at risk, especially in English-speaking countries and Western Europe. The founder and chief scientist of research nonprofit Sapien Labs, who released a similar report, Tara Thiagarajan, told CNBC that "Adoption and usage were much faster in the Anglosphere because the first language of the internet was English." De Neve told CNBC that "Fifteen-year-old girls using social media for five hours or more a day are a whole point lower in terms of their life evaluation," compared to those who use it for an hour or less.
But it also says social media does not fully explain the decline. Processed foods were singled out as a factor, as it "has a major impact on your ability for emotional control and regulation and your depressive symptoms." Thiagarajan also pointed out that young people have "less close family ties, less friends that will help them out. So they're not embedded in a strong social support network anymore."
De Neve emphasized the importance of not solely blaming one cause for unhappiness in today's youth. "All of them matter," De Neve told CNBC, "and all of them feed into sort of a toxic cocktail" that affects young people's wellbeing.
Originally published on IBTimes
