I’m here to speak for every other twenty-something-year-old in the US. WE ARE STRUGGLING. Not all, but most.
Growing up, the media made it seem like when you become an adult there’s so much you can experience and do. You can conquer the world as soon as you turn 18 and be considered an adult. You have your own money and working your grown-up job.
Watching “13 Going On 30” made me so excited to live my life by my own means. All we had to do was do good in high school, go to college, pick a major, and graduate. And there will be offer letters lined up waiting for us to sign. I don’t know about you, but unless you have a family business or know someone who knows someone, getting a job is exceptionally hard nowadays. And it shouldn’t be. There’s no reason for the job market to be this hard while having all the right qualifications. And it’s like all these corporations don’t realize that Gen Z has been in the workforce for quite some time now, not everyone has 5-7 years of experience under their belts. It’s as if you have to know someone or make connections to get a job straight out of college and not have the right credentials and resumes you’ve been told your whole life to get. I really feel for our generation.
Our college/high school lives have been cut short due to a pandemic and we haven’t even gotten a dissertation on how the pandemic has negatively affected everyone. The weird part about this age is that we are used to our peers being on the same path. Most people were middle and doing middle and high school things. Once you leave high school, everyone is off on different paths. Some people are married and have kids and there’s me who couldn’t fathom raising a child. In THIS economy.
Everyone I know is either anxious or depressed trying to survive the day. Not only can we not find a stable job, but the cost of living is skyrocketing and the rate of pay is not matching up. Is it just me or is no one talking about this?? I feel like everyone is choosing to dissociate because they feel so helpless and just waiting for the world to end. Face it, we all feel like something is coming. Things can only get so much worse. We are so caught up in trying to survive that we literally don’t have the energy for anything else. Everyone is constantly overstimulated by negative news and short-lived trends on TikTok that our brains literally do not know how to process. We are not meant to live like this. We have so much access to the world at our fingertips that our brains don’t know what to do.
I had to delete social media and slow down because I don’t know where I would be if I constantly was being fed all this news as an HSP (highly sensitive person). We didn’t get time to heal after the effect of COVID-19 on us all. We were locked in our houses and just glued to technology and screens. Most of us don’t have hobbies or passions that renew our energy. We don’t have third spaces to meet people’s desire to be social beings. That’s in our nature, to socialize and not be antisocial. It’s pretty unorthodox for a lot of social beings to have social anxiety. We were just expected to go to work and live life as normal after losing 6,985,964 people in the world. Oh and by the way COVID is still not over and people are still dying.
I spent my nights anxiously trying to figure out how to cope, and what to do with my life because it seems like so many people are achieving so much more than me and I am just at home watching my life go by. I spent hours researching, studying, and learning how to become the best version of myself and I got burnt out and couldn’t even do anything else. So I just said f*** and I stopped. I stopped trying to force things. We live in a hustle culture society and it’s seen as bad if you don’t work until 7 PM and don’t have eight passive income revenue streams. If you aren’t building skills and learning hobbies that you can monetize you are failing in life. That’s what it seems and we are all tired, helpless, and anxious.
Did you know anxiety disorders are rising concernedly across the globe? I remember being a socially talkative high schooler before the pandemic to a socially anxious edge human being trying to survive every day. WE ALL ARE TIRED. And it’s not just Generation Z who are feeling the effects. We just don’t know an adult life before phones, 9/11, COVID, and social media. It’s not our fault and we’re going to be the ones who have to deal with the aftereffects in the future. The boomers won’t be here in 40 years, it’ll be us and the generations after us.
This is just too much to handle so I am going to just stop and try not to think about it. It’s not my job to fix the entire world. But only better myself and evaluate what I want my life to live like. Hopefully, this can be seen by others to do the same. Because at the end of the day, we just need to focus on the present. I have learned that I have never been so lost in life and that’s okay. This is completely normal for a lot of people, older and younger. I doubt anyone really knows what they are doing. I’m just going to stop trying to figure everything out, what the future going to look like, and how I am going to achieve my goals. I just need to focus on the “what” and figure out the “how” later. I don’t want to miss out on the present trying to obsess and figure out the future.
I have made a pact with myself to quiet the noise in my head because it’s just as bad if not worse than the outside world and I cannot continue to let that happen. It’ll only cause more harm than good. I just need to believe that I’ll figure it out one day and if I don’t that’s okay too. I just know everything will work out in the future.
Yes, the world is extremely loud but that doesn’t mean your inner world has to be also. All we need to do is take the necessary steps to make our inner world as peaceful as it can. I’m working on simplifying my life and building meaningful connections in this world and I have already seen what a positive effect it has on my overall well-being.