Young Americans are drinking a lot less than they used to. That bodes ill for America.

Let me explain. A new report making headlines from the research organization Monitoring the Future reveals that the percentage of teenage Americans who had tried alcohol in 2025 was lower than at any time since the data had been collected. In the mid-1970s, 92 percent of 12th graders had tried at least a sip of alcohol; by 2025, that proportion had fallen almost by half, to 47 percent.

On the one hand, this is good news, given the many problems created by underage drinking—and I include those of my own besotted youth. But the new finding also indicates a trend that is distinctly less cheery: an unwillingness to take risks associated with adult behaviors. This is a point persuasively made by the psychologist Jean Twenge, who has shown that among adolescents and young adults, all manner of risk-taking—from having sex to driving a car—has tanked in recent years.

For example: Now that Gen Z is firmly in the workforce, financial researchers have begun to look at these young adults’ investing habits. The conventional wisdom is that young people are piling into crypto and meme stocks—and some certainly are. But on average, members of Gen Z prefer safer, liquid assets and avoid high-risk investments, compared with older cohorts.

Lest you think this is simply evidence of prudential wisdom about finances, Gen Z is even more resistant to high-stakes investments in other people. In 1980, 90 percent of 35-year-old men were married; today, the rate is 60 percent and falling fast. In 1993, 83 percent of 12th-grade girls said they hoped to marry at some point; by 2023, only 61 percent said the same.

Some of this stems from a lack of self-confidence: The percentage of 12th-grade girls who believe they would make a “very good spouse” fell by 11 percentage points from 2012 to 2022. (The decrease for boys was 8 points.) But the data generally point to the fact that rising rates of anxiety—which creates risk aversion—are a big reason why members of Gen Z are avoiding real-life relationships. For example, higher anxiety among young people predicts a preference for digital messaging over face-to-face interaction. And according to recent data analysis by the University of Washington’s Ryan Burge, this anxiety extends far beyond a preference for texting. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z say “you can’t be too careful” in dealing with people—far and away the highest of any age cohort. Depressingly, only 13 percent of Gen Zers say that most people can be trusted. The result is that in pursuit of avoiding risk, Gen Z is avoiding people.

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Heavy, man. A few seconds later, however, he followed with this: “At least the Knicks are crushing it.”

As we all know, the Knicks went on to win their first NBA finals since 1973 on Saturday night, making my friend even happier alongside millions of New Yorkers. From Brooklyn to Queens to the West Village to the Upper East Side, fans of all ages, races, and religions streamed onto the streets, hugging and high-fiving each other at random. Fire trucks honked along with chants; taxi cabs blasted “New York State of Mind”; and walkers whooped as they passed each other, for no other reason than the exhilarating experience they had just enjoyed together.

As a happiness specialist, one thing I have seen in the studies and data over the past decade is that sports fandom is one of life’s unalloyed sources of joy. In Fans Have More Friends, the sports writers Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak show that professed sports fans who have favorite teams are twice as likely to be “very happy” compared with nonfans, are far more likely to feel known, and are more grateful about life.

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Moral attitudes in the United States have shifted enormously over the past few decades, and on a whole range of issues: from same-sex marriage to abortion. But Americans have remained foursquare against adultery. A solid 90 percent of adults said in a survey last year that marital infidelity is morally wrong, whereas just 2 percent said it is morally acceptable. (The rest believed it is not a moral issue.)

This overwhelming condemnation transcends age, gender, religion, and political ideology. Given that 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women admitted in 2022 to having had an affair (and many more don’t fess up to it), this condemnatory consensus even includes a good many cheaters themselves.

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Papal encyclicals aren’t typically known for provoking controversy. But Pope Leo’s decision to grapple with one of the most powerful and least understood technologies of our age has inspired intense debate. Matthew Walther, editor of Catholic literary journal The Lamp, called it “disappointingly measured and cautious.” AI safety researcher and blogger Zvi Mowshowitz criticized the pope’s assertion that AI cannot truly think. Others, including critics, developers, and religious leaders, praised the encyclical for the breadth and seriousness of its approach.

