The Collapse of Youth Happiness in Canada
The World Happiness Report reveals a sharp drop in youth life satisfaction and a growing generational divide
Young Canadians are becoming less happy, and the decline is sharper than almost anywhere in the world. The latest World Happiness Report finds Canadians under 30 now rank far below older adults, with youth happiness falling from already troubling levels to 71st globally. Meanwhile, Canada’s overall ranking has slid from 5th in 2011 to 25th today.
In this episode, we discuss what’s behind the drop. Is social media really to blame? Or is the bigger story about expectations, affordability, and what the report calls “option freedom”: the ability to make meaningful life choices. We dig into why the decline is concentrated in English-speaking countries, how the World Happiness Report actually measures well-being, and why housing, opportunity, and delayed milestones may be driving a generational sense that the promised path to the middle class no longer works.
If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:
Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Canadians are now experiencing their midlife crisis in their early 20s. Well, sort of.
Happiness typically follows a U-shape in your life. Young adults are quite happy, but get less content as they get older. Life satisfaction would bottom out when someone hit middle age, with 47 often seen as the unhappiest age, and when midlife crises were at their worst.
Mike Moffatt: As someone who just turned 49, I’m glad to hear it’s all uphill from here.
Cara Stern: Yeah, over time, happiness would increase as someone entered their golden years. But that’s not happening anymore in Canada.
A new World Happiness Report finds that adults under 30 are now less happy than their older counterparts. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and the decline has been as deep as in war-torn countries such as Lebanon and Afghanistan.
This isn’t just happening to Canada, though. We’re seeing the same kinds of drops all over English-speaking countries like Australia and the United States, but we’re not seeing it in many other countries. Youth happiness is on the rise in Latin American countries such as Mexico and Costa Rica. Although the headlines about this report mostly focused on social media causing this drop, those countries also use social media a lot. So that can’t be the only reason.
Mike, I remember a couple of years ago, you had a post that went viral about the World Happiness Report. At that time, it showed young Canadians were particularly unhappy, and a lot of the pushback at the time said these results are just a blip. Young Canadians, they’re not really that unhappy. But the 2025 version of the report was released last month, and somehow, the youth happiness results are even worse than last time.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah. That’s right. Two years ago, when the report was released, young Canadian adults, those between the ages of 18 and 30, were found to be the 58th happiest in the world. Needless to say, this caused a great deal of controversy, and if someone like me stated this stat, it was taken as a sign that they either hate Canada or they hate the Trudeau government or both, and I exaggerate there, but not by much. There is a pretty tense online debate.
The newest version of this report came out, and we’re now down to 71st, which is worse. And it’s not that youth in other countries are getting happier and passing us, though some are. Canada’s score in absolute terms is on the decline for youth, but also across the board.
Cara Stern: Canada’s results are pretty depressing. Back in 2011, when the first World Happiness Report was published, Canada was ranked fifth in the world, behind only Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands, with an overall score of 7.5. Today, those four other countries are still in the top ten, but Canada has fallen all the way down to 25th overall, and our score has fallen by nearly a full point.
We should talk a little bit about this report and who put it together. How do they collect the data?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah. So this report was born out of a United Nations initiative to both measure and understand the factors that contribute to well-being. Now we have all kinds of indices of economic activity and human development, such as educational attainment, inequality, life expectancy, and so on, but all of those indirectly measure how satisfied people are with their lives. So the goal of this project is to directly measure how people feel about their lives, but also to understand why.
Every year, a report is released on March 20th, which is the United Nations International Day of Happiness. Now, the report relies heavily on an initiative called the World Gallup Poll that surveys adults from all over the world. The question for the poll that is relevant to the World Happiness Report rankings is as follows:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
Cara Stern: So before, when Canadians were at 7.5, that meant they were on step seven and a half of the ladder, and now they’re on step six and a bit of a ladder, right?
Mike Moffatt: Exactly, yeah. We’ve gone from about 7.5 on the ladder down to about 6.7. And these results on this ladder are then compared to a number of other data sets and polling results. Things like GDP per capita to income inequality, to questions like, “Have you donated money in the last month,” to see which factors are correlated with happiness and which aren’t.
So what matters in all of this is not just how Canada ranks relative to Finland, but how happiness changes in Canada over time. And I find this to be an incredibly useful exercise.
So I know many scoff at the idea of actually asking people how they’re doing rather than inferring it from economic data. I think there’s value to both approaches, and as it turns out, they lead to similar, though not identical, results.
Cara Stern: The youth happiness results are actually pretty depressing, with Canada falling all the way to 71st, which seems unlikely at first, but it makes more sense when you look at how the poll question is worded. The question asks whether you are currently living the best possible life for you, not the best possible life in the world, or how you’re doing compared to a billionaire financially.
