What (Actually) Brings Teens Joy?

Headlines trumpet an alarming trend: American teenagers are in the midst of a crisis. Their rates of anxiety and depression have been rising for years. And many of the factors contributing to this unhappiness — the psychological toll of the Covid-19 pandemic, school-shooting drills, climate change, social media — are ongoing.

Amid all this gloom, I became curious about how teenagers have been sustaining themselves. I remember how extreme the emotions of adolescence can feel; anxiety and hopelessness can seem intense, but so can joy and euphoria. Teenagers are learning who they want to be, experiencing the fullest range of their feelings and seeking out the good. In trying to figure all that out, the youngest among us might actually be the experts at looking beyond challenging circumstances to find happiness.

So I asked dozens of young people from all over the country to explain, in their own words, how exactly they do that. They told me about taking pleasure in everything from fluffy pom-pom pens to white-noise playlists to cotton-candy ice cream. Yes, sometimes these teenagers feel disillusioned and overwhelmed. But they also have routines that reliably bring them delight.

These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Credit…Illustration by Andy Rementer

Talking out loud to a rubber duck

Over the past year, I’ve been teaching myself how to code. For teenagers, a lot of things in the world feel out of our control right now. The way out of that is to actually make something ourselves.

It’s satisfying when my code works, but my favorite part is actually when it doesn’t work, because that’s when I talk to my rubber duck. “Rubber duck debugging” is a concept invented by engineers. Basically, when I’m coding, I have a literal rubber duck next to me. When I run into problems, I turn to the duck and explain what I did, step by step.