These subjects aren’t relevant to Catholics alone; indeed, we wrestle with them every day here at The Free Press. So we were thrilled to learn that Free Press columnist Arthur Brooks was invited to write the foreword for the English edition of the encyclical, published by Ascension Press. Today, we’re sharing an adapted version of the foreword, in which Arthur reflects on the pope’s lessons during a moment of profound technological change. For more, tune in to Arthur’s live conversation with Father Mike Schmitz Wednesday, 8 p.m. ET, about artificial intelligence, human dignity, meaning, and the future of humanity. —The Editors

There’s an expression that artificial intelligence developers in California use to refer to their work: “Building God.” In fact, one of them, Avital Balwit, the chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, just did so in a May 22 essay for The Free Press. The use of the phrase, she wrote, is intended as a form of sardonic humor, acknowledging the awesome power and potential consequences of AI.

But is it a joke, really? The timing of Balwit’s piece was serendipitous, for only three days after it was published, Pope Leo XIV made headlines around the world for writing about artificial intelligence. On Monday, he issued his first encyclical—a major papal declaration on contemporary issues that is intended to guide the Catholic Church—titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

AI, Leo writes, isn’t the first time people have tried to build something godlike. Indeed, he opens his encyclical with the biblical story from Genesis of the Tower of Babel, which was a human attempt to reach “to the heavens.” What was the builders’ motivation? By their own account, “so that we may make a name for ourselves.”

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True, a few commencement speeches have been memorable, such as David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” at Kenyon College in 2005; Steve Jobs’s “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” that same year at Stanford University; and Admiral William H. McRaven’s “Make Your Bed” at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

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That has reversed in the past decade. Now, I see a greater edge in the American students—more cynicism, less laughter. Today, it is the Asian and South American students who smile more easily. Even the jaded, cosmopolitan Europeans seem happier than my young compatriots. The only ones who seem to be able to give us a run for our gloom are the Brits and the Canadians.

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Years ago, early in my life as a public writer, and soon after comment sections became common in online publications, I published a very earnest article about the importance of loving one’s ideological foes. By that, I did not mean to tolerate our enemies or coexist with them in a bumper-sticker way; rather, as Jesus taught, to love them, no matter how their views make us feel. I genuinely believed the essay would be helpful, provocative in a constructive way, and I eagerly anticipated the response.

As soon as it was published, like a newborn lamb wandering into a den of hyenas, I clicked on the feedback section.

The first comment? “Arthur Brooks can eat a plate of hot trash.” It went downhill from there.

Welcome to the world of hate-posters; the trolls who have infected all social media platforms and the comment sections of most publications. These are people who—usually anonymously—post inflammatory, insulting content on the internet that aims to upset others and disrupt conversations. You have no doubt encountered them in Instagram comments and Facebook groups. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans in 2020 said they were victims of some form of online harassment. The Cyberbullying Research Center reports that the percentage of adolescents who have experienced cyberbullying rose from 17 to 33 percent over the past decade.

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Like so many ideas propagated as fact on social media and the internet, this belief gives a wildly distorted picture of the desires and needs of the vast majority of both women and men today. The best data on what young adults are actually looking for comes from data collected by think tanks such as the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute, which together have recently published a report titled “State of Our Unions 2026: The Dating Recession.”

It is true that, according to the report’s survey, only 21 percent of single young adults today are satisfied with their dating options. But contrary to the idea that young women are solely after good times and resources, the researchers find that 83 percent strongly endorse a dating culture focused on forming serious relationships and creating emotional connections. And lest you think that young males simply seek short-term hookups, the corresponding numbers for men are 74 percent (relationships) and 76 percent (connections).

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So said a self-critical report published this month by Yale University, bemoaning the lack of intellectual diversity at their own college and most of the nation’s other leading campuses. Well, duh, readers of The Free Press might respond. To you, this report, which also cited problems in higher education including ballooning tuition fees, opaque and unfair admissions criteria, and grade inflation—may sound like a master class in the obvious.

But to many in academia, this is not obvious. Despite decades slipping into an ideological monoculture, many academics still don’t see a problem. Amid increasingly widespread scrutiny, they don’t understand why so many elite colleges have squandered public trust.

