I get it, it’s a fairly depressing time to be alive, and feeling positive about life can seem impossible. Between climate change, being broke af, and our world leaders saying increasingly dumb stuff every single day, hope can feel hard to come by.
Mission Australia released the results of their 18th annual Youth Survey today, after asking over 25,000 Australians between 15 and 19 a ton of questions about their lives. It’s got some pretty grim statistics like the fact that half of young people feel like they never get a say in public affairs, or that 85.2% of bullying incidents that people witnessed were seen at at school, TAFE, or university.
But it’s also got some surprisingly good news for us. Everyone who took the survey was asked to rate their feelings about the future on one of those dot scales that goes from ‘very positive’ to ‘very negative’.
Just shy of 60% – 58.3% to be exact – of people felt either positive or very positive about the future. As I was reading the report, I expected a pretty massive chunk of respondents to feel very negative about the future, but turns out that only 3.4% of young people surveyed do.
It’s not even just the future that we’re feeling surprisingly positive about. Another question was asked about how happy people are with their lives currently, and found that even while we spin around on this burning hell rock, 60.7% of young people are happy or very happy with their lives.
It might not necessarily feel like a good time to be alive when you switch on the news (or dare to venture into the news-y section of Twitter), but it’s always nice to know that hope is out there. It’s especially nice to know that the people who are going to take over this planet are feeling good about their inheritance, as well.