We often romanticize being young—the naïveté and spirit and freedom of it. Young adults stuck in the crevice between teenagehood and proper adulthood, supposedly more mature but not there yet. The utter stupidity and brilliance of our actions, total dependence and total independence, total rebellion and total obedience, feeling like we know it all and feeling confused all the same.
Being young is a period of self-experimentation—at times humiliating and other times glorious—of escapades and good times, of carelessness and untroubled buoyancy; heart wrenching music and hormones pulsing through it all. Still, young people have diverse relationships with time. There are those who want to go back to the past, those who want to leave the past behind, those who go with the flow of the present moment, and those who want to click fast-forward into the future.
But the pandemic upended a lot of that, and even though I know that holding a grudge against something so invisible doesn’t make sense at all, and even though I’ve tried making my peace with it, I still can’t help but resent the pandemic from time to time. We were supposed to go out there and see what horrors and treasures we can find in the world. Among other things, there was the loss of youth, adventure, and maybe even growth.
Young people collectively mourn for the loss of our limited youth.
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Gen Z are generally characterized as digital natives, as the leaders of tomorrow who are politically progressive on the one hand, and as people with the worst mental health on the other. Some out there would say that any young generation is a narcissistic bunch—entitled kids who think the world revolves around them.
But I think there’s a deeper truth reverberating across my generation, a background thrumming that will only intensify in the generations that come after us. And with anything that eats away at people, it unfolds slowly over time until it finally consumes you day in and day out.
I’m talking about the ever-increasing restlessness of being young.
There’s that Snoop Dogg-Wiz Khalifa anthem that always makes you feel golden. They sing of young people “living young and wild and free.” They talk about getting drunk and smoking weed and not caring who sees because they’re just having fun and living young and wild and free. How I wish we could have the space to be that careless. Because “young, wild, and free” was never the mantra of this generation. It’s “insecure, anxious, frantic, precarious, and unstable” all rolled into one.
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I certainly can’t speak for every single person in my age group, but I can talk about the things I’m experiencing in what I suspect to be the result of my youth.
I think young people want to change so many things about the world. We’re generally an idealistic bunch, and I’m definitely on the most idealistic side of the spectrum. The problem is, we have all this energy to want to make good changes but we’re given little actual power to do so. We can’t hold positions of power or respect, so this ball of idealistic energy has nowhere to go. We only have limited outlets to channel our intensity into something productive.
If you can surmise from my commentary articles, I’m critical towards a lot of things—not because I get a kick out of hating things—but because criticizing is my way of maintaining my idealism, of maintaining my hope. By saying that we don’t accept the world as it is and that we can do a hell of a lot better ignites the fire up my ass to continue to hope. By critiquing the world, we tell the world that things are far from over.
But that’s just it. I feel like the most productive thing I can do with all my anger and hope and sadness and excitement is criticism. I’m not sure where else to channel all of these productively.
Maybe this is why I find writing opinion articles very cathartic, maybe this is why young people have a reputation for complaining a lot, and maybe this is why we’re an angsty group of people. Everything’s channelled inwards because there’s no productive outlet that channels any of this outwards.
When I think of restlessness, I think of a leg, bouncing up and down, up and down erratically on the floor, someone who cannot sit still because the internal system is going on overdrive. Because the internal system is restless and needs an outlet.
So being young as I am, the only way I know how to decrease power is by questioning it, by chipping away at its fortress. Because even though I can’t decrease power in a material sense, I can decrease its power in my own mind and maybe encourage others to do the same.
Still, these are just my opinions. What else can young people do?
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Perhaps young people tend to see the future as something vast and uncertain—a horizon between the sea and the sky that just stretches on forever. And this idea that there are endless destinations that we can sail to excites us so much. We just can’t wait to see what the future has in store for us.
But this exhilaration is a double-edged sword. I think a lot of young people are directionless and drifting and restless because while the ocean is vast and wide and we can go wherever we want, we don’t exactly know where to point our sails. We don’t even know how to use our compasses.
Whereas proper adults are constrained to sail to certain destinations, the youth have near endless choices. And when faced with so many destinations for the first time in our lives, we become frantic and overwhelmed by having to make inalterable decisions for the first time.
