Instead, they found the quarter-life crisis is very real, and Gen Z is struggling by historical standards (although they do not use the term “quarter-life crisis”). The decline in mental health among young people, they write, is “particularly evident for young people ages 12-25, and especially young women.” What’s more—and what sets Blanchflower and Bryson’s research apart from so much other relevant work in this area—is it’s the first study to directly link youth despair to what’s happening in the labor market. Bryson noted that it’s just been put out as a discussion paper and is yet to be peer-reviewed.
When reached for comment by Fortune, Blanchflower described being “freaked” out by what his research is showing: “Suddenly young workers look to be in big trouble.” The economist admits he had “never really heard the phrase” quarter-life crisis before, but he “might well have used it” if he had. Still, he was forthright. “Now, both absolutely and relatively, the young are worse off … [it used to be] true that your happiness was going to decline in midlife, but that’s all changed.”
In a separate interview, Bryson agreed the findings do support a quarter-life-crisis thesis in the sense that big issues are facing young people. He cited a speculative but striking quote from their research about how “things have moved against people at that time in their lives, when they’re looking to build careers and move on and acquire property and all the things … the ladder-type things.”
“Moving on up the ladder, it feels as if, perhaps, for some of them, somebody’s removed some of the rungs on that ladder.” Bryson added that he has not seen research directly supportive of this sentiment.
Bryson said they’ve found “workers are always more mentally healthy than non-workers … But there’s a big change in what’s going on for young people. They’re getting worse relative to the non-workers, amongst the young only.” He clarified that they’ve found this isn’t happening to people over 40 years old, “but it is happening if you’re below 40 years of age, and it’s increasingly so amongst the very young, those under 25.”
Blanchflower said he’s been talking to Putnam about how the problem of social isolation, first identified in 2000, is getting worse. “The answer is people aren’t bowling at all. They’re not going to the swimming pool. They’re not dating. They’re not having sex. They’re not doing things … The horse is bolted.” Blanchflower urged people to pay attention to what’s happening: “I think the potential consequences of this are huge, long-lasting and global.”
Drawing on an extensive range of nationally representative data sources—including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS, 1993-2023), the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH, 2008-2023), as well as multiple large national surveys—the researchers document a dramatic rise in despair among young people who are active in the labor force. This means in general, the younger the worker, the higher their level of reported mental distress, with despair now declining steadily with age instead of peaking in midlife.
While young workers face a rising tide of distress, the original midlife “hump” of despair persists only among Americans who are unemployed or unable to work, and remains flat for homemakers, students, and retirees, according to the NBER paper. This points to a crisis concentrated among the young and employed—not a general trend affecting all cohorts equally.
“The reason that mental despair now declines in age is because of the recent decline in the mental health of workers under the age of 40 and especially those under 25,” they write. The rise is seen across different datasets and demographic groups, but is especially pronounced among women and those with jobs, rather than unemployed or economically inactive individuals.
Although the paper primarily establishes the existence and scale of the shift, rather than pinning down exact causes, it points to wider social and economic factors that may be contributing: rising job insecurity, diminished worker control and autonomy, rapid technological change and close digital monitoring in the workplace, stagnating wages relative to living costs, and the weakening of collective bargaining power. The loss of traditional expectations around steady employment and the rise of “gig” economy precarity may also leave younger workers feeling especially vulnerable—despairing, really.
Bryson told Fortune that, although “some people don’t agree,” their research suggests this rise in young worker despair began “some time not long after the Great Recession,” specifically the years between 2012 and 2014. Critics say the decreasing stigma around discussing mental health has led to elevated findings of despair in survey data, but Blanchflower and Bryson cite hard data around rising rates of suicide, hospitalization for eating disorders, rising obesity, and social withdrawal as strong evidence of genuine despair among young people. “There are behaviors to support the underlying proposition that the mental health of the young has been declining,” Bryson said.
Blanchflower described how, even though he’s been studying this topic for years, he hadn’t previously spotted this pattern stretching back to the 1990s because the data was patchy; besides, he had assumed it was a pandemic-related phenomenon. But after reading an interview with Jean Twenge, he went back and “started to look at the data. And I went, ‘Oh, good lord’ … It was clear that it had started before 2020 and that Covid obviously made it worse, but I think people hadn’t recognized it.”
The supporting evidence in the UK was also stark. Blanchflower said it took time for different disciplines to get their data to be consistent, as medical professionals have tended to describe the issue in terms of “mental health” whereas economists have tended to use “happiness,” but “it was always clear in the unhappiness data.” It really locked in for him when they asked the right question: “Over the last 30 days, how many of those were bad mental health days?” The chart that resulted “made me fall over,” Blanchflower said.
Curiously, the authors note the declining mental health of young workers is not driven by a decline in wages, as the ratio of the youth wage to older workers has increased; real wages have also been on the rise. But other costs have added to despair: the relative prices of housing, healthcare, and student debt have risen. Meanwhile, health has worsened, with increases measured in both social isolation and obesity. Youth suicide rates are rising. These factors coincide with a worsening of reported mental health across major survey instruments since the mid-2010s. Blanchflower told Fortune that, once you rule out dissatisfaction with wages or unemployment, it adds up to a conclusion that young workers are basically saying “this job sucks.”
Bryson offered Fortune another speculative observation: that young people are full of skepticism, much of it justified, about their career prospects. “There’s something special about this moment … At the moment, there are a bunch of things that young people in particular are being hit with, and it means that they can’t be as certain as previous generations.”
