Teen mental health 📈, blindness treatment 👀, and hobby pursuits 🎯

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There’s something satisfying about accomplishing something difficult. Solving a puzzle. Doing well on a test after studying a lot. Mastering a new language. We’re also good at finding ways to make things compelling for ourselves by placing stakes on them (not just monetary ones, although that can be fun too). Playing a game of basketball becomes much more serious when it’s part of tryouts for a team. Learning a new instrument takes that same shape when you sign up for a recital. Even so, that feeling of accomplishment can fade quickly. You did it. So what?

The moments where it sticks are the ones where the accomplishment connects to something you value beyond the challenge itself: the friendships built through the sport, the beauty of the performance, the discovery that changes how you understand the world, the community that depends on you, or the person you became through the commitment.

In a finite lifetime, we have limited attention and energy; what we choose to make room for reveals a lot about what we value, even when we haven’t quite put those values into words. One of the best ways to see this is in picking up something new. Like anything, it takes time, which means giving up whatever you used to spend that time on. For example, building Three Great Things has taken a lot of introspection in reprioritizing commitments from other domains of our lives.

But turning every hobby into a project can drain the joy out of it. Sometimes the point is just to play. Sometimes it’s useful to choose, every so often, to make things matter. A little structure can turn a vague intention into something we commit to and help us discover what we’re capable of along the way. Part of being human is coming to see why something is worth doing.

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories where people are discovering new ways to do things. Students are learning to support classmates struggling with mental health. Blind patients are learning to interpret light signals. People are rediscovering the value of hobbies in a world increasingly dominated by screens.

With gratitude,

The 3GT Crew

The mainstream view of teen mental health has been shaped by pandemic-era reports of record-level sadness and hopelessness. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on youth mental health in December 2021. Since then, the news has raised more concerns about it through the lens of social media, and more recently, AI chatbots. However, the latest CDC data shows that teen sadness and suicide risk have been declining over the last several years, at an accelerating pace. In some measures, these figures are now below pre-pandemic levels, so this is more than kids just getting back to normal.

By the numbers: persistent sadness or hopelessness among high schoolers fell from 42% in 2021 to 33% in 2025. Meanwhile, the share seriously considering suicide fell from 22% in 2021 to 14% in 2025. That now ties the survey’s record low and is less than half the 1991 level of 29%. The 8-point improvement may not sound like a lot but represents 1.4 million fewer kids seriously contemplating taking their own lives.

And it isn’t just kids answering differently. ER visits for suspected suicide attempts among teens are down 20% since 2021, and the suicide mortality rate has shown significant drops among boys and young men. The numbers aren’t uniform. Girls report persistent sadness at nearly twice the rate of boys. Still, girls saw a 14-point improvement, nearly triple the boys’ drop.

How we got here: the reality is that nobody knows for sure. But a few great things have been happening alongside the improvement. Students are learning how to help one another and recognize the signs. High school chapters of Sources of Strength, a national peer-leader program, train students to reach out to struggling classmates. Separately, mental health resources are receiving new investment. In Fort Worth, the school district partnered with a local nonprofit to open five school-based behavioral health centers that provided therapy to more than 1,700 middle and high school students in their first year.

A Pew survey found that parents’ most common concern for their kids, at 40%, was anxiety and depression. That’s the picture most people still carry from the pandemic, when sadness was at its worst on record. By every mental health measure the CDC tracks, today’s high schoolers are doing better than they were four years ago, and on most metrics, better than a decade ago too.

After nearly 40 years of blindness, a 58-year-old Parisian man could count the white stripes of the crosswalk again. He was the first patient in a study of a new treatment for retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inherited disease that slowly kills the retina’s rods and cones, the cells that detect light. As these sensors die off one by one, people go blind, but the wiring behind their eyes that carries images to the brain stays alive. Until now, doctors could only try to save sensor cells before they died. Once they were gone, nothing could be done.

The new treatment bypasses the dead sensors. A single injection into the eye gives the surviving wiring cells a light-sensitive protein borrowed from pond algae. The protein lets those cells react to light on their own. Then, the patient wears goggles with a camera that beams a scene into the eye as bright flashes. Learning to read those flashes takes months of practice; researchers compared it to learning a new language.

Last Wednesday, the team published results from ten patients. About half of those tested got better at finding and touching an object on the table. Several could find a doorway or follow a line on the floor. Just two days earlier, the scientists behind the algae protein won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. In the early 2000s, German scientists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel found the protein a single-celled pond alga uses to swim toward light. In 2005, Karl Deisseroth at Stanford put it into nerve cells and showed that a flash of light could make them fire on command. The technique became one of the main tools for studying the brain.

Turning it into a treatment for blindness took another two decades. The treatment was also designed only for those with working optic nerves (the wiring), so those with glaucoma or any other blindness disease where the connection is destroyed are out of luck. And it isn’t sight as you know it. The trial participants can only see grainy, black-and-white outlines through goggles. Nobody could read or recognize a face. But researchers say that’s their next target. A Texas-based company’s version, which works without goggles in ordinary light, is currently under FDA review.

Zooming out: macular degeneration shares the same failure as RP and is a leading cause of vision loss for Americans over 50. Nearly 20 million Americans over 40 have some form of it, including 1.5 million with a vision-threatening version. For most of medical history, losing those cells meant losing sight for good. Now, the wiring may just need a new switch.

Bank of America recently released its August credit card data report. They found that spending on the hobby economy was up 7.9% from last year (with purchases up 3.4%, most of the rest from inflation). They define the hobby economy as spending at arts-and-crafts stores, dedicated hobby shops, and outdoor outfitters.

This comes on the back of a major slump. Hobby buying fell from 2021 to 2024 as the pandemic boom wore off, then began recovering in 2025 and has accelerated over the past few months. The prevailing belief is that screens ate up our free time and the niche pandemic hobbies are long gone. It’s true that screen time has risen significantly in the last few years. However, the money and store purchases say people are also buying yarn, paint, tents, and model kits in rising numbers.

Census Bureau data and toy sales showed the same rise. Sales at sporting goods, hobby, music, and bookstores rose nearly twice as fast as the broader retail and restaurant segment. Meanwhile, toy sales to adults rose 25% in the first half of 2026. Despite having the least free time of any age group, people in their mid-30s to mid-40s were the ones spending the most on hobbies. The bank says some of it likely reflects spending on their kids.

In-person socialization has dropped over the last decade. Hobbies are an easy way to bring people together around a common interest. Across Minneapolis, craft nights regularly draw up to 70 people, uniting a group of strangers working side by side in a low-pressure setting. The benefit shows up in research, too. A study of more than 90,000 people 65 and older across 16 countries found that having a hobby was linked to fewer symptoms of depression and higher life satisfaction. On paper, the credit card data is just a spending number. What it’s buying is a reason to sit next to a stranger, a new skill for a kid, and a habit that pays off decades later.