Who would want to be 25 years old and living in Ireland? Anyone and no one would appear to be the answer.
If you have hit this particular milestone in the last year or so, you almost certainly have a decently paid job and work in one of the areas of the economy that has prospered during the last decade. You earn on average €29,000 a year, and if you are one of the 60 per cent who went to university or have some other third-level educational qualification, it’s closer to €32,000. You would rate your job satisfaction as 7 out of 10.
However, you are also more than likely still living at home and quite possibly one of the 25 per cent of 25-year-olds who have been diagnosed with anxiety or depression. Not to mention the 30 per cent who report above normal levels of stress.
You can’t blame it all on waking up every day in your childhood bedroom, but it is a factor. Your peers who have managed to fly the nest are significantly more optimistic about their future than you are.
You are also quite likely to be giving some serious thought to emigration. More than one in 10 of your peers has headed off – mostly to the UK or the Antipodes – and are not planning on coming back anytime soon.
So says the latest report from the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study. It has surveyed the same group of young people every five years since they were nine years old, and they have now passed the quarter century.
There is probably nothing in the pen picture above that would come as a surprise to a 25-year-old or anyone else. But there is still something shocking about seeing it all pulled together into one place. It exposes what is arguably the biggest anomaly at the heart of the spectacular revival of our national fortunes. Having worked so hard to provide a better life for our children, my generation seems to be hell bent on squandering the fruits of our labour.
The endemic shortage of housing is obviously a real issue for 25-year-olds, but if you dig a little deeper into the study a place of their own is not a panacea for their problems.
Of the 70 per cent who are still living at home, only six in 10 said the primary reason for not moving out is financial. Everyone’s circumstances are different, but there would appear to a significant number of 25-year-olds who are not desperate to live away from the family home. Perhaps, for them, a 24-hour concierge service, including bedroom-floor-to-folded-in-your-drawer laundry service has its appeal.
[ The Irish Times view on Ireland’s young adults: a stuck-at-home generationOpens in new window ]
Having a roof over their head is, however, the top of the worry list for 25-year-olds, with almost all of them saying they were concerned about access to housing. By comparison, only 85 per cent worry about access to decent employment opportunities in Ireland. This makes perfect sense. These are two areas that directly affect all of them and the answers chime with a country that has full employment and a chronic housing problem.
They have less immediately selfish worries too: 94 per cent worry about poverty in Ireland and 87 per cent worry about racism, while similar numbers worry about animal rights, climate change and the global gap between rich and poor countries. Slightly fewer, around 77 per cent, worry about gender equality.
The survey doesn’t break down how concerned they are, and obviously there is quite a difference ‘between wide-awake in the middle of the night worried’ and experiencing a fleeting moment of concern. But 25-year-olds do seem to be inordinately worried about things that barely impinged on their parents’ consciousness.
Equally puzzling is the number who say they have experienced everyday discrimination, which is defined as subtle forms of discrimination such as feeling they were being treated with less respect, getting poorer service, being treated as less intelligent or as if people were afraid of them. On the face of it this question would appear to try to capture the extent to which minorities are discriminated against, but almost two-thirds of 25-year-olds answered in the affirmative. It’s a surprising result for what is still, despite immigration and other changes, a very homogeneous group.
It is all too easy to talk in derogatory terms about snowflakes and wokeness and dismiss these findings as some sort of byproduct of social media. But that is to miss the salient question, which is whether all this seemingly excessive worrying and angst has a bearing on the high number of 25-year-olds who say they have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Leaving aside the one in four who say they have a diagnosis, there must be a significant number with undiagnosed symptoms.
The more pertinent question is how to fix it.
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