The first generation to flourish less

There was a regularity that well-being researchers took for granted. It is known as the U-curve: you are reasonably happy when you are young, you hit rock bottom in your late forties—mortgage, young children, aging parents, the career that was not exactly what you imagined—and then, against all odds, you rebound. Old age arrived with more peace than anyone expected. Since it was described in 2008, that curve has been replicated more than six hundred times across different countries and time periods (Blanchflower et al., 2025). Few things in social sciences are so robust.

Well, now: it has broken.

The Global Flourishing Study is the largest attempt yet to measure not happiness, but human flourishing. It is a longitudinal study of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries on six inhabited continents, featuring representative sampling and five years of annual data collection. It is led by Byron Johnson of Baylor University and Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, with Gallup handling the fieldwork. The first results were published in 2025 in a special collection distributed among journals of the Nature portfolio.

Its conclusion regarding age is blunt: instead of a U-shaped relationship, flourishing remains flat until around age fifty and increases from there. And not only in the aggregate, but also in optimism, inner peace, meaning, and balance. In other words: young people are no longer at the peak of the curve. In many countries, the 18 to 24 age group scores the lowest of all.

"Perhaps one of the most sobering features of these data," VanderWeele said during the presentation, "is that, when aggregating across all 22 countries, flourishing tends to increase with age, such that the youngest individuals report the lowest levels of flourishing."

Spain is on the list of countries where this is happening. Along with Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

What exactly is flourishing

It is worth stopping here, because the word lends itself to confusion and the study does not measure what it might seem.

The framework was formulated by VanderWeele in 2017, in an article published in PNAS. Flourishing is not just being happy. It is a state in which all aspects of a life are going well, and it is measured across five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. Two questions per domain, rated from 0 to 10. There is an expanded version that adds a sixth: financial and material stability.

Look closely at what is included. Character and virtue. Meaning and purpose. These are not typical categories in a well-being survey; they are classical, almost Aristotelian categories, integrated into a statistical instrument. That is the bet of the framework: that something broader than people's mood can be measured with rigor.

What is dragging young people down is not sadness

Here comes the data point that should most interest anyone working in a university.

When the youth score is broken down to see what is weighing it down, a general failure does not emerge. Instead, two specific items pull downward with significant force: mental health and understanding one's purpose in life. The pattern repeats in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Gallup, 2025).

That is to say: it is not that today's youth are struggling with everything. It is that they do not know what they are here for.

And that is a lack of a different order. It cannot be resolved with more resources or more opportunities. It is a question—what is worth doing with a life—that someone must have taught you to ask, and for which you need to have read, debated, and thought in the company of people who have spent centuries pondering it.

Money does not explain it

The study's other surprise dismantles the habitual reflex of blaming the economy.

In the overall ranking, Indonesia came out first. It was followed by Israel, the Philippines, and Mexico. The United States ranked fifteenth out of twenty-two; Sweden, eighteenth; the United Kingdom, twentieth; Japan, last. Wealthy nations score high on financial security and low on meaning and social bonds. The researchers write it plainly: many developed nations report greater material security and better life evaluation, yet at the same time less meaning, less prosocial behavior, and poorer relationship quality.

The Swedish case is the most telling. Of the twenty-two countries, Sweden ranks second in life evaluation. And nineteenth in meaning and purpose. You can build a country where people highly value their living conditions and yet still do not know why they get up in the morning.

But beware of the easy headline

All this is serious enough without needing exaggeration, so it is best to be precise.

This is not a universal law of contemporary youth. The World Happiness Report 2026 makes this clear: in 85 of the 136 countries studied, those under 25 are happier today than they were twenty years ago. The slump is concentrated. In the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, life evaluations for those under 25 have dropped by nearly a full point out of ten in a decade, while the average for young people in the rest of the world has risen.

We are not facing a youth problem. We are facing a problem of wealthy societies with their youth. Which, if you live in one of them, is worse news rather than better.

Regarding the causes, prudence is advised: even the authors most critical of social media acknowledge that the causal relationship remains tentative, and the report itself notes that those who use social media less than an hour a day report higher well-being than those who abstain entirely. The simple answer is yet to be found.

Why this is the university's business

One might think that a problem of meaning belongs to the psychological counseling office, the chaplaincy, or the family. But the framework itself suggests otherwise.

In the foundational 2017 article, VanderWeele identifies four pathways through which people access the domains of flourishing: family, work, religious community, and education. The university is not a secondary actor in this story. It is one of the four main pathways.

And it just so happens to reach the student at the exact moment. Spanish data from the Fad Juventud Barometer indicate that the 20 to 24 age bracket concentrates the highest levels of stress and uncertainty: the age when expectations collide head-on with reality. It is, quite literally, the third and fourth years of university.

Some universities have already drawn their conclusions. The Human Flourishing Program has launched an initiative offering universities a survey to measure their students' growth in wisdom, leadership, and civic character. In the United Kingdom, the Jubilee Centre in Birmingham and the Oxford Character Project published a framework for universities to articulate their mission of character formation. And four questions regarding growth in wisdom, justice, and contribution to society have already been incorporated into the Wall Street Journal university rankings.

The underlying movement is clear: for decades we measured universities by what they produced—graduates, employment, publications—and we are beginning to measure them by what happens to the person on the inside.

Measuring the before and after

Here lies the uncomfortable part for any institution that claims to educate the whole person.

Almost all of them say they do. It is in the mission statements, the commencement speeches, the homepage of the website. Very few can prove it. Attendance is measured, satisfaction with the course is measured, grades are measured. None of those three things says absolutely anything about whether a twenty-one-year-old understands his life better in June than in September.

There is an alternative, and it is not complicated: twelve questions at the beginning, the same twelve at the end. It does not measure whether the student logged onto the platform or whether they liked the professor. It measures whether something shifted in their sense of meaning, their relationships, or their character. It is the only proof a vice-rector can present without blushing.

A well-constructed humanities curriculum does not promise to cure anything. It would be dishonest to promise that, and whoever does is selling something else. What it can do is place before a young person the questions that data shows they are lacking, in the company of people who have spent centuries discussing them. And then, at the end, ask again.

If the response has changed, then you know it has served a purpose.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.