For fifty years, happiness researchers drew the same shape on the same chart. High in your twenties. A trough somewhere around fifty. Climbing back up after that — the empirical backbone behind every midlife-crisis joke anyone’s ever made. That shape is gone. A 2025 PLOS ONE study by David Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and Xiaowei Xu pooled data from 44 countries and found the U-shaped happiness curve — technically, the “unhappiness hump” — has disappeared. Ill-being doesn’t peak in midlife anymore. It’s highest in the twenties and falls, more or less steadily, from there. Cicero, writing in 44 BCE, argued something close to the reverse of what everyone has assumed for the last half-century: that old age was the easier part, because it releases you from the very state young people are currently stuck in.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
Who ran the study?	David Blanchflower (Dartmouth), Alex Bryson (UCL), Xiaowei Xu (Institute for Fiscal Studies)
Where and when?	PLOS ONE, published August 27, 2025
How big was it?	Global Minds Project data across 44 countries (~1.7 million responses, 2020–2025), plus decades of US and UK survey data
What changed?	The classic U-shaped happiness curve — unhappiness peaking in midlife — has disappeared
What’s driving it?	Young people’s mental health getting worse, not older people’s getting better
How much worse?	US despair among men 18–24 rose from 2.5% (1993) to 6.6% (2024); among women, 3.2% to 9.3%
What did Cicero argue in 44 BCE?	Old age isn’t decline — it’s release from youth’s “campaigns of lust and ambition, of strife and enmity”

The Quick Version

A 2025 PLOS ONE study spanning 44 countries found that the decades-old U-shaped happiness curve — unhappiness peaking in midlife, easing on both ends — has vanished. Ill-being now declines fairly steadily with age, because young people’s mental health has collapsed relative to everyone older than them. Cicero’s De Senectute, written in 44 BCE, argued almost the reverse of the popular assumption: old age isn’t the hard part. It’s what comes after the hard part, once you’re free of youth’s “campaigns of lust and ambition, of strife and enmity.”

What the Study Actually Did

Blanchflower has skin in this particular game. He’s one of the economists whose earlier work, with Andrew Oswald, helped establish the U-shape as one of the most replicated findings in happiness research — a pattern that turned up across dozens of countries for decades: people report the least life satisfaction somewhere in their late forties, then climb back up through their sixties and seventies. It became a fixture of pop psychology, the data-backed version of “hang in there, it gets better.”

It’s not showing up anymore. Blanchflower, Bryson, and Xu drew on the Global Minds Project — survey data spanning 44 countries and roughly 1.7 million responses collected between 2020 and 2025 — combined with decades-deep national datasets: the US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which has surveyed more than 400,000 people a year since 1993, and UK household panel data reaching back further still. Across all of it, the same pattern held. Ill-being no longer humps in the middle of life. It falls, roughly in a line, from a high point in the early twenties down to a low point in old age.

The reason isn’t that older adults got happier. It’s that the young got so much unhappier that the trough moved to the start of the line instead of the middle. In the US data, despair among men aged 18 to 24 rose from 2.5% in 1993 to 6.6% in 2024 — more than double. Among women in the same age bracket it very nearly tripled, from 3.2% to 9.3%. The Conversation’s write-up of the findings puts the shift plainly: misery now peaks among the young, not because midlife got lighter, but because the starting line got worse.

Cicero Already Made the Opposite Argument

Cicero didn’t have a despair statistic to work from. He had Cato the Elder — eighty-four years old in the dialogue — explaining to two much younger men why he wasn’t dreading what was left of his life.

De Senectute (“On Old Age,” more formally Cato Maior de Senectute) is a dialogue Cicero wrote in 44 BCE, in his own sixty-third year, dramatized as a conversation set nearly a century earlier between Cato, Scipio Aemilianus, and Laelius. Cicero puts his own conclusions in Cato’s mouth and works through the four standard complaints against old age one at a time: it withdraws you from active life, it weakens the body, it takes away almost all the pleasures, and it’s close to death. He grants some of it. He doesn’t grant the framing.

The complaint that matters most here is the third one — that old age “takes away the pleasures.” Cato’s answer isn’t that pleasure doesn’t matter. It’s that the appetite for it was never the asset people assume it is. He quotes Archytas of Tarentum on the subject, and the line doesn’t soften in translation: “No more deadly curse has been given by nature to man than carnal pleasure, through eagerness for which the passions are driven recklessly and uncontrollably to their gratification.” Desire, in this account, isn’t a resource you lose with age. It’s closer to a fever you eventually recover from.

Later, Cato describes what’s left once that fever breaks — the soul, having “finished its campaigns of lust and ambition, of strife and enmity and of all the passions,” gets to “return within itself.” That’s not a euphemism for decline. It’s Cicero’s actual claim: youth is organized around wanting things urgently and immoderately, that organization produces real turbulence, and old age’s supposed poverty — fewer wild appetites — is a release from a genuinely hard condition, not a diminished version of a good one. Cicero deals with the fourth complaint too, proximity to death, with an argument this site has covered at more length here: that fearing an inevitability does nothing except tax the years you still have.

Set that next to what the 2025 data describes. Not people in their twenties having marginally less fun than people in their fifties. Despair rates. A trough that used to sit at midlife and now sits at the start of adult life, easing from there on. Cicero wasn’t being contrarian for its own sake. He described youth’s “campaigns” as the more dangerous terrain — accurately, it turns out, about two thousand years before anyone measured it.

What Is the U-Shaped Happiness Curve?

The U-shaped happiness curve is a pattern documented across decades of well-being research: life satisfaction is highest in early adulthood, drops to a low point around midlife — typically the late forties — and rises again into old age. It’s one of the most replicated findings in happiness economics, popularized in part by Blanchflower’s own earlier research, until the 2025 study found the pattern had reversed.

