What’s Making Young Canadians So Unhappy? The Data Is Brutal

Young Canadians are now less happy than seniors, and the gap is getting worse.

The latest World Happiness Report shows Canadians under 30 have fallen to 71st in the world for life satisfaction, while Canada’s overall ranking has dropped from 5th to 25th. In this episode, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern break down what’s driving the decline — from housing affordability and falling “option freedom” to expectations, social media, and why the drop is concentrated in countries like Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

We also explain how the World Happiness Report actually works, why expectations matter as much as income, and what policy choices may be making young Canadians feel like they’re playing by a different set of rules.

Chapters

00:00 Intro: The U-Shape of Happiness and Midlife Crisis

00:51 Canada's New Phenomenon: Young Adults Are Less Happy

01:48 From 5th to 25th: Canada's Global Happiness Ranking

03:00 How Happiness is Measured: The Gallup Poll Ladder Question

04:43 The Fundamental Equation of Happiness: Expectations vs. Reality

06:11 Canada's Mixed Ratings: Inequality and "Option Freedom"

07:18 Social Media's Impact: Passive vs. Communication Platforms

08:50 The Real Solution: Fixing Middle Class Housing and Policy Choices

Research/links:

World Happiness Report 2026 | The World Happiness Report

https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/

Hosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux

Produced by Meredith Martin

Funded by the Neptis Foundation https://neptis.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So we shouldn't be surprised that people who were promised a certain kind of life and can't access it are unhappy.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

There is no question that young Canadians today have less freedom than my generation had 20 or 25 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Demographics, posted by Mike Moffat and Kara Stern. Canadians are now experiencing their midlife crises 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.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

As someone who just turned 49, I'm glad to hear it's all uphill from here.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

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. And this is a relatively new phenomenon, and the decline has been as steep 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, the United States, but we're not seeing it in many other countries with youth happiness 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 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.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

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 was a pretty tense online debate. Now, 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.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

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 10, but Canada's 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 like who puts it together, how do they collect the data?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

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 the 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 from 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?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

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 the ladder, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

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 like 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.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

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 currently are living the best possible life for you, not the best possible life in the world or how you're doing compared to like 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, you know, 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.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

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.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

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 42nd for inequality and somehow 48th overall for freedom? That one confused me. Like, how are we 48th for freedom?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

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. Rather, it's 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?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

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.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

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.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

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 like straightforward relationship. Yes, heavy social media use, specifically more than two and a half 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.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

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 UK 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.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

The authors think part of what might explain the Anglosphere pattern specifically is 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.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

And remember, if you like our TikTok videos, please like and subscribe. It would help us out a lot.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

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 ones are like, you know, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, because those require more active engagement. They're therefore like 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's 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.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

There probably is a rule 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 Canadian governments 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 cliche at this point, but we really need to fix middle class housing and restore the dream of homeownership. So let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yep, if we could fix it, that would go a long way. Now, 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, you know, kids today are doing it wrong. We just we 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't access it are unhappy. The Gallup question asks if you're living the best possible life for you. And for a lot of Canadians right now, they're seeing people just a bit older, but who really took the same life path as them, living that life, so they 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 our editor is Sean Foreman.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

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 missing middle podcast at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

But only our TikTok feed. See you next time.