Many components decide your happiness, however one appears to have an excessive amount of affect at this time—your age.

The World Happiness Report printed this week ranked a rustic’s happiness general and likewise by age for the primary time because the inaugural listing over a decade in the past.

“The relationship between age and happiness is more nuanced than previously understood,” Ilana Ron Levey, Gallup’s managing director, tells Fortune in an e mail interview.

Researchers underscored a decline in happiness for People beneath 30 years previous. It might assist clarify why the U.S. dropped out of the highest 20 happiest nations for the primary time, rating twenty third in comparison with fifteenth a yr prior. “The U.S. decline is at least partly attributable to Americans under age 30 feeling worse about their lives,” the report reads, launched in partnership with Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Analysis Centre, and the UN Sustainable Improvement Options Community.

For People over 60, the U.S. ranks within the prime 10, however for these beneath 30, it drops to 62nd place.

Levey hypothesizes the well-being variations might come right down to the power of individuals’s community and social ties. How folks prioritize and work together with associates, household, coworkers, and others might differ relying on age. “We know that social support and loneliness affect happiness, and different generations have different levels of social connections,” she says. “Factors including school closures during COVID-19, technology use, and quality of friendships may affect the young and the old differently.”

Levey hopes the report sheds gentle on the significance of combating loneliness, particularly as long-standing analysis finds that the strength of people’s social connections all through their lives determines the extent of their happiness in previous age.

And extra, securing deeper connections is one thing folks can work at.

“Happiness as you get older is based on many of the same factors as happiness when you are young,” Levey says. “Fostering strong social connections, helping others and demonstrating benevolence, and feeling like you have someone to count on in a time of need is crucial for happy aging, just like it is crucial at all ages.”

Throughout the globe, youthful folks (between ages 15 and 24) have been usually happier than older folks, apart from in North America.

“There is a great variety among countries in the relative happiness of the younger, older, and in-between populations,” says John F. Helliwell, founding editor of the World Happiness Report, in a press launch. “Hence the global happiness rankings are quite different for the young and the old, to an extent that has changed a lot over the last dozen years.”

The rankings compile self-reported happiness responses on a scale of 0 to 10 from the Gallup World Ballot’s pattern between 2021 and 2023. Beyond the happiness rankings, the report additionally components a rustic’s GDP, life expectancy, and folks’s sense of freedom and corruption to make clear particular person nations’ wants.