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No one worries about that today. And not just because Donald Trump is not Catholic; rather, because he goes out of his way to criticize the pope as if the pontiff were just another political opponent. Most recently, after Pope Leo XIV condemned the war in Iran, President Trump responded on social media that the Vicar of Christ is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” The administration went on to pull millions in aid from Catholic Charities, which supports migrant children. It justified the decision by claiming that the number of children in need is “significantly lower” than it was under the Biden administration.

In an era of rank partisanship and binary ideological choices in America, this might seem to put traditional Catholics—like me—in a bind. Am I Team USA or Team Vatican?

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Last week, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University was scheduled to vote on a proposal to cap A grades, subjecting them to a limit of 20 percent plus four students per class. The proposal also included a plan to link academic honors not to grades, but to a percentile-ranking metric. This came after a long period of grade inflation at the university, to the point that in the academic year 2024–25, 66 percent of students were awarded As, and 84 percent received either As or A-minuses.

Alarm over this trend has been rising for years. In the words of Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, “Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college.”

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This was the actor Rainn Wilson’s response to my question about why he’d always made jokes as a kid. He explains that when you are in a lot of pain but figure out that you are naturally funny, you start making jokes to distract yourself and others from your misery. It’s a kind of “emotional substitution,” he said.

Wilson’s childhood was completely unstable. The family’s economic situation was precarious at best. His mother abandoned the family when Rainn was 2 years old; he didn’t see her again until he was 14. Desperate and despondent, his father quickly entered into a tense, loveless second marriage and converted the family to the Baha’i faith. Wilson’s upbringing was, in his own words, characterized by “confusion, anxiety, and alienation.”

At 18, Wilson escaped to college in New York City and studied acting, resolving to be finished forever with his dysfunctional family and their weird religion. He could not outrun his demons, however. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety hunted him relentlessly. He drank heavily and used drugs throughout his 20s and 30s, a form of self-medication that led, inevitably, to addiction.

At 40, his luck seemed to change when he scored the role of Dwight Schrute in the television comedy The Office. Almost overnight, Wilson became internationally famous. You might think that having people shout “I love you” from passing cars would fix his depression and give him an incentive to kick his habits, right?

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This sounds like a line from the campy 1978 sci-fi horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens from a dying planet that come to Earth and replace humans with clones that are devoid of their old personality.

But it’s not.

It’s actually a quote from a recent study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships about the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges that the governing elite is dominated by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic, deep-state pedophiles. Participants in the study described watching the theory take hold of their friends and family members, transforming them beyond recognition.

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar. You too may know someone who started “doing his own research” on politics, science, or the economy—and then went down an internet rabbit hole of posts claiming that some event or phenomenon was plotted by a clandestine group of powerful people or organizations, usually with sinister or malevolent intentions. Before you know it, he seems like a different person. His new beliefs dominate conversations and ruin relationships.

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It’s the kind of writing that makes you put down your phone and think—which, given how long we all stare at our screens every day, is no small thing. And now Arthur’s taken it a step further: His new book, The Meaning of Your Life, hits shelves on March 31. It doesn’t just explore the modern crisis of unhappiness—it tells us what to do about it.

That begins with identifying who is truly suffering—and why. In the exclusive excerpt below, Brooks turns to an unexpected group: our young strivers, whose lives appear to be going right in every visible way. And yet, they are more depressed, distracted, aimless, and bored than ever before. Why are the future leaders of our society the most unhappy? And what, exactly, will it take to change course? —The Editors

It’s no secret that we are living at a time of profound unhappiness. According to the General Social Survey, the percentage of American adults of all ages who are “not too happy” about their lives more than doubled from 2000 to 2024. Young adults were hit especially hard: The percentage of American adolescents with symptoms of major depression nearly tripled from 2005 to 2019, while anxiety almost doubled.

But here’s the really weird part: The ones suffering most are not just the down-and-out types—the addicts, the impoverished, the failsons. Those for whom there are obvious things gone wrong in their lives. On the contrary, it is also those who seem to have everything going right for them—in other words, our young and most successful strivers.

