Handing off Their Happiness: Happiness in Youth from the 1960s to Now

Happiness is something that youth seems to have always sought after, but most people have extremely different views on what exactly it is. According to the Meriam-Webster dictionary, happiness is defined as “a state of well-being or contentment”. What is immediately noticeable when one tries to evaluate the meaning of this definition is that it really depends on what an individual or group considers well-being and contentment. This is where we can pose our question: do youth today have different attitudes towards happiness and its definition than in the 1960s?

To begin, according to Ruth Styles’ DailyMail article, polls have shown that a majority of both youth and adults believe that life nowadays is more difficult than it was forty years ago. The study took a sample of 4000 people spanning two generations also found that the specific issues affecting the current youth have to do with the economic climate. Things such as greater job security, pensions and job pressure as well as the absence of so much debt creation are mentioned as possible causes. These issues, which are placed at the forefront of many youths’ goals have caused a lot of young peoples’ ambitions to be much more individualistic, according to Dr Catherine Hakim.

The data presented in the DailyMail article give us a great indication of what may be “well-being” or “contentment” for much of today’s youth. With society’s emphasis on personal success, happiness for the generation represented in the study would be defined as having to do with ones’ level of job security and salary.

Youth struggling to find employment. Credit to Paul Sakuma.

Next, let’s try to gain an understanding of what happiness was for youth in the 1960s. An article written by Carolyn Gregoire for The Huffington Post presents a hippy-youth’s key points for cultivating happiness and they are as follows: meditate, get back to nature, read books, bring music into your life, tune into your spiritual side, take a holistic approach to health, go on a retreat, and eat dinner with your family. There is also a definition of the word “hippy” provided, which presents a hippy as “person who rejects the mores of established society, advocates of nonviolent ethic, and often uses psychedelic drugs or marijuana”. The article ends by quoting a passage from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning due to its significance from 1962, which reads: “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”. All in all, the article shows a much more spiritual and less economic perspective on happiness. Of course, not all youth from the 1960s were hippies, and certainly not every hippy believed in the same things, but this gives us a good idea for what their overall attitude was. It’s clear that to much of the youth, there was a heavy weight put on exploration and finding one’s way by separating from societal norms.

Definition of "hippy". Credit to Tony Alter

This is where the interesting split occurs. As was just mentioned, it seems that for much of the youth in the 1960s, happiness was something found by separating from social norms, with well-being and contentment being achieved from within. However, nowadays, many young people associate happiness with conformation into social norms; being accepted into a job and blending into the system, therefore finding their well-being and contentment externally, held in the hands of their dictators. This stark and perhaps scary contrast begs the question, what happened to that free spirit of the hippy era?