You’re not being asked to compare your life to someone else’s, but rather how your life compares to how well you could be doing. And that explains a lot of this.
There’s a book called Engineering Happiness: A New Approach for Building a Joyful Life, and in it, the authors develop something they call the fundamental equation of happiness, which defines happiness as the difference between reality and expectations.
If you’re a young person in Canada who was told that if you worked hard in school, you’d get a job that paid enough to get married, buy a house, have a couple of kids, and all that turned out not to be true, you’re bound to be unhappy.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, exactly right. And I think that’s what people don’t get about this report. They’ll look at it and see that young people in Costa Rica are much happier than those in Canada. Those folks will scoff at the idea, and they’ll dismiss this whole exercise.
But once you realize that people’s happiness is a function of their expectations, it makes a lot more sense. Canada made a lot of promises to young people that, frankly, we haven’t delivered on.
Cara Stern: You mentioned earlier that the report examines a number of other factors and rates countries on those factors. Looking at Canada’s ratings, it looks like a bit of a mixed bag because we do well on some indicators — like we’re 18th for GDP per capita, 21st for healthy life expectancy — but then we’re at 42nd for inequality and somehow 48th overall for freedom.
That one confused me. How are we 48th for freedom?
Mike Moffatt: Well, the definition of freedom is really important here. It’s not freedom in the sense that the government is preventing you from doing something, but rather is based on the concept of option freedom. That is, do you have options? Do you have the resources to make decisions that are in your best interest, or is your life determined by factors outside of your control?
Cara Stern: Okay, so it’s less about civil liberties and more about options of whether you’re able to control your destiny in terms of being able to own a home or move to a more expensive city, maybe afford to have children before you’re 35, and so on.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I couldn’t have said it better myself. And in that sense, there is no question that young Canadians today have less freedom than my generation had 20 or 25 years ago.
Cara Stern: As I mentioned, the headlines on this report focused on the role of social media and how it’s making young people unhappy. And the report has a lot of evidence to back that up, but the relationship isn’t this straightforward relationship. Yes, heavy social media use, specifically more than 2.5 hours a day, is linked to lower life satisfaction and higher rates of depression and anxiety, particularly for young women.
But that doesn’t mean you should just quit social media. The people who reported the highest well-being were actually moderate users, around an hour a day on average.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and what I found particularly interesting is how much youth happiness has cratered across the Anglosphere. Like it’s not just a Canada problem. Australia, the United States and the U.K. are also experiencing large declines in youth happiness. However, we’re not seeing the same relationship between youth happiness and social media use in other countries, including countries where social media use is really quite heavy.
Cara Stern: The authors think part of it might explain the Anglosphere pattern, specifically, which platforms are dominant in those countries. So there are the passive algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and Twitter, which seem to be the ones most strongly linked to worse mental health outcomes.
Mike Moffatt: And remember, if you like our TikTok videos, please like and subscribe. It would help us out a lot.
Cara Stern: Just don’t spend two hours a day watching our videos, and you’ll be fine.
Then there are social media platforms that are more communication platforms. Those are ones that are like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. Because those require more active engagement, they’re therefore a more curated experience, and they appear to have a neutral or maybe even a positive relationship with mental health.
There might be a way to regulate social media to try to help address Canada’s youth happiness decline. Australia is trying it now with a new social media ban that came into effect in December, focusing mostly on those passive social media platforms.
Mike Moffatt: There probably is a role for improved regulation of social media, though I worry we may end up doing more harm than good.
I don’t have a lot of faith in the Canadian government to get this right. Even if we did get social media regulation right, it still doesn’t address the huge drop in option-freedom experienced by young people. I know it’s cliché at this point, but we really need to fix middle-class housing and restore the dream of homeownership. So let’s do it.
Cara Stern: Yeah, if we could fix it, that would go a long way. As we say all the time on this podcast. People entering adulthood today like they’re playing by totally different rules. So the game plan we’ve given them just doesn’t work, and that’s because of a series of policy choices, not because kids today are doing it wrong.
We just didn’t build enough homes, especially in areas where people want to live, especially where they can access jobs.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that people who were promised a certain kind of life and can access it are unhappy. The Gallup question asks if you’re living the best possible life for you.
A lot of Canadians right now are seeing people just a bit older, but who really took the same life path as them, and they’re living that great life. So those young Canadians can see what that life looks like, what they could have had if they won the birth lottery, but they just can’t reach it themselves. And that’s incredibly frustrating.
Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and her editor is Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: If you have any thoughts or questions about why it’s actually okay to spend three hours on our TikTok feed, please send us an email to [email protected].
Cara Stern: But only our TikTok feed! See you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Canada ranks 25th out of 147 countries in the 2026 World Happiness Report - The Globe and Mail