Scrolling, Struggling, Excluded:
Youth Well-Being at the Intersection of Technology and Labour

The annual happiness rankings have a familiar architecture: Finland first, Nordic countries clustering at the summit, the world's wealthiest English-speaking nations — the US, UK, Canada, Australia — conspicuously absent from the top tier. For the second year running, not one English-speaking country appeared in the top 10. Only half made the top 20.

The reasons are well-rehearsed: Nordic societies combine strong institutions, high trust, low inequality, and accessible public services in a way that no Anglo-Saxon country has managed to replicate. But this year's report — the 14th edition, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the UN — goes further. It trains its analytical attention not on which countries are happiest, but on why young people in particular countries are becoming so much less so.

In most of the world, young people are getting happier. In the English-speaking West — the wealthiest, most connected, most technologically saturated corner of the globe — they are not. Read alongside ILO and OECD labour data, the timing, geographic pattern, and demographic shape of the decline point toward two co-stressors working in combination: digital environments that harm, and labour markets that disappoint.

The 2026 report's central thesis resists the temptation of simple condemnation. Social media is neither poison nor panacea. The Oxford researchers — joined by an international team that includes psychologist Jonathan Haidt, researcher Jean Twenge, and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein — present a more nuanced framework: platform architecture, usage intensity, and user demographics interact to produce wildly different well-being outcomes.

Platforms built around algorithmically curated, passive, visual content demonstrate a consistent negative association with well-being. Platforms designed to facilitate direct communication and genuine social connection are positively associated. The same technology infrastructure can yield radically different human outcomes, depending on how it is engineered and used.

Sunstein captures the collective action dimension with particular sharpness. Social media, he argues, is a product trap: people lose out by not joining, yet most would prefer a world without such platforms. Studies found a majority of active TikTok users — and nearly half of Instagram users — would pay meaningful sums to have everyone in their community deactivate.

Among the most striking findings in this edition is how sharply the effects of social media use diverge by gender. The damage is not equally distributed. Girls bear a disproportionate burden.

Across 47 countries surveyed through the OECD's PISA program — covering over 270,000 fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds — girls showed a monotonic decline in life satisfaction as social media use increased. For boys, the picture was more complex and region-dependent. In Western Europe and English-speaking countries, boys showed similar (if smaller) negative effects. In Central and Eastern Europe, the linear correlation was near zero, though the heaviest users still showed elevated low life satisfaction.

Why are girls more vulnerable? The report points to several converging explanations. Girls are more likely to engage in the passive, social-comparison-driven usage patterns that most damage well-being. They spend more time on visual, influencer-heavy platforms. And they face social dynamics — including cyberbullying, appearance pressure, and the psychological weight of curated peer presentation — that boys encounter less intensely.

Belonging — not abstinence — may be the most powerful protective factor for adolescent girls. A school environment that is connected, supportive, and inclusive appears to do more for a teenage girl's well-being than simply restricting her phone use. The priority ordering matters enormously for where governments direct resources.

The negative relationship between internet use and well-being is not uniformly distributed across age groups. It is sharply graded, and those in the youngest age groups bear the steepest burden.

The age gradient is explained by two interacting forces: exposure (younger age groups have used the internet longer, more intensely, and during more formative developmental windows) and susceptibility (the same amount of use appears to produce larger negative effects in younger people). For those in older age groups, who mostly encountered social media as a supplement to an already-formed social world, the relationship with well-being is mildly positive.

The headline global number looks encouraging: the youth unemployment rate at 13% in 2023 was the lowest in 15 years. But the rate conceals as much as it reveals. A fifth of young people globally were NEET — not in employment, education, or training — and two-thirds of those were female. Even among those who found work, roughly half were in informal, short-term employment with no social protection.

Neither the WHR nor the ILO, reading alone, captures the full mechanism. The WHR shows that lower socioeconomic status amplifies the negative well-being effects of social media, most severely for adolescent girls in Anglo-Celtic countries. The ILO shows that young women are structurally more excluded from decent work, with NEET rates more than double those of young men across all major regions. Combine these two findings, and a self-reinforcing cycle emerges that neither dataset describes on its own.

Young women who are economically disengaged have more unstructured time, less access to the protective social scaffolding of school or workplace, and fewer institutional anchors for their sense of identity and purpose. They are therefore more likely to spend extended time on social media — and specifically on the passive, comparison-oriented, algorithmically curated feeds that the WHR identifies as the most damaging usage pattern. The digital harm then deepens their disengagement: declining self-worth, increasing anxiety, and reduced motivation to seek employment or re-enter education. The cycle closes.

Young women face the compounding effect in its most acute form. They are more economically excluded, more harmed by social media, more likely to be NEET, and more likely to have lost the institutional trust and sense of social connection that would otherwise buffer these harms. Finland's formula works precisely because it interrupts this compounding at the structural level: strong welfare architecture means labour market instability does not cascade into social isolation, which does not cascade into digital dependency, which does not cascade into identity collapse.

The policy implication is not that social media regulation and labour market reform are separate agendas. They are the same agenda: restoring the conditions under which young people — and young women most urgently — can form stable identities, build genuine social connections, and participate meaningfully in economic life.

Strip away the methodological caveats, and what remains is a portrait of a fracturing contract between institutions and young people. We built platforms optimized for engagement. We built labour markets that reward capital and penalize inexperience. And in both domains, the bill has been sent to the same address: the youngest age groups, and within them, disproportionately to young women.

Costa Rica's remarkable rise to fourth place — up from 23rd in just three years — is the report's most humanizing data point. Here is a nation without Germany's GDP or the US's technological infrastructure, outranking almost every wealthy democracy in life satisfaction. Costa Rica did not scroll its way to happiness, nor did it engineer it through labour market statistics. It built it, person by person, through the texture of daily life.

The gender findings demand direct acknowledgment. A girl in an English-speaking country who spends seven hours daily on algorithmically curated visual feeds while sitting outside the labour market and education system is not simply wasting time. She is navigating two environments — one digital, one economic — both of which have been engineered to extract value from her attention while returning very little of it in the currency of meaning, purpose, or genuine connection. The WHR's most important policy signal — that belonging is a more powerful protective factor than phone restrictions — points toward the same structural intervention that the ILO data demands: restoring the social and institutional scaffolding within which young people can locate themselves.

The 2026 WHR, the ILO's employment data, and the OECD's labour statistics are, read together, an argument for the same thing: intentionality in how we design the systems — digital, economic, and institutional — within which young people spend their lives. Not as a byproduct of wealth or GDP, but as something closer to what Finland and Costa Rica, in very different ways, have managed to build: the daily experience of being held by institutions that work, connected to people who matter, and able to see a pathway through the world that feels worth walking.