Eversince graduating from high school, I’ve had endless choices to make, which meant needing to close an endless amount of doors for the first time too. Making these choices is horrifying as much as it is a badge of independence. I struggle with closing doors because I want to keep as many of them as possible wide open—just in case. Just in case I change my mind, just in case the job market changes, or just in case something changes. Or maybe this is just me desperately trying to make inalterable decisions alterable.
Perhaps we try a lot of things while we’re young then. Perhaps we switch degrees or take an extended break or experiment with a new hobby. But there’s not even much time to do those things because adulthood is constantly pounding at our doors.
And I thought youth was a period of self-experimentation. I wonder if being young then, is only as good as preparation for being an adult.
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What then, is there in adulthood that awaits us?
Young people are stuck with a collapsing earth, an inhumane capitalist society that sees us as labor and resources instead of as individuals, and soaring fees on everything except on wages. A society that revolves around the market, money, advertisements, and selling as much as anything to as many people as possible. Too many things are commoditized now—companionship, health, spiritual fulfillment—even our very selves.
What then, is there in adulthood to look forward to?
Everything I see in the future is instability. The job market is unstable, the environment is unstable, our very identities are unstable. And when I look to the future, all I see is labor. I dread it, but it seems like there’s no escaping it. We get college degrees not for wisdom, but for the labor it can entitle us to.
It used to not be like this.
Restless young people are entering a restless society. But because it’s a broken society, then there’s a lot of room for improvement and change… after my 9-5, that is.
I’ll still have to eat and pay my rent.
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Of course, there’s a certain challenge when thinking about being young while you’re still young. I can’t see how this chapter of my life fits into what came before or after it. Not yet. It’s like not knowing how life-changing an encounter with a person can be until years after that encounter, when the ramifications become evident to you.
I don’t have the wisdom of retrospection to really tease out what being young is like. I suppose I just want to capture, in this exact moment, what I feel as a young person. What it feels like to flit back and forth between hope and hopelessness, between eagerness and helplessness, at the cusp of a long roller coaster ride. I don’t know whether I’ll be sick or thrilled by the end of this. Maybe I’ll feel both.
And I wish I were more hopeful about the future, but this essay is not that. I wish to comfort young people not by way of optimism, but in letting them know that we don’t have to be optimistic all the time. We can just face the world as it is and admit that a lot of it’s broken. Not all—but a lot of it. There’s a lot of mending that needs to happen, which is probably going to be a long-drawn-out collective effort.
And so, I have to say goodbye to my younger self now, who was dreamy-eyed and full of wonder. Because I don’t see adulthood as this vast expanse of possibilities and potential anymore, but a series of adaptations to external circumstances. Maybe we adjust and alter ourselves less of our own autonomy and choice, but more at the behest of societal norms, powerful institutions, wealthy corporations, the market, our histories, and the environment.
Maybe. I don’t know, I’ll have to grow up first and check in with you what I find out there.
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Thanks so much for reading!
— Alyanna
What you’re experiencing is very understandable. I had most of the same thoughts in my years in university and in my 20s. I had big dreams of working internationally globe trotting all over the world working as a lawyer for the United Nations. That was my goal, to fight injustice and poverty as a lawyer. Did I come close to achieving it? No haha…
Life experience has taught me that before I can make meaningful changes in the world, I first needed to feel secure of myself, I first needed to be content and happy with the decisions I have made. And so I looked for jobs, internships, worked for others and tried to be as self sufficient as I can be. The feeling of making my own money helped build my confidence that I could do things, that I had the freedom and independence to make my own choices, that I was not beholden to anybody because I now had the skills needed to take on any task. Did I regret not pursuing that globe trotting UN lawyer lifestyle? Not really. Every choice I made and every risk I took was in pursuit of building myself, of becoming the best version of myself that I wanted to be.
By the time I felt secure of my abilities and my position in this world, I was in my 30s and my priorities have shifted. I long to build my own family and community, to enjoy the company of other people, and to make up the lost time in my 20s working hard trying to build confidence within myself. Working in some faraway land and hopping on plane after plane does not look as appealing anymore. I’ve realized that the changes I wish to create in the world starts in my own community, family and close friends. And so I may not have been a UN ambassador or a lawyer fighting poverty and injustice, but hopefully, to my close friends and family, I am their beacon of shine and hope, who makes people smile and whose kindness inspires them to share the same light and hope to others. After all, big positive changes all start within our own families and communities.
