725: draft

Rui,

This is a reasonable start on aging and happiness. You have organized the paper so it seems basically to argue that the young are having a hard time that the older generation never had. On an economic level, you are absolutely right. But on an existential level (“How can I live a good life?), you also seem to recognize that youth are, by their nature, more likely to have doubts and challenges because they have not yet been able to accomplish certain things (forming an adult identity, finding a good career, etc.) that ensure a stable, peaceful life. They are “on their way” to doing those things, and that’s suspenseful.

The first thing I’d ask you to do is look at your thesis. Does this whole paper only say that the older generation is happier? (That isn’t much of a problem to solve, is it? It is just a fact, so it is not a strong thesis.) I think your thesis could be something more like what I wrote above: in some ways the younger generation has an objectively worse youth than their parents. In other ways, they are just going through the doubts of being young.

IF you want to write the paper that way, you may need some sources—maybe just a couple interviews with young people—that discuss how your own young generation has a harder time in life than their parents. This is all objectively true. You can find many articles saying that, in the U.S. at least, the younger generation of today will likely have less income than their parents did.

Your paper needs a problem and a suggested solution. Maybe the problem is that young people are suffering more than their parents and face fewer good prospects. And the suggested solution? What do you think would help the younger generation do as well as their parents? (How about a debt-free college education? Economic assistance for first-time home buyers?) You may have other solutions.

It would be good to use your sources a little more so that your reader can see more specifically what people say about the situation and the feelings of the older generation. Also, by providing specific examples of the situations you describe generally, you can make the reader appreciate the depth of the issues you write about. You could show, for example, what the average debt is of a young person graduating from a four-year college today. (PHENOM is a group of students, findable online, that gives many statistics about how the price of Mass. Colleges have increased dramatically. It might help you.)