Stoic Advice For Gen Z

If you are aged between 12 and 27 then you are officially the unhappiest of all the age groups according to scientists at the Dartmouth University who have studied data from 43 countries and concluded that Gen Z are the least happy.
The current thinking was that happiness is U shaped with people most happy in their younger and older years and dipping in Middle Age but  the new research has suggested that young adults today are at their lowest happiness almost at the start of their life and face an uphill battle to achieve greater happiness as they age.
Researchers have pinned the change to around 2014 to 2017 when record numbers of young people, particularly young women, began seeking help from mental health services and researchers are not sure what particularly happened around that time and why it affected young women especially.
I have had a look through the year 2014 on Wikipedia and i think there may be a clue on February 28th when the number of people in the U.S. using mobile devices to access the internet overtook those using desktop computers and was followed globally two years later in 2016.
Whereas you actually had to have access to a computer previously and they were generally at school or in the living room of your family home, social media became easily accessible through something which was always to hand and could be accessed anywhere.
If we had social media on tap back when i was a teenager then one look at my Facebook page back then would have seen me shunned by polite society but luckily it wasn't and any teenage indiscretions are lost in the mists of time along with my bare-faced lying so we never had the pressures teenagers have today with their mood swings, obsessive crushes and social anxiety played out in front of the whole World on social media.
A staggering 49.5% of today's youngsters meet the diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders with 31.9% of them experiencing anxiety disorders and 22% exhibiting severe impairment or distress and at such a tender age you are not equipped to handle the vitriol and maliciousness which often comes over social media.
I say to the Gen Z-er's, as bad as things seem now, they will get better or at the very least you will be better equipped to handle them and follow the sage advice of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius who said: 'If you are distressed by anything, the pain is not due to the thing itself but your reaction to it and it is you who determine your reaction'.