The results of the Finnish Youth Barometer 2025, aptly titled “Ihan paineissa“ (Under Pressure), have just been released. For anyone following the conversation on youth mental health, the findings serve as a stark confirmation: our young people are navigating a historically unique and intensely demanding environment.

​As we look at the data through the lens of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s theories on the “anxious generation,” several critical patterns emerge that connect the Finnish experience to a broader Western trend.

​1. The Weight of Expectations

​The 2025 Barometer highlights that young people today aren’t just facing one type of pressure; they are caught in a crossfire of internal and external expectations.

• ​Academic and Career Stress: Seven out of ten young people feel significant pressure to secure a job, while many fear making the “wrong” choice in their educational path.

• ​The “Perfect” Image: Half of the respondents face intense pressure to look good and maintain a successful outward-facing life.

​This mirrors Haidt’s concerns about the “performance-based” childhood. When every life choice feels like it is being lived under a spotlight—or a smartphone camera—the fear of failure becomes paralyzing.

​2. The Great Deceleration of Optimism

​Perhaps the most sobering finding is the decline in future-belief. Long-term data from the Youth Barometer 2024 (The Three Decades of Youth) shows that while 86% of young people were optimistic about their future in 2008, that figure has plummeted to 61% in 2024.

​In the 2025 report, only 30% of young people gave their life satisfaction a top grade (9 or 10), the lowest result in the history of the monitoring. This “optimism gap” is often fueled by what Haidt describes as the loss of “play-based” independence and the rise of a “phone-based” existence, where global crises—from climate change to geopolitical instability—are piped directly into their pockets 24/7.

​3. Digital Fatigue and the Social Web

The 2024 Leisure Survey (Kesä ja kännykät) provides the backdrop for this digital reality. For today’s youth, the digital world is not a separate “hobby”; it is the very infrastructure of their social lives.

​However, this connectivity comes with a cost. The 2025 Barometer notes that social media acts as an active producer of social pressure, where young people feel they must hide any deviation from “the norm”. This aligns with our previous discussions on Haidt’s work regarding how social media platforms can amplify social comparison and diminish the “real-world” resilience-building experiences that previous generations took for granted.

​4. A Generational Rift?

​We are seeing a growing “generational friction.” Many young people in the 2025 survey expressed that older generations do not understand the weight of modern stressors, such as the “digital imperative” or the crumbling of the traditional “social contract”. They feel they are expected to be more efficient and more resilient than their parents, but with fewer tools and a more unstable planet.

Moving from Pressure to Resilience?

The data from the Finnish examples tells us that “resilience” cannot be a solo project. As Haidt suggests, we need to return to a world where youth have the space to make mistakes, the freedom to disconnect, and the structural support to believe in a future that isn’t just about “surviving the pressure.”

If we want the results to show a turn toward optimism in the future, we must address the root causes of this pressure: the over-digitalization of social life and the overwhelming weight of “perfect” expectations.