The year-old is about to graduate, debt-free and, by his own admission, without any anxieties about the job market.
In the shade of a tree on a warm day in Vilnius, Lithuania, the happiest twenty-somethings in the world are drinking coffee. Given the weather perfect and the drinks cheap , it's hard to feel anything but happy.
It's even harder if, like year-old Simona Jurkuvenaita, the government has just handed you 21 euros to direct your own debut short film about Lithuanian teenagers. And the opportunities for young people are so good and the level of optimism is so high that Lithuania topped this year's list of the happiest countries in the world for under 30s.
Millennials and Gen Z members in Lithuania rated their happiness at 7. I think many young people here are patriotic. We feel, at least in Vilnius, that we live good lives compared to other European countries," he says. It's certainly not the most exciting place in the world: Jurkuvenaite complains that it can be a bit boring, and Bendikas wants to see other countries before settling down here.
The Vilnius Tourist Board has jokingly branded the country as the "G point of Europe" because "nobody knows where it is. But compared to the election smearing, widespread student debt and housing crisis in Great Britain, many would accept this as boring," writes the Guardian.
