Ask someone from Generation X what they worried about at 22 and you might hear: finding a decent job, paying the rent, getting a girlfriend, getting your hands on the new Pearl Jam album, quitting smoking… Ask a 22-year-old today and the list sounds a little different: housing costs, student debt, climate change, political corruption, Botox or lip filler, finding a job, whether AI will eliminate their job! Welcome to Generation Z, folks.
Generally defined as those born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with smartphones, social media, and an almost continuous window into what everyone else is doing, achieving, buying, wearing, and pretending not to care about. Their adolescence and young adulthood also collided with a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, political polarization, and a dramatic rise in concern about mental health.
So yes, they are stressed! Gallup research found that 45% of young people ages 10 to 18 reported feeling stressed “a lot” the previous day, while 38% felt anxious. Interestingly, 94% also reported feeling happy, so that’s good at least. This combination may tell us something important, though: Gen Z isn’t just miserable. Their emotional world is crowded. Happiness, anxiety, ambition, loneliness, optimism, fear, humor, and exhaustion can all coexist.
What if Gen Z isn’t unusually fragile? What if they’re having a fairly understandable response to an unusually demanding environment?
Teens and young adults have always compared themselves with other people. The difference is that previous generations eventually went home. Gen Z takes everyone else home in their pockets! A teenager can instantly find out that friends are together without them. A young guy who is uncertain about his future can see a friend he went to high school with announce that he has founded a company, bought his first house, achieved the perfect body, married the perfect man, and discovered the secret to happiness! Social comparison used to have limits— basically, you compared yourself to the kids at school or in your neighborhood, or you looked at fashion magazines and maybe felt a bit ugly.
But now we have Wifi.
I’ll say this: I don’t necessarily think that social media is inherently bad. After all, it provides community, information, connection, and cat videos. But carrying a constantly updating scoreboard of other people’s lives does have psychological consequences.
And there is almost nowhere to disappear anymore. Embarrass yourself in 1987 and maybe 30 people knew. Embarrass yourself today and someone may have recorded it!
Think about it: At what age would you have wanted a permanent video record of your teen years?
Then add the sheer volume of information young people absorb. Mass shootings. Politics. Climate disasters. Economic uncertainty. Another notification. Another video. Another crisis. The human nervous system wasn’t really designed to receive breaking news from the entire planet every second of the day.
And then came COVID. I mean, come on— it was a truly awful time for most of us. But for Gen Z, it interrupted development. First dates, graduations, college dorms, friendships, sports, parties, hallway conversations, independence, and all those ordinary social experiences that help young people figure out who they are suddenly disappeared. Those experiences may sound like no big deal to some people, but developmentally, they’re actually quite important.
Gen Z also faces an extraordinary pressure to “optimize” (I loathe this word). Get good grades. Exercise. Eat well. Build your résumé. Find your passion. Develop meaningful friendships. Be socially aware. Practice self-care. Protect your mental health. Get enough sleep. Limit screen time. Choose the right career. Build a meaningful life. And remember to hydrate!
Somewhere along the way, even “wellness” became another performance metric.
There is an interesting paradox here. Gen Z may be the most psychologically literate generation we’ve ever seen. Young people readily anxiety, ADHD, trauma, boundaries, neurodivergence, sexuality, and identity. In so many ways, this is a positive thing and represents tremendous progress. But there is an important distinction between understanding distress and pathologizing distress. Experiencing anxiety before something important isn’t necessarily an anxiety disorder. Feeling socially awkward doesn’t automatically mean something is clinically wrong. Heartbreak, embarrassment, disappointment, loneliness, and uncertainty are painful, but they are also part of the human journey. A psychologically healthy life isn’t a life without uncomfortable emotions. In my view, this distinction matters enormously.
Are we trying to make young people feel less anxious, or are we also helping them discover that they can function remarkably well while sometimes feeling anxious?
Here’s the part of the Gen Z story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention.
Despite all that anxiety, Gen Z has not given up on the future. In a 2024 Gallup-Walton Family Foundation survey, nearly eight in ten Gen Z respondents said they believed they had a great future ahead of them! This certainly is isn’t a portrait of a defeated generation, right? It’s a portrait of young people carrying a huge amount of stress while still imagining something better. They are also more willing to talk about mental health, question old assumptions, seek help, discuss identity, and ask whether the way we’ve always done something is the way we should keep doing it. And they’re funny! Their humor (and language) can be surreal, self-deprecating, and occasionally (low-key) incomprehensible to anyone born before 1995, but the fact that they can make light of things can be a pretty effective pressure-release valve.
So maybe what Gen Z needs from us isn’t constant rescuing. Maybe they need more listening. Perspective. Boundaries. Real-world connection. Permission to fail. Permission to be uncomfortable. And maybe, most importantly, permission to be unfinished. They don’t need to have their careers figured out at 19. They don’t need to be AMAZING at everything. They don’t need to convert every hobby into an achievement, every interest into a side hustle, or every uncomfortable feeling into a diagnosis. And maybe we should stop confusing resilience with the absence of distress.
Resilience isn’t: “Nothing bothers me.”
Resilience is: “This bothers me, and I can handle it.”
Gen Z may indeed be one of the most stressed generations we’ve seen. But I think calling them “fragile” kind of misses the larger story. They are coming of age in an environment that is psychologically noisy, socially relentless, and historically unusual. Their distress deserves our attention. But so do their adaptability, humor, openness, and hope. So perhaps our job isn’t to remove every source of discomfort from their path. Maybe it’s to help them discover that they can experience uncertainty, disappointment, anxiety, and even failure without being overwhelmed by them.
The world can be uncertain. You are not going to be great at everything. Other people may look like they’re doing better than you. You will sometimes feel anxious, lonely, embarrassed, disappointed, or completely overwhelmed.
None of that means you’re failing at life.
And you don’t have to have everything figured out yet. Because frankly, neither do the rest of us.