Big Smile, No Teeth: Everything worth doing is hard – that’s life

Only 23% percent of Gen Z rate their own mental health as excellent, versus over a third of older generations. — 123rf

A friend of mine recently enrolled in a university course at 50, which takes a certain kind of nerve, sitting in a lecture hall with all those young people. So much zest for life, I couldn’t handle it. But she countered me, saying young people today are miserable, full of anxiety, and depression.

Naturally I did what anyone would do with a good anecdote: I went to fact check it, because ruining a perfectly good observation with facts is one of my few remaining hobbies.

Turns out the statistics back up what she’s saying. Only 23% of Gen Z (those born between the late 1990s and early 2000s) rate their own mental health as excellent, versus over a third of older generations.

Here are more sad numbers: 42% report ongoing depression; 61% report anxiety; 94% report some kind of monthly struggle, which at that point is not really a statistic so much as a description of Tuesday.

Diagnosed rates (ie, official, doctor-reported numbers) are up 25% since 2019. Turns out my friend did not misread the room. The room actually is like she described it.

There are lots of reasons for this. Social media is doing measurable, unglamorous damage. Depression risk rises 13% for every extra hour of daily use, and teenagers on screens four-plus hours a day are twice as likely to report anxiety or depression.

Also, this generation is growing up with massive workplace instability. Being in your early 20s is unstable by definition but add in artificial intelligence eating everyone’s lunch, and you’re compounding that situation.

So Gen Z definitely has things to be depressed and anxious about. But what does that mean?

Already, 46% of Gen Z have a formal diagnosis. Another 37% are fairly sure they have one, which sounds a bit problematic when people are self-diagnosing disorders. That means more than eight in 10 young people have or think they have a diagnosis. And look – naming a thing is good. It genuinely is. You can look it up and treat it. But the tricky thing with psychiatric diagnoses is there can be a tendency to think of them as part of you. And that doesn’t need to be true.

There used to be an enormous, unglamorous, underrated category of human experience called just feeling like crap for a while. You didn’t get a name for it. You didn’t get a framework. You just felt terrible, assumed this was roughly 40% of what being alive involved (yes, it is!), and stumbled your way back out the other side. Nobody explained you to yourself in advance. You had to work it out.

The thing about life is depression, anxiety, mania, it all happens. To everyone. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to feel these ways, and life will absolutely give you the reasons. It is not unhealthy to feel depressed for a period after a hard loss, or to feel anxious about your future in your early 20s, that’s life.

When we can, and do, label everything, I wonder how much it legitimises how hard things are for us and helps us stay in that space.

I have anxiety, because I went through something that should cause anxiousness. You can feel that but it doesn’t need to become your personality. You have permission to move past it.

People grow and change. I am not the same person now that I was when I was 20. I have a whole new list of anxieties completely different from when I was young, but that’s not me having anxiety, that’s life.

Thinking you are clinically depressed or anxious rather than thinking, hey, things have been kind of crappy for a bit, can help you feel like this is your permanent state.

And just like all those self help gurus blather on about: your mindset matters. Sometimes, over analysing every crappy feeling you have can just lead to more crappy feelings – put that on a T shirt because that’s the gist.

I wonder if we’ve become so good at naming the fog that we have forgotten to teach people how to simply walk through it without a map.

There was a kind of resilience that came specifically from not knowing or not dwelling on what was wrong with you. You just had a bad week/fortnight/month and, eventually, a slightly less bad one.

Nothing’s perfect. Everything worth doing is hard. That’s life.

Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.