I’ve spent my life surrounded by that very group. As a longtime college professor, I have been privileged to teach hundreds of wonderful students—ambitious strivers just starting out on what promised to be terrific careers and lives. I have met countless young people who were so inspired by ideas, so purpose-driven, and so enthusiastic.

But in 2009, I left academia to run a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. And when I returned to campus a decade later, the atmosphere was dark. Larger and larger percentages of students were suffering from depression and anxiety. At some schools, more than half of students were receiving mental health treatment. My office hours were more like counseling sessions than tutoring. Hope and optimism had been replaced by anger and sadness.

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What were you reading right before this article? Probably some news, most likely about the war in Iran, which is dominating coverage, and ancillary topics such as the effect on the economy and markets. Along the way, you most likely encountered and felt compelled to consume some political news and opinions. I don’t mean humdrum policy stuff: what Congress voted on today, or the like. Instead, I mean horse-race politics and lightning-rod punditry.

And this lowered your well-being.

My confidence that you read about politics owes to the fact that political dilettantism—closely following who’s up, who’s down, who created the latest outrage—is a national obsession. We can’t get enough of “monitoring the situation.” In a 2023 survey of American adults, about a third said they follow national politics “very closely.” Meanwhile, 62 percent of Americans consume news about politics and government “often” or “extremely often,” which is 30 percentage points above the next highest area of news interest.

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Actually, I am named after both of my grandfathers, Arthur Hansen (a Dane, whom I therefore called “Bedstefar”) and Charles Brooks (a good old-fashioned American “Grandpa”). Bedstefar was a joker; he had a bumper sticker custom-made for his Buick that said, “Be Alert! The World Needs More Lerts!” Grandpa was a serious man: a preacher and an academic.

I have positive memories of them, even though, despite both living within three hours of us, I didn’t see either very often: a couple of times a year at most, for maybe a day at a time. If you asked me to tell you the biggest life lesson they gave me, I’d have to think on it. I think one of them taught me the rules of croquet.

Much the same could be said of the relationship between my three kids, who grew up on the East Coast of the U.S., and their grandparents in Seattle and Barcelona. My children’s memories of the old folks are happy, but hazy: Sometimes they saw our parents at Christmas or during a summer trip, but not often enough to establish any sort of intergenerational intimacy.

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Last week, a viral blog post from Citrini Research titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis outlined a scenario in which, two years from now, artificial intelligence has progressed to the point that it eliminates jobs on a mass scale in nearly every industry. In Citrini’s doomsday alternative reality, this leads to a cratering of consumer spending, more AI adoption to cut costs, deeper unemployment, a stock market crash, mortgage defaults, and so on.

This “thought experiment” sounded realistic enough to investors that last Monday, all the major stock indexes opened sharply lower, and fell further over most of the day. Hardest hit were companies specifically mentioned in the memo, such as American Express, which lost nearly 8 percent.

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The column provoked reader feedback not only about screen use, but also about ways to low…

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This was a sign he might be suffering from the “Werther Effect,” so named for the main character in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 popular novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The story revolves around a romantic youth with signature yellow trousers who, spurned by his true love, takes his own life. Young men in several countries, overcome by amorous fervor after reading the book, would emulate the protagonist in manner and dress, seek out their soulmates, and audaciously declare their love. And when the objects of their affection were women totally out of their league who were unswayed by maudlin displays and yellow trousers, these men would, like Young Werther, do themselves in.

The yellow pants were the uniform of mass despair caused by the novel—a sartorial case of social contagion. When this type of social contagion becomes a mass phenomenon, behavioral scientists have a name for it: a psychogenic epidemic, or one in which mental or physical suffering spreads widely and quickly, especially among adolescents and young adults, despite lacking any obvious biological origin.

Psychogenic epidemics are still common today, although they are not usually as bizarre as the Werther Effect. The 2026 equivalent of yellow pants is, I would argue, the hunched-over posture of a population addicted to the screens in our pockets.

Let me explain.

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My column on Monday focused on the fear that many young adults experience about in-person dating and romantic commitment—particularly an exaggerated concern about “red flags” (reasons to cut and run from a relationship). This anxiety has led to an explosion of pornography use and social-emotional avoidance behaviors. I urged my readers to t…

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