Why Are so Many Young People Unhappy?

College students in America are struggling at an alarming rate with clinical depression. “Suicidal thinking, severe depression and rates of self-injury among U.S. college students more than doubled over less than a decade,” Reuters reported in August 2019, citing a study of hundreds of thousands of students from 2007 to 2018. “Reports of suicide attempts increased from 0.7% of survey participants in 2013 to 1.8% in 2018, while the proportion of students reporting severe depression rose from 9.4% to 21.1% in the same period,” reported Reuters. “The rate of moderate to severe depression rose from 23.2% in 2007 to 41.1% in 2018, while rates of moderate to severe anxiety rose from 17.9% in 2013 to 34.4% in 2018.”

Related reading: “New Cigna Study Reveals Loneliness at Epidemic Levels in America”

Related video: “The Key to Unhappiness” – Dennis Prager

Social commentator Kay Hymowitz writes in a recent op-ed on the growing “epidemic of loneliness” in the West: “Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking. It’s not much comfort that Americans are not, well, alone in this. Germans are lonely, the bon vivant French are lonely, and even the Scandinavians — the happiest people in the world, according to the UN’s World Happiness Report — are lonely, too.”

Loneliness has become such a prevalent issue in the U.K. that Britain felt it necessary recently to create a Minister of Loneliness. “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time, Theresa May said today as she launched the first cross-Government strategy to tackle it,” the British government announced in October 2018. “The Prime Minister confirmed all GPs in England will be able to refer patients experiencing loneliness to community activities and voluntary services by 2023.”

“Though people have more money, better health care, better health, better housing and more education, and live longer than at any time in history, they — especially young people — are unhappier than at any time since data collection began,” notes Dennis Prager.

While there are any number of reasons, including drug and opioid addiction, less human interaction because of cell phones and social media, and fears about the future, the biggest reason in the West is the loss of values and meaning.

Related reading: “Happiness is a Serious Problem” – Dennis Prager

Since the 1960s, Americans have increasingly lost their sense of a shared identity and a unifying “American creed.”

A 2019 Gallup survey found that American pride reached a new low, with only 45% of Americans saying they felt extremely proud to be American, while 30% said they were either only moderately or not at all proud.

Related video: “The American Trinity: The Three Values That Make America Great” – Dennis Prager

The loss of key shared American values has resulted in the loss of community. Among some of these lost values is the belief in meeting community needs with civic organizations, like Kiwanis, Rotary and Lions Clubs, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and churches — in which participation has dropped off sharply in the last half-century — rather than turning to the government to address them.

An increasing number of young Americans have also lost middle class or bourgeois values — including prioritizing getting married before having a child, building a family, holding a full-time job, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and patriotism.

The result is that loneliness has reached epidemic levels in America. A recent Cigna study of 20,000 U.S. adults found that over a quarter say they “rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them,” and over 40% say they “sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful” and they feel “isolated from others.”

After decades of a sustained war on family values in America, the majority of births to millennials are to unmarried women.

The percentage of American adults who have never been married and who have no children has recently reached historic highs.

A 2018 study by Cigna found that single parents are generally the loneliest of Americans.

Related video: “Be A Man. Get Married.” – Brad Wilcox

A belief that one’s life has meaning is essential to happiness. Renowned psychoanalyst Victor Frankl famously argued in his masterpiece “Man’s Search for Meaning” that, aside from food, the greatest human need is meaning.

More than a third of Americans born after 1980 affiliate with no religion.

A 2016 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA Psychiatry, found that American women who attended a religious service at least once a week were five times less likely to commit suicide.

Dennis Prager sums up the root cause of the increasingly pervasive unhappiness in America: “The reason so many young people are depressed, unhappy and angry is the left has told them that God and Judeo-Christian religions are nonsense; their country is largely evil; their past is deplorable; and their future is hopeless. That seems to be a major reason, if not the reason, for so much unhappiness: not capitalism, not inequality, not patriarchy, sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia but rather having no religion, no God, no spouse, no community, no country to believe in and, ultimately, no meaning. That explains much of the unprecedented unhappiness. And it explains the widespread adoption of that secular substitute for traditional religion: leftism. But unlike Judaism and Christianity, leftism does not bring its adherents happiness.”