The following article caught my attention. It seems to suggest that millennials and Gen Zers have just become more willing than earlier generations to seek out therapy for mental health issues. But 50-75% quit their jobs due to mental health? That seems more like an epidemic than social enlightenment and the fact that it strikes deepest among certain age cohorts is a red flag. I would suggest that other research studies into happiness, fulfillment, and health have come up with different factors. (My book The Ultimate Killer App: How Technology Succeeds presents most of this research with citation references.)

First, most normal (i.e, non-medical) psychological depressive states can be traced to a disconnect between expectations and reality. We all experience this as disappointment, but an over-emphasis on relative status with our peers can be a strong catalyst for psychological distress. Certainly social media has made this relative status more salient in our daily lives: “Gee, our friends on Facebook seem to be living much more exciting and rewarding lives!!!” We’ve even coined this distress as FOMO (fear of missing out). In pre-mass media days few people knew they were missing out on the Vanderbilt or Rockefeller lifestyle; these were more like Hollywood fantasies. But social media has brought such status comparisons into our daily lives with real people we know. How can a young worker flipping burgers as a career job stepping stone last more than a month of this humiliation when his friends are playing ping-pong at Google? Apparently not many.

An older generation would reply that work is not supposed to be fun, that’s why it’s called work. But I think the future offers us better solutions if we are cognizant enough of the problem to seek them out. First, healthy humans at some point realize that relative status matters not a whit; nobody really cares about how great your life is, except you and perhaps your mom.

The second point that psychological research reveals is that money and wealth offer a very poor representation of true status and self-actualization. Instead we should be looking to our creative and social instincts. This is the major thesis of The Ultimate Killer App: what we truly desire to be happy and fulfilled is to explore our creativity and share it with like-minded others to establish robust social connections. Having a child and a family helps satisfy these most primal needs. It really comes down to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and this is the foundational idea of tuka, a creativity sharing social network platform.

Young people are quitting their jobs in droves. Here’s why.

by Megan Henney

Young people are spearheading mental health awareness at the workplace.

About half of millennials and 75 percent of Gen Zers have quit their jobs for mental health reasons, according to a new study conducted by Mind Shares Partners, SAP and Quatrics. It was published in Harvard Business Review.

That’s compared to just 20 percent of respondents overall who said they’ve voluntarily left a job in order to prioritize their mental health — emblematic of a “shift in generational awareness,” the authors of the report, Kelly Greenwood, Vivek Bapat and Mike Maughan, wrote. For baby boomers, the number was the lowest, with less than 10 percent quitting a job for mental-health purposes.

It should come as no surprise that younger generations are paving the way for the de-stigmatization of mental health. A Wall Street Journal article published in March labeled millennials the “therapy generation,” as todays 20- and 30-somethings are more likely to turn to therapy, and with fewer reservations, than young people in previous eras did.

A 2017 report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State University found that, based on data from 147 colleges and universities, the number of students seeking mental-health help increased at five times the rate of new students starting college from 2011 to 2016. And a Blue Cross Blue Shield study published in 2018 revealed that major depression diagnoses surged by 44 percent among millennials from 2013 to 2016.

Increasingly, employees (about 86 percent) want their company to prioritize mental health. Despite that — and the fact that mental health conditions result in a $16.8 billion loss in employee productivity — the report found that companies are still not doing enough to break down the stigma, resulting in a lack of identification in workers who may have a mental health condition. Up to 80 percent of individuals will manage a mental health condition at one point in their lifetime, according to the study.

Of course, sometimes employees are unaware of the different resources offered at their organizations, or are afraid of retribution if they elect to use them. In the study, millennials, ages 23 to 38, were 63 percent more likely than baby boomers, 55 to 73, to know the proper procedure for seeking mental health support from the company.

The study was based on responses collected from 1,500 U.S. adults.