Living with their husband in their in-law’s basement apartment in Aurora, Ont., working three jobs and still coming up short on a mortgage, Kai Farnum, 26, wanted to make one adult aspiration come true.
So they got a puppy.
Ms. Farnum and their partner carefully calculated food, pet insurance and vet bills before deciding they could budget for Benny, a sock-stealing standard poodle who came free from a friend.
But they’d like to be foster parents someday, too, and that’s a more faraway goal until life feels more solid. A cheaper city might help, but their main jobs aren’t transferable, and they can’t count on getting new ones.
In addition to a full-time job with a social services agency, Ms. Farnum, who paid their own way through college, works five hours a week doing administration and social media for a daycare, and babysits evenings up to 20 hours a month. Their husband, a customer service representative, also has two side gigs.
Forget going out. It’s a big night, they say, when friends come over to help fold laundry and watch Temptation Island.
Kai Farnum of Aurora, Ont. – playing with Benny the dog at breakfast – works three jobs, their husband two. Earning enough to start a family is a long shot, they say.
To Ms. Farnum, this uncertain, tightfisted entry into adulthood feels like a broken promise, when they’re working so hard and did everything right.
They see the same struggle among other members of their generation – the surging debt and loan defaults, the soaring cost of housing and food. The realization that computers now excel at the skills they dutifully acquired from expensive degrees. And looming above all else, the fires, floods and war that foreshadow, Ms. Farnum fears, an end to the middle-class life their parents achieved.
“There really is this sense of impending doom while I am trying to get my life in order,” they say.
And yet, that orderly – and thus, worthy – life still feels like it requires the very milestones that have become increasingly unattainable. According to the cultural expectations received by Ms. Farnum and their generation since childhood, they need wealth, status and a sprawling house to be truly happy. But when society sells an impossible version of happiness, the inevitable result is distrust and despair.
Ms. Farnum, doing crosswords with husband Brendon, is in an age cohort whose life satisfaction has trended down in the past two decades. Affordability is one reason for that. Ms. Farnum and their husband have explored options to move somewhere cheaper than Aurora, without success.
This deep dissatisfaction has been documented in research papers and national surveys, including the last several editions of the World Happiness Report, which compares global values and attitudes. More recently, it’s been highlighted in a new Canadian analysis of the Gallup World Poll, which has been collecting data on life satisfaction in more than a hundred countries since 2005.
Until recently, decades of responses on subjective life satisfaction across dozens of mostly Western, industrialized countries suggested that lifetime happiness followed a U-curve.
People, on average, hit the road happiest in their free-wheeling 20s, tumbled down in life satisfaction during the early child-raising and career-juggling middle age, and then climbed back up, puttering into old age relatively content with life again.
But happiness isn’t what it used to be. Between 2006 and 2024, the average self-reported life satisfaction of Canadians under 35 has nosedived – and it now takes a long march to retirement age to reach those previous levels of happiness.
As described in a recent working paper by a trio of researchers at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia, the U-shape “has been replaced with a mountain for youth to climb.”
“Instead of a mid-life crisis, we now have a crisis of the young,” the authors write.
And the collapse of youthful life satisfaction is the main reason Canada has fallen out of the top ten list of happiest nations.
In this year’s World Happiness Report, Canada landed 18th out of 134 countries, the country’s worst showing ever. When only Canadians below the age of 30 are included – the age range used by the report – the country falls to 58th place.
This happiness deficit cannot be restored with gratitude journals and mindful mediation, whatever the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry might say.
There’s a big difference between unhappiness triggered by envy for your neighbour’s new kitchen, and the daily distress of not being able to pay rent or groceries. More mental health awareness will not cure climate anxiety if the forests keep burning.
As Ms. Farnum and their peers are already learning, the hungry, striving, self-centred version of the happy life isn’t possible or sustainable – for them, or the world. And if the definition of modern happiness is broken, you need a better one.
So Ms. Farnum went searching – not just for the things that would make them happy, but for what would bring life meaning.
We’ve known for a while that young Canadians are creeping into adulthood anxious and stressed, anticipating a collision with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The Gallup Poll asks respondents to rank their current quality of life on a scale of zero to ten. The Canadian working paper found that over nearly two decades, the lowest life satisfaction responses in this country more than doubled among the youngest respondents, those between the ages of 15 and 34. For the same group, the highest scores declined by 30 per cent.
The seismic drop in young adult happiness has been recorded in many Western, industrialized countries, including Britain and the United States.
