Are Kids Today Really Worse Off?

The idea that today's youth are uniquely broken, anxious, and struggling is one of the most pervasive narratives in modern culture — but Dr. Laurie Santos and guest Alexis Redding uncover a startling truth: the struggles of college students today are remarkably similar to those of their grandparents' generation. After discovering lost 1970s interviews from a forgotten Harvard study, Redding and her team found that students from 1975 described loneliness, identity confusion, academic pressure, and emotional breakdowns with near-identical language to today’s undergraduates. This isn’t a new crisis — it’s a timeless one. The real issue isn’t that kids today are worse off, but that our minds are wired to misremember the past as better and magnify present pain through cognitive biases like negativity bias and fading affect bias. These distortions create the illusion of moral and psychological decline, even when data shows no such trend. The episode challenges listeners to stop pathologizing normal developmental struggles and instead foster empathy by recognizing that every generation has faced the same existential questions. The takeaway? Young people aren’t failing — they’re human, just like us.