Why Are Young People Less Happy Than Older Adults Now?

The study documents the reversal more confidently than it explains it. Blanchflower and his co-authors don’t settle on one cause, but a few candidates come up consistently in their work and in the coverage around it.

1. The timing lines up with smartphones and social media. The decline in youth well-being becomes visible in datasets starting around the mid-2010s — roughly when smartphone and social media use among teenagers became near-universal, a correlation researchers flag without claiming it’s proven causal.
2. The youth labor market got meaner. Entry-level work, housing costs, and the general difficulty of establishing an independent adult life have all worsened for people in their twenties relative to prior cohorts, even as the same period generally improved for people already established in their careers.
3. Comparison got automated. Bertrand Russell diagnosed envy as a habit of comparison back in 1930, long before anyone could refresh a feed of other people’s highlight reels forty times a day. A platform built to surface exactly the comparisons Russell warned about, running constantly, on the age group that grew up with it — that’s not nothing.
4. Reporting may have gone up alongside actual distress. Reduced stigma around naming anxiety or depression means some of the rise is almost certainly people finally saying what earlier generations didn’t. The researchers are careful not to claim this accounts for all of it — the scale and consistency across 44 countries argues for something more than a reporting artifact.
5. Chasing status doesn’t pay off the way it promises to. The hedonic treadmill Aristotle noticed means each new achievement resets to baseline rather than accumulating — a dynamic that hits hardest exactly when someone is building an entire identity around acquiring things for the first time, which is what your twenties mostly are.

Where This Doesn’t Hold Up

This isn’t a case for skipping ahead to old age, and neither the study nor Cicero would back that reading.

Start with the irony sitting right at the center of the source text: Cicero wrote De Senectute in 44 BCE and was murdered the following year, on the orders of Mark Antony, at sixty-three — barely into the stretch of life he was describing as the calm after the storm. He didn’t get much of the release he was arguing for. That doesn’t make the argument wrong, but it’s worth naming rather than skating past.

There’s a second problem, and it’s more substantive: Cicero’s case individualizes something that the 2025 data suggests is structural. De Senectute frames youth’s turbulence as a matter of appetite — desire running hot and uncontrolled, something a person eventually outgrows. But a housing market that’s harder to enter, a labor market that took longer to reward entry-level work, and a decade of near-constant social comparison delivered through a device in your pocket are not appetite problems. They’re conditions. Cato, Scipio, and Laelius were also, it’s worth saying plainly, three of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Rome — a dialogue about aging gracefully reads differently from that position than it does from a shared apartment and a gig-economy job.

The despair numbers are also a floor, not a full account. A rise from 2.5% to 6.6%, or 3.2% to 9.3%, describes a shift in the population, not a verdict on any individual twenty-four-year-old’s life. Most people in their twenties, even now, are not in the tracked distress category. And correlation with smartphone adoption is not the same as proof that smartphones caused it — the researchers themselves stop short of that claim, and so should anyone summarizing them.

If what’s actually happening is more than a hard patch — if it’s persistent despair, not situational difficulty — that’s a case for a therapist or a doctor, not an ancient dialogue about the virtues of turning sixty.

A Practice Worth Trying

Neither the researchers nor Cicero wrote this as a five-minute fix, but the shared shape of their findings points somewhere specific.

1. Name the campaign you’re actually running. Cato’s phrase was “campaigns of lust and ambition, of strife and enmity.” Before reacting to the next thing you want urgently, ask which campaign it belongs to — and whether it’s one you’d choose to be fighting if you weren’t already mid-fight.
2. Interrupt the comparison, not just the mood it produces. If a bad feeling traces back to someone else’s update, Russell’s diagnosis still applies: the habit of comparing is the actual problem, not the specific person you’re comparing yourself to this time.
3. Borrow Boethius’s move on reversals. Fortune’s Wheel turns by design, not by insult — treating a hard stretch of your twenties as a permanent verdict on your life is the same mistake as treating a lucky stretch as a permanent guarantee. Neither holds still.
4. Build mattering through people, not through milestones. Recent research on “mattering” finds that feeling valued by specific people does more for well-being than any single achievement does. That’s a cheaper, more available fix than waiting for the job, the relationship, or the decade to sort itself out.
5. Practice the “return within itself” Cicero describes. Block ten unstructured minutes with no phone, no input, nothing to acquire. Not a productivity hack — the point is closer to what Cato meant: noticing what’s left when nothing is being chased.

The Data Caught Up to the Argument

Cicero wasn’t running a survey. He was building an argument, in Cato’s voice, out of observation and a handful of borrowed lines from Archytas — that a life spent chasing appetite is a harder life than a life spent past the point of needing to chase. He couldn’t have known that argument would eventually intersect with a dataset covering 44 countries and roughly two million people, or that the intersection would land on the exact age group he described as living through “campaigns.”

Blanchflower, Bryson, and Xu built the empirical version from a completely different direction — decades of national survey data, a method built to separate a stable trend from noise, and a finding strong enough to hold across the US, the UK, and dozens of other countries at once. This site has tracked the pattern before: a philosopher gets the sequence right centuries ahead of the study that confirms it. This time it’s not a sequence. It’s a shape on a chart, inverted from what everyone assumed it was, matching an argument written by a man who’d be dead within the year for reasons that had nothing to do with old age at all.

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This post discusses a 2025 population-level study on happiness and despair trends, and a classical philosophical text. It isn’t a substitute for professional guidance on mental health. If persistent despair — not just a hard stretch — is the actual problem, a therapist, doctor, or crisis line can help in ways a two-thousand-year-old dialogue can’t.