Your article brings hope that the youth of today will strive to do what is right. However, what I did not see in the article was the acknowledgement of the truth that big changes start in small steps. They start in our families, in our friends, in school, in our communities, but most importantly, it starts within our own selves. Failures and disappointments are part of learning. Have faith that the choices you make are part of the pursuit of becoming a better version of yourself. There are many things beyond our control, but we can at least control some of the choices we make for ourselves and our family.
Omg A-i Karol I didn’t know about any of that! Thanks so much for sharing and you’re totally right. Growing up means making a lot of mistakes (ugh, I dread this part already but they have to happen haha) and embracing the reality that our priorities shift. Thanks so much for the feedback too; I appreciate that you pointed out how we must first be secure within our own selves before we go out there and make other things secure, and that big changes really take shape as small steps in the right direction. That’s a very comforting thought, and I’ll definitely keep that nugget of wisdom in mind as I go. Thank you so much, I’m very grateful!! ❤️
So many truths spoken in this essay, your words felt like a near perfect reflection of how I’m feeling right now — confused and uncertain about the future, optimistic yet anxious about the present, and conflicted about my past.
But I really appreciate how reading this essay also put me at the ‘cusp of a long roller coaster ride’. Starting with a general critique on society and the world, to mentioning our confused and acrimonious response to society, life, adulthood, and everything. And lastly, to acceptance and letting go as we transition away from our younger selves. Above all else, thank you so much for writing this essay.
I liked how you touched on the the reality that our worth, as seen by the world, is only based on the labor we can give and the skills that we posses. “We get college degrees not for wisdom, but for the labor it can entitle us to” resonated with me so much. My high school self thought that I could dodge this reality by going to a more prestigious university, but nothing was, in essence, different; I chased my dream of going to a university abroad in search for a more “prestigious” degree and “higher-quality” wisdom, but I soon realized that prestige was an illusion, as I was still subject to the same system that we all dread so much; the only difference was that my internships paid better, at a higher cost, of course.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is pretty much bullshit. Today, no one cares about how wise you are, or how nice of a personality you have. You can be a philosophical sage or an absolute beast in whatever you like doing, but the sad cold truth is that all that doesn’t matter if you can’t speak 5 languages, do 80 hour work weeks, and have tons of work experience. Heck, it seems like your entire existence is just judged by a piece of paper we call a resume. Employers these days want so much from you that you practically have to give your heart and soul for the job — it’s simply demoralizing. (excuse me for sounding so bitter)
In the initial stages of our adulthood, we stepped in the world with so much fervor and optimism and drive to change the wrongs we see. But I guess today, all that is just a far-fetched and vaguely forgotten idea at the back of our minds. The only thing we can do about it is to keep complaining and criticizing, to keep writing about them as a form of outlets, and to not let that glint of optimism fade away. A “collective effort”, as you mentioned, one in which we face the world not with so much optimism but with practicality, seems to be a good proposal that I’m eager to witness unfold. I guess the only choice we have today is to work our way up the system, but I don’t know what’s for sure; it’s for us to discover.
We all just have to grow up together and see for ourselves.
Hi Malcolm, thank you so much for your kind words! You’ve spoken so many truths too, especially that part about resumes. I definitely relate to that 100% and it’s so frustrating. Our young adulthood shouldn’t be a series of things to put on our resumes, especially because we haven’t figured ourselves out yet, but that’s what’s happening. I suspect this is why many older adults aren’t well-adjusted to adulthood; they didn’t get the chance to build a solid identity when they were young. But then if we don’t participate in this cut-throat system, we’re also basically toast.
“Employers these days want so much from you” is a FACT, which is why we have so many overqualified people in underpaying jobs now. It’s not practical at all, but that’s what’s happening. If you read history, you’ll find that people’s relationship with jobs used to not be like this; this hustle culture is just a peculiarity of our contemporary times due to capitalism. I’m still trying to find ways to somehow escape this system because working our way up sounds demoralizing. I wonder if instead of within, we can disrupt it from the outside. Anyway, I’m still figuring it all out too. Here’s to growing up! Lol, yikes.