By Deputy Editor Aaron Carroll.
Published on the 19th of March, the World Happiness Report 2026 revealed that the higher the usage of social media in young adults, the lower their overall life satisfaction will be. It also found the inverse to be true; lower usage means higher life satisfaction.
The study looked at seven internet activities for 15-year-old students in 47 different countries (including Ireland).
Social media, gaming, and browsing for fun were generally considered to lead to lower life satisfaction, while communications, news, learning, and content creation were considered to lead to higher levels of satisfaction.
However all of the above activities are considered to be culprits of low satisfaction when used at high rates, especially those studied in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Data also revealed that platforms that show content based on algorithms have high negative associations at high levels of use, while platforms used purely for communication purposes do the opposite.
While Western Europe and English speaking countries correlate high usage of social media with low wellbeing for young people, those studied in Latin America showed that high usage of social media actually shows higher wellbeing.
The study also showed that those surveyed in Latin America use social media mainly for maintaining social connections, rather than endlessly scrolling through algorithms like their English speaking counterparts.
There are also differences in life satisfaction between genders. Boys generally have a life satisfaction between 7-7.5 (scale 0-10), decreasing slowly the more social media is used.
Girls, on the other hand, have a peak life satisfaction of 6.8, which falls off more drastically to 6.1 the more social media is used. Academic scores and school participation for both genders is roughly even.
Another part of the report delved into the procrastination side of social media.
A study found that most users of social media (mainly Facebook) would be willing to pay very little to no money to use the platforms. It also found that those who go a month without using said platforms would be much happier during the month they stayed away from it.
The interesting thing they found though, was that even after admitting that they were happier during their month without social media, people would request much more substantial sums of money to not use social media again for another month.
The report suggests that this could be due to potential positive benefits of social media – such as communication – or that it could be because of the desire to miss out on interactions with friends. Put simply, people would get FOMO (fear of missing out).
A similar study on US college students, relating to Instagram and Tik Tok had similar findings.
But they also found that while still wanting to be paid to deactivate accounts for a month, they would be willing to pay to shut the platforms down for a month, only if everyone else in their community also did so. Once again, reinforcing the concept of FOMO.
The report concluded that if users could coordinate themselves to stop using these apps, they would be much happier. It also says that the users know this fact, however the ‘product-trap’ of FOMO keeps them coming back, despite their knowledge.
Image Credit: World Happiness Report