I was eating overnight oats this morning, which is painfully on brand for a 25-year-old Gen Zer, when the radio presenter announced that this is the worst time for young people to get on the housing ladder since the financial crash.
Perfect timing, considering I’m currently trying to buy my first home.
Apparently, house prices are too high, interest rates are too high, wages are too low, nobody has savings and the future is basically one long direct debit nobody can afford.
It’s hard to feel excited about a milestone, like buying your first place, when every reaction comes wrapped in pessimism.
Tell someone you’re becoming a homeowner and instead of “congratulations”, you get, “Bet that’s cost you a fortune”. Or worse, the classic, “We bought ours for £20 in 1987 and now it’s worth £2m”.
Nothing makes my eye twitch faster.
Being in your twenties today feels like living under a permanent grey cloud of warnings. Every achievement arrives with a disclaimer attached. Interest rates are falling… but they’ll probably shoot back up. You got a pay rise… most of it will disappear into tax. Found a decent rental… enjoy it before the landlord sells up.
Even optimism has become conditional, and reports like Alan Milburn’s today, warning of a “lost generation” are becoming increasingly common.
I work in news, so I understand why the mood feels so relentlessly bleak. Every day it’s war, economic decline, climate anxiety, political chaos, another market crash prediction, another headline telling young people they’ll never retire, never own a home, never earn enough and probably shouldn’t bother dreaming too big anyway. Doom performs well and fear spreads faster than hope ever could.
Then there’s AI – the latest thing we’re supposed to panic about before we’ve even figured out the previous five crises.
In some industries, the conversation has shifted frighteningly quickly from “AI can help people work” to “AI can replace people entirely”.
You constantly hear that the robots are coming for your job, and after a while it stops sounding dramatic and starts sounding plausible.
For Gen Z, this instability becomes a mindset. Even when something good happens, you instinctively brace for the catch.
I’ve felt it myself with my mortgage offer. I managed to secure what now feels like a unicorn rate – 4.1 per cent on a two-year fixed deal.
Since then, rates have climbed again, with the average rate for a two-year fixed deal sitting way above 5 per cent. If my purchase doesn’t complete before the offer expires, my monthly payments could jump by around £100.
And that’s not nothing. But what exhausts me more than the financial reality is the commentary around it, the assumption that struggle is inevitable, the immediate pivot towards sacrifice.
“You’ll need to start cutting back.” “That’s going to sting.” “Better get used to it.”
At some point, you stop feeling like you’re building a future and start feeling like you’re preparing for impact.
And honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a career I genuinely enjoy, I can afford holidays occasionally, I can save, I can buy a flat on my own, which increasingly feels like a statistical anomaly for someone my age.
But even with those privileges, there’s a low-level anxiety humming in the background constantly, this sense that everything stable is temporary and everything good could disappear overnight.
So, I can’t imagine how bleak things feel for people just leaving university.
They’re graduating into a jobs market that barely exists, burdened by student debt that can climb well above £50,000, while being told they need more experience for entry-level jobs and more resilience to survive an economy that doesn’t feel designed for them.
Young people are staying at home longer, delaying relationships, delaying children, delaying adulthood altogether, not because they’re lazy or entitled, but because financially and emotionally, the runway keeps moving further away.
Yet, older generations still seem baffled when Gen Z appear unenthusiastic about “the real world”.
The truth is, we’ve inherited a culture that catastrophises everything. We are over-informed, permanently online and constantly reminded of every possible thing that could go wrong. Algorithms reward outrage, news cycles reward panic, social media turns success into comparison and comparison into failure, and somewhere along the way, optimism started sounding naive.
But despite all of that, I don’t actually think the world is ending. Things are difficult, sure.
Some industries will change dramatically because of AI, the economy is rough, housing is expensive. But people are still building lives, falling in love, creating careers, buying homes, making memories and finding happiness within all the noise.
Most young people I know aren’t asking for luxury, they just want a fair shot without being told every five minutes that disaster is around the corner.
Maybe what my generation needs most isn’t another lecture about how impossible everything has become because we know, we hear it every single day.
What we’re missing is permission to feel hopeful about the future without being made to feel stupid for it.
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