For decades, my students have been split approximately 50-50 between Americans and those from abroad. As a behavioral scientist specializing in happiness, I pick up on the dispositional differences between the two groups. Early in my career, many of the international students seemed to me to have a certain weariness about them that the Americans did not. My Spanish wife saw it, too: Young Americans were relaxed, happy, and innocent by comparison.
That has reversed in the past decade. Now, I see a greater edge in the American students—more cynicism, less laughter. Today, it is the Asian and South American students who smile more easily. Even the jaded, cosmopolitan Europeans seem happier than my young compatriots. The only ones who seem to be able to give us a run for our gloom are the Brits and the Canadians.
I didn’t field a survey or run an experiment on this, so maybe, I thought, it was just my imagination. That is, until I read this year’s World Happiness Report, published by Oxford University. A principal finding of the report’s survey of more than 140 countries is that the people most disproportionately dissatisfied with life have one big thing in common: They all speak English. From 2006 to 2025, the U.S. saw a 10 percent average decrease in self-evaluated life satisfaction. The UK’s measure fell by a little less, Canada’s by a little more. These are greater declines than in any other part of the world.
The Anglospheric funk is not uniform across the population, however. The rising unhappiness is occurring mostly among young adults—that is, people like my students. According to additional data published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, in virtually every survey over the past two decades, Americans under 25 reported a greater drop in life satisfaction than any other age group, and by an order of magnitude over some.
What accounts for this? There are several possibilities, but one obvious culprit is that the Anglosphere’s social media use is among the highest in the world. Less than 5 percent of 15- and 16-year-olds in English-speaking countries spend no time on these platforms, the lowest threshold of any region. And nearly 80 percent of them devote more than an hour a day to them, the highest measure globally.
This is, in fact, the main explanation advanced by the report itself. The lead essay, by Jonathan Haidt and Zachary Rausch of New York University, lays out copious evidence from surveys, experts, and experiments to demonstrate a causal link between social media use and unhappiness. The authors compare the dramatic impact that this technology has on adolescents—in driving depression and anxiety—to the effects of childhood maltreatment. They also demonstrate that cutting social media use for just two weeks could reduce the incidence of clinical depression in young adults by a third.
This tracks with what I describe in my new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. The overuse of personal screens changes the way we use our brains, from a healthy balance between the left hemisphere’s technical and analytical focus and the right hemisphere’s emphasis on mystery and meaning, to a much heavier emphasis on only the left side. In the process, we also become incapable of tolerating boredom—and that eliminates the crucial functions of the brain’s capacity for mind-wandering and abstract thinking, both vital for well-being.
But that seems to be only part of the story, because here’s the paradox: Social media use in other regions of the world isn’t that dissimilar to the Anglosphere’s—yet their happiness levels haven’t cratered like ours. According to the report, more than two-thirds of Asians and Latin Americans use social media for more than one hour per day, but each region’s well-being levels, even among adolescents, have mostly remained stable. This means that raw time usage can only be part of the reason why social media makes the Anglosphere uniquely miserable.
So why does social media have a larger deleterious effect in the English-speaking world than elsewhere? I’d propose three interlocking hypotheses, all of which point to a conclusion that the problem isn’t social media per se but rather how we Anglophones tend to interact with it.
Hypothesis No. 1 revolves around the fact that social media was largely invented in America, in English. It is a U.S. cultural innovation, intended (at least initially) for users who lived in the individualistic cultures that are typical in the Anglosphere. Think of the early days of Instagram or Twitter—posting photos of your life or publishing your thoughts to the digital masses. Indeed, research has shown that higher rates of social media use lead younger generations to engage in more “self-presentation” and “self-optimization” behavior than older generations. In other words, social media was originally designed to attract people with the characteristics most prevalent in the U.S. and its closest cultural orbit.
In one cross-cultural study between Britons and Arabs who spent the same amount of time on social media, the Brits were significantly unhappier. This was because the Arab subjects, on average, spent more time connecting with their friends and family, whereas the British ones were engaged with social media as it was originally designed—as a mirror to self. Another study of Korean and American college students found that cultural differences manifested online: Korean users tended to keep tighter, more intimate social media circles, whereas Americans sought broader, looser networks and disclosed far more personal information online. Notice that in both studies, the Anglospheric samples spent more time thinking about themselves. Unsurprisingly, this makes us unhappier: Scholars have long known that constant self-focus is a precursor to misery.
