Gen Z’s angst, the death of the midlife crisis, and young worker ‘despair’: 2 top labor economists study the mess on the ladder to success

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Nick Lichtenberg is Fortune Intelligence editor and was formerly Fortune's executive editor of global news.

The term “quarter-life crisis” is a millennial invention, referring to young adults’ period of anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt as they transition into adulthood. Introduced into the zeitgeist

Gen Z knows this feeling all too well. From chronic struggles with burnout to a pragmatic, even skeptical take on how to lead their careers, the generation that entered the workforce during the age of quiet quitting has come to exemplify the quarter-life crisis. But what if this is the new norm, and the midlife crisis is going extinct the way other trappings of the 20th century have, like dial-up internet and Kodak film? What if Gen Z has giant, macroeconomically valid reasons for being plunged into a collective quarter-life crisis?

A provocative working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research has discovered exactly that: Young people are now experiencing much higher levels of “despair” than those in midlife and older age, reversing the longstanding generational pattern of a “hump-shaped” relationship between mental despair and age. To sum: Way back when, you were supposed to be full of despair in middle age, not in adolescence or early adulthood. Economists David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and the University of Glasgow, and Alex Bryson of University College London, are unequivocal: This is nothing less than the “disappearance” of the traditional midlife crisis.

Instead, they found the quarter-life crisis is very real, and Gen Z is struggling

When reached for comment

In a separate interview, Bryson agreed the findings do support a quarter-life-crisis thesis in the sense that big issues are facing young people. He cited a speculative but striking quote from their research about how “things have moved against people at that time in their lives, when they’re looking to build careers and move on and acquire property and all the things … the ladder-type things.”

“Moving on up the ladder, it feels as if, perhaps, for some of them, somebody’s removed some of the rungs on that ladder.” Bryson added that he has not seen research directly supportive of this sentiment.

Bryson said they’ve found “workers are always more mentally healthy than non-workers … But there’s a big change in what’s going on for young people. They’re getting worse relative to the non-workers, amongst the young only.” He clarified that they’ve found this isn’t happening to people over 40 years old, “but it is happening if you’re below 40 years of age, and it’s increasingly so amongst the very young, those under 25.”

Blanchflower and Bryson’s cite Jean Twenge‘s research that “the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted,” along with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s “Deaths of Despair,” both influential findings of a well-being crisis in the 21st century. In interviews with Fortune, both Blanchflower and Bryson also cited the work of Jonathan Haidt, who has argued for a link between smartphone addiction and youth depression, while Blanchflower also cited Harvard professor Robert Putnam and his famous observation at the turn of the century that Americans were increasingly “bowling alone.”

Blanchflower said he’s been talking to Putnam about how the problem of social isolation, first identified in 2000, is getting worse. “The answer is people aren’t bowling at all. They’re not going to the swimming pool. They’re not dating. They’re not having sex. They’re not doing things … The horse is bolted.” Blanchflower urged people to pay attention to what’s happening: “I think the potential consequences of this are huge, long-lasting and global.”

Historically, mental despair in the US—typically characterized

Drawing on an extensive range of nationally representative data

Blanchflower said he was particularly struck

While young workers face a rising tide of distress, the original midlife “hump” of despair persists only among Americans who are unemployed or unable to work, and remains flat for homemakers, students, and retirees, according to the NBER paper. This points to a crisis concentrated among the young and employed—not a general trend affecting all cohorts equally.

“The reason that mental despair now declines in age is because of the recent decline in the mental health of workers under the age of 40 and especially those under 25,” they write. The rise is seen across different datasets and demographic groups, but is especially pronounced among women and those with jobs, rather than unemployed or economically inactive individuals.

Although the paper primarily establishes the existence and scale of the shift, rather than pinning down exact causes, it points to wider social and economic factors that may be contributing: rising job insecurity, diminished worker control and autonomy, rapid technological change and close digital monitoring in the workplace, stagnating wages relative to living costs, and the weakening of collective bargaining power. The loss of traditional expectations around steady employment and the rise of “gig” economy precarity may also leave younger workers feeling especially vulnerable—despairing, really.

Bryson told Fortune that, although “some people don’t agree,” their research suggests this rise in young worker despair began “some time not long after the Great Recession,” specifically the years between 2012 and 2014. Critics say the decreasing stigma around discussing mental health has led to elevated findings of despair in survey data, but Blanchflower and Bryson cite hard data around rising rates of suicide, hospitalization for eating disorders, rising obesity, and social withdrawal as strong evidence of genuine despair among young people. “There are behaviors to support the underlying proposition that the mental health of the young has been declining,” Bryson said.

When asked about similarities to the concept of labor-market hysteresis, introduced

Bank of America Global Research regularly looks at trends in unemployment, including for young workers. A recent analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows the unemployment rate is always higher for young workers, but more tellingly, since 2022 the rate for recent graduates has risen above the overall unemployment rate. The Bank of America Institute offered a more comprehensive view of the situation for young workers: “some 289 million young people globally are neither gaining professional experience through a job nor developing skills

Subsequently, a first-of-its-kind study

Blanchflower described how, even though he’s been studying this topic for years, he hadn’t previously spotted this pattern stretching back to the 1990s because the data was patchy; besides, he had assumed it was a pandemic-related phenomenon. But after reading an interview with Jean Twenge, he went back and “started to look at the data. And I went, ‘Oh, good lord’ … It was clear that it had started before 2020 and that Covid obviously made it worse, but I think people hadn’t recognized it.”

This led to a 2024 NBER paper with Bryson and Xiaowei Xu of the University of Pennsylvania, when they first contrasted the more traditional “hump shape” of the established midlife crisis with the post-2019 surge in youth despair. The chart doesn’t look like a hump anymore, but more like an upside-down check mark, peaking on the left side and going down and to the right. His U.S. chart specifically, he said, prompted a phone call from the United Nations, which would later engage him to work on studying the despair issue globally.

The supporting evidence in the UK was also stark. Blanchflower said it took time for different disciplines to get their data to be consistent, as medical professionals have tended to describe the issue in terms of “mental health” whereas economists have tended to use “happiness,” but “it was always clear in the unhappiness data.” It really locked in for him when they asked the right question: “Over the last 30 days, how many of those were bad mental health days?” The chart that resulted “made me fall over,” Blanchflower said.

Bryson said economists are trained to think of job quality in terms of the pecuniary rewards from work (money and non-monetary financial benefits), whereas psychologists, and a growing number of behavioral economists, point to “the value of work,” or something that is not only estimated in terms of economic benefits. In conversation with Fortune, he referenced Abraham Maslow, famous for his “hierarchy of needs” and how “people’s well-being is very strongly linked to self-actualization, the ability to pursue goals that make them who they are. And for lots of us in our societies, that’s really about work.” Bryson said it’s “conceivable” that the declining quality of jobs for the young is particularly impacting their well-being, adding he considers this to be speculative, absent further research.

Curiously, the

The NBER study sends a strong message, and it’s one the UN is taking seriously: The world’s young workers are in crisis, and the shift in despair from midlife to youth represents both a public health and an economic emergency. Blanchflower confirmed that Dartmouth and the UN are co-hosting a symposium in New Hampshire in late October, with guests including Jonathan Haidt and Robert Putnam.

Bryson offered Fortune another speculative observation: that young people are full of skepticism, much of it justified, about their career prospects. “There’s something special about this moment … At the moment, there are a bunch of things that young people in particular are being hit with, and it means that they can’t be as certain as previous generations.”