But to get a sense of the relative significance of Canada’s happiness collapse, Haifang Huang, a University of Alberta economics professor who co-authored the working paper, ranked countries by the change in life satisfaction among young adults.
By that measure, out of 134 countries, Canada shows up near the very bottom, ahead of just four others – Jordan, Venezuela, Lebanon and Afghanistan.
In other words, according to this particular dataset, Canada has had just about the largest drop in happiness in the world.
It’s easy to blame the pandemic, but as Dr. Huang points out, happiness among young people was already falling before the COVID-19 lockdowns. The steepest decline has been among Gen Z, now older teens and twentysomethings in Gallup Poll data, but it started with the millennials before them.
There’s a convincing case to cast social media as the headliner villain, especially with other research suggesting that mental health among young people took a dive once they started spending larger chunks of their day on their smartphones.
But that’s not so simple either, says Dr. Huang, who has provided research for the annual World Happiness reports since 2015. Life satisfaction hasn’t fallen in every European country, even though, he notes, young people in those places “probably use the internet as often as their Canadian and American peers.”
Instead, Dr. Huang proposes an explanation highlighted in the narrative of Ms. Farnum and so many of their peers struggling to stick the landing that came sooner and more easily to previous generations. In his ongoing analysis of the data, he finds a clear connection between more young people reporting financial hardship and the decline in subjective well-being.
“In Canada, at least,” he says, “a substantial part of the happiness crisis is economic in nature.”
Jerry and Jason Song of Toronto say they’re keenly aware of the climate and economic threats their generation will face in the future.
As Jason Song, an 18-year-old first-year student at the University of Toronto, put it, his generation feels the pressure of countdowns, not the inspiration of an open-ended timeline of possibilities.
“If we don’t act on climate change within the next few years, the world as we know it disappears,” he says. “If we don’t secure stable jobs early, we may never afford a home or a place we can call ours. So, the future for our generation doesn’t feel open at all, like I think the future should. It feels like it’s all closing in.”
In the 1970s, American political economist Ronald Inglehart proposed that the industrialized world was entering a post-materialist age; with their basic needs met, many people could afford to prioritize life’s more existential luxuries – individualism, autonomy, freedom of speech, gender equality.
Yet these are the very elements of society under attack right now by those who feel left behind and betrayed. Young people in Canada, according to a 2023 study by Elections Canada, are less likely to express satisfaction with democracy than previous generations at the same age. Along with less optimism for the future, they report higher levels of distrust for institutions and lower levels of patriotism.
In an Ipsos-Reid poll, taken as the trade war with the U.S. escalated this past January, four out of ten respondents between the age of 18 to 34 said they would vote to join the United States if they were guaranteed citizenship and a conversion of their assets to the American dollar. One third agreed that a merger between the two countries was inevitable, three times more than respondents over age 55.
Suspicion and hopelessness are dangerous values to seed in the next generation of leaders. Untethered and disillusioned, young people become susceptible to extremist groups more than ready to offer simple answers.
The Canadian data, however, suggests that young people, given the choice, will find meaning in more prosocial ways. Compared to older citizens, Dr. Huang says, life satisfaction for them is more affected by issues related to trust, social support and hope – such as concerns about access to food and shelter; the question of whether the standard of living will get better or worse; a sense that children are treated with respect and dignity; and how positively they view their community.
At this recent climate march in Ottawa, some protesters’ signs tried to accentuate the positives, encouraging people not to let despair lead to inaction.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Mr. Song and his twin brother, Jerry, are an example of this social ethos. They have pursued a sense of meaning by working to change the system they’ve inherited. In British Columbia, they’ve been outspoken leaders in Vote16, a campaign to lower the voting age in municipal and provincial elections to 16.
Tackling a problem gives them personal purpose. But if the campaign is a success, the change would also give all young people a more meaningful say in what happens in their country, at a time when many of them feel helpless.
“There’s the huge unspoken burden to save a world, which frankly, we didn’t break in the first place,” says Jason. “I think that pressure is so overwhelming for so many of us, it deteriorates and completely destroys our mental health in ways that I think we’re only beginning to understand.”
Consider, the twins say, how often young people are token representatives on a committee, or not even granted a seat at the table – and how often they’re criticized for not speaking up, and then judged when they do. They challenge the argument that a 16-year-old needs to meet some measure of knowledge or maturity to cast a vote. Creating a voting habit early, they argue, will lead to more invested participation later.
“Young people feel unrepresented, so they disengage, and then they’re blamed for their silence,” says Jerry.