This leads to Hypothesis No. 2: The Anglosphere uses types of social media platforms that are harder on well-being. The authors in the report distinguish between two categories of social media: “social connection platforms” (such as Facebook and WhatsApp) and “algorithmic content platforms” (such as X, Instagram, and TikTok). They argue that the former tend to have net benefits for well-being, whereas the latter are more likely to cause net harm (though Facebook has increasingly adopted features associated with the latter category). Unsurprisingly, the more harmful type—the algorithmic platforms that are highly visual and induce passive consumption—tend to be more heavily used by English-speaking youth. By contrast, more citizens of Latin American nations use “social connection platforms.”
Put another way, how we engage with social media matters a lot. If we use the technology to complement our in-person relationships, all the better; if we use it to substitute for in-person relationships, not so good.
This finding pairs well with Hypothesis No. 3: The Anglosphere has seen a gradual decline of in-person community and relationships, which has set the conditions for social media to fill this gap more here than elsewhere. Everyone familiar with Robert Putnam’s prophetic 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, will know that the Anglosphere, even before social media existed, had witnessed a fraying of its institutions of community. Although some areas of the world have also grown lonelier, the Anglosphere, as the report demonstrates, has seen precipitous declines in social trust, civic engagement, neighborliness, friendships, and romantic partnerships.
Again, Latin America provides a useful contrast. For years, researchers have shown that the region’s strong interpersonal ties (as measured by family, friends, and tight-knit communities) have kept its well-being rates fairly high, despite economic hardships. So, even though Latin Americans’ rates of social media use are nearly as high as those of the Anglosphere, their vibrant community life provides a buffer against social media’s negative side effects.
It’s not as if all this is shocking news to most young people. In interviews for my book, many young American adults told me they know they’re isolating themselves and living in a screen-based world that feels phony—“like a simulation of real life,” one subject told me: fake friends, fake dating, fake workplaces, fake fun.
Weirdly, many talk about before-times that they themselves never even experienced but that were real. You may have come across the social media trend of film snippets showing teenage life from about 1979. You see teenagers goofing around outside, going to movies together, talking at parties—all, notably, without a phone in sight. This meme has gained currency because it offers young people today who feel sentimental about real life a nostalgia for a time they never knew.
That grainy meme of the ’70s was my own adolescence. Those years featured plenty of trouble, much of which I got into myself. God knows, there were problems in the world: You think Iran is complicated now? Try 1979. U.S. politics was brutal, too. And, oh yes, we had the nagging little issue of thermonuclear war to worry about. Imagine growing up knowing that we could all be vaporized on any given Tuesday. And yet, as we all know—including people born decades later—those were far better times to be a young person, because life was not a simulation. No social media fakery, no obsessive scrolling and posting—just real life.
So what do the current grim statistics about the miserable Anglosphere portend? One prediction might be that social media use will follow the trajectory of ultraprocessed junk food, much of which was designed for American culture and palates but which now afflicts the rest of the world. In this case, Latin America and Asia will follow the Anglosphere in unhappiness in the years to come.
An alternative future is one in which we figure out how to use social media in a more productive, connective way—more as our Latin American and Asian friends do, to complement relationships, not substitute for them. I already see this adaptive behavior in the young English speakers I know best: my three twentysomething adult kids. They all have social media accounts but mostly employ them to communicate with people they actually know. And they regulate their use: One of them carries a flip phone rather than a smartphone on the weekends, in order to stay more focused on his family. For them, social media is not a problem but a tool for staying connected.
But my kids’ good digital hygiene tells only part of the story. They, like today’s Latin Americans, have real relationships within tight-knit communities. They host friends for dinner parties and go to the park with other young families after church. In fact, social media is a snore compared with their lives off the internet.
I’ll put my money on this second scenario—not because I’m an optimist but because of the upside to the Anglospheric culture of entrepreneurship and individualism. English speakers have solved big problems and changed the world for the better, again and again, throughout history. I’m confident that Silicon Valley now sees the problem with the algorithms, and in time will make its products better. But as individuals, we don’t have to wait for that. The biggest life innovation each of us can make today is to live more in an old-fashioned way: loving one another, in real life.