Is There a Happiness Crisis Among Young Canadians?

We find a large decline in the life satisfaction of younger Canadians - those below age 35 - since the mid-2010s in the Gallup World Poll (GWP), several different themes of the Canadian General Social Surveys (GSS), and the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), often driven by 2-3-fold increases in misery (very low responses) and around 30% declines in very high responses. The declines appear in happiness levels and relative to older Canadians. The timing of the decline is consistent across surveys. In all cases the downward trend started before COVID-19 and continued during the pandemic. In terms of birth cohorts, the declines are the most dramatic for Gen Z. But Gen Y follows not far behind. Boomers, in contrast, stand out in their resilience. The decline in younger Canadians’ subjective well-being has turned the “midlife crisis,” captured by a U shape in the age-happiness relationship and frequently seen in earlier Canadian data, into a crisis for the young: most surveys now feature a monotonically rising age curve, with happiness starting low and rising until the retirement age.