Their campaign has plenty of support, including the many older Canadians who added their voices when the Song twins spoke before a provincial legislative committee on democratic reform in Victoria this summer.
The Elections Canada paper on youth and their rising dissatisfaction with democracy also suggested lowering the voting age. And the twins were further encouraged this summer when the United Kingdom did just that, announcing plans to give 16-year-olds the vote for all elections.
The Songs say activism has changed their outlook on happiness and the process for achieving it.
More personally, activism has expanded their view of the happy life.
“There’s something deeply powerful about committing each day to a cause you truly believe in,” says Jason.
The twins reject the idea that happiness is a formula – take x, then add y, and you’ll have it. “Happiness is something that emerges quietly alongside life,” Jerry says, “not as goal to chase.”
And it tends to show up, Jason adds, “in those moments of doing something difficult, but right.”
But happiness is also created, they suggest, when we start talking to each other. Sadly, they feel the opportunity for spontaneous connections pass by while we’re lost in our phones. And while people can instantly text from one side of the world to another, Jerry observes, “it’s a struggle to find someone who truly listens from even across a room.”
And yet, he says, “some of my coolest conversations have been talking to random people.” And he holds on to them: the gentleman in a food court who told him skydiving stories, the older woman on the bus who shared her gardening advice. “I vividly remember someone teaching me, for 30 minutes of the bus ride, how to plant a rhubarb,” Jerry recalls.
“These genuine interactions, just living in the moment, instead of worrying about something else, are so rare.”
And yet, so important. This kind of social connection is fundamental to both a happy and meaningful existence, as many studies over decades have shown. According to 2019 study published in the journal of the American Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, believing that your life is worthwhile has, in turn, been associated with better health, more prosperity, less loneliness and stronger relationships – independent of age, education and socioeconomic status.
Perhaps most importantly these days, it keeps us hopeful. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning that human beings can endure even the most unimaginable suffering when they have purpose. Knowing your life matters, he said, keeps us moving forward when everything else is falling apart.
Ms. Farnum’s intentional search for meaning began four years ago, at a spiritual retreat. At the time, they didn’t have many friends. Adulthood was supposed to bring clarity; instead, “day-to-day life felt very monotonous and unbearable.” The retreat focused on self-compassion and was held in nature. Ms. Farnum sought both.
On the second day, participants were asked to find a place in the forest to be alone with their thoughts. Ms. Farnum hates insects, but was soon sitting in the moss, leaning against a tree, watching the ants at work.
“They weren’t bothering me, and I wasn’t bothering them.”
They lost track of time. “It felt like five minutes,” they say, but as they sat there, the sun went down. And Ms. Farnum realized the fear of ants – which had seemed so large and overwhelming – had dissipated. They felt calm. Communing with the tree and the dirt and crawling creatures, they were suddenly aware “that the world turned long before I got here, and it’s gonna turn after, so as best you can, enjoy the journey.”
Kai Farnum says they and their friend group have tried to support each other through economic tough times, without getting hung up about wealth for its own sake.
Psychologists refer to this feeling as “transcendence,” a sense that you’re part of something larger than yourself. It‘s found by connecting to nature or with something beyond your own daily concerns, and can help – as it did for Ms. Farnum – to put your own worries in perspective.
In The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith identifies four pillars that explain the world to us and who we are in it: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. These are the parts of meaning, she writes, “that cut through every aspect of our existence,” and “amplify positive values and goals.”
In addition to nature, Ms. Farnum also finds transcendence in their faith life at church, where they volunteer on a committee that supports the LGBTQ community.
“Even if I can’t make sense of the things that are going on around me,” they say, “I can hold on to this idea that something a little bit higher than myself might know what’s going on.”
As for another of Ms. Smith’s pillars – purpose – Mr. Farnum finds it through their social services job. And belonging they get from their close circle of friends, while together they hunt for that landing spot in adulthood.
Gathering at someone’s apartment, they brainstorm how to save money on groceries or find better jobs, share chores and hunker down in front of Netflix. No one ever says “just work harder,” or judges Ms. Farnum’s occasional latte: they know they’re working as hard as they can – and they need the caffeine.
Personal goals are important, says Ms. Farnum, but they now reject the idea that material wealth should dictate their choices, or that homeownership confers bragging rights.
The world may feel broken and unfair a lot of the time, but you can set an example by defining your own version of the meaningful life.
“When our well-being is intertwined with our neighbours,” Ms. Farnum said, “we are naturally compelled to create a more compassionate world.”
Vibe checks: More from The Globe and Mail
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