When I was a teenager, I dreamed of a better life. I grew up in an apartment where mice darted through waist-high piles of trash, thanks to my mom’s hoarding. For a year I was in foster care, and other times I was homeless, spending some summer nights in the back of my battered ’92 Corolla. Despite all this, I saw a path out and up: I would ace the SAT, pick the right major at a good college, then graduate into a lucrative career. It was far from a sure bet, but I wagered that this plan could change my destiny — and it did. I got a computer science degree from Harvard, then an engineering job at Google.
I wrote a memoir about my upward trajectory, and in the years since it was published I’ve been invited to speak at colleges around the country. At first, I saw myself as a slightly older role model to students. But while speaking to rising graduates this year, I felt more like the narrator of a historical novel. I started to wonder: Is my perspective relevant at all?
When I graduated from college in 2015, my classmates and I were steeped in millennial values. Advisers urged us to follow our dreams, to do what we loved, and, for women, to lean in. A poster on my dorm room wall featured a quote from Sheryl Sandberg, the personification of 2010s corporate feminism: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I proudly met the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes. Work offered us not just a salary, but a purpose. It was salvation and selfhood and transcendence all at once.
Identifying with your work is no longer the vibe. I started at Google gung ho and left so jaded by sexual harassment that I promised myself I’d never love a job again. The fall of Ms. Holmes and other executives accused of fraud created a societywide disenchantment with supposedly genius company founders. Then came Covid-19, which forced a reappraisal of how much space the office should occupy in our lives. A half-decade later, state minimum wage laws top out under $18 an hour while the stock market mints new millionaires in the U.S. at the rate of 1,200 a day.
Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work — in fact, they say so themselves — and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible. Who knows where we’ll live anyway once the Earth is uninhabitable. One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that “basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.”
I wanted to understand how the outlook of young people has changed, so I reached out to colleges I’ve visited to talk to graduating students about their hopes and fears for their looming adulthood. I found that like job seekers of all ages, they feel terrified and discouraged. But one thing stood out: Many students told me that ambition as I knew it no longer makes sense.
It’s not just that they believe upward mobility like mine is now impossible. They no longer believe work in the traditional sense leads to any reliable payoff. The casino economy they’re entering doles out success in the form of windfalls, and makes those wins vanish just as suddenly. Ambition requires a belief that you have meaningful control over your future. With so much uncertainty today, it can feel pointless to prepare for tomorrow.
The most driven young people are still striving. But their ambition looks dramatically different than mine did in college, when I sat in an auditorium listening to Ms. Sandberg recount how she became a Facebook executive. Gen Z values money and free time over job titles. In a recent global survey, Gen Z respondents who were not pursuing leadership roles pointed to burnout and “too much responsibility” as their main reasons. In other polls, three in four Gen Z-ers wanted to become entrepreneurs, and more than half said they would be an influencer if they could. They’re trying to “get the bag” and make a fortune, but they’re not depending on getting promoted by their boss to do it.
Alejandra Perez is one student who sees entrepreneurship as her future. Ms. Perez, 21, has an active LinkedIn, a smooth blowout and a fresh bachelor’s degree in marketing and business administration from St. Mary’s College of California. Her family runs a beekeeping business that she helps out with, and she plans to launch her own company selling honey products. She considers owning her own business to be the key to unlimited opportunity. She thinks classmates who choose to climb a corporate ladder are forfeiting their true potential, an opinion shared by many of the students I spoke to; not a single one named a dream company they aspired to work at.
Ms. Perez’s material goals are relatively modest: She wants to be able to buy a home in a safe neighborhood, invest in stocks and afford trendy sneakers and fancy desserts. Despite this, when it comes to her earning potential, she says, “I don’t have a limit.” She envisions building her business up to a seven-figure income.
These sky-high expectations are in line with those of other members of her generation. In a recent poll, Gen Z-ers on average said that in order to feel financially successful they would need to earn nearly $600,000 a year — or roughly what the top 2 percent of Americans make. Most of the students I spoke to told me they would need $200,000 to $300,000 a year just to feel stable. To be rich, or afford kids, many said they would need millions in the bank. A 2010 Pew survey found that for millennials entering adulthood, marriage and children were far more important than owning a home, earning a lot of money or having free time. While the desire to create a happy family certainly hasn’t disappeared for Gen Z, that value is surpassed in polling data by “financial independence” — having so much wealth you never need to work again.
In some ways, Ms. Perez’s ambitions reminded me of those of a 2010s-era girl boss. But there is a crucial difference: She is not willing to sacrifice her personal life for a company title. Ms. Perez’s fiancé graduated last year and now works as an admissions officer at St. Mary’s. They are getting married next year and hope to have three kids, whom Ms. Perez, a Catholic, wants to raise herself while running her business from home. One of her role models is Lila Rose, a podcaster and anti-abortion activist who is both a high earner and a mother who is present for most of her kids’ waking hours. Young conservative female influencers like Ms. Rose, Brett Cooper and Isabel Brown bring their children on work trips and hold their newborns in video interviews, conspicuously displaying a lifestyle that balances faith, family and financial comfort. It’s a version of having it all for the influencer generation — and a response to economic scarcity by doubling down on personal choices.
Ms. Perez looks at her peers with alarm, and not because she worries about unemployment rates. “It’s like there’s no motivation,” she says. Others I spoke to levied similar judgments. Adreanna Marin, a 39-year-old aspiring social worker at California State University, San Marcos, who first started college 20 years ago, told me, “It almost seems like ambition is no longer existent, honestly, among college students.” Many students blamed smartphones, the boogeyman of our age. “We are the future, and we can change it,” Jaasiel Hernandez, 20, an engineering student at Porterville College in California, said. “But it’s easier to sit down and scroll.” His comment echoed a common fear: If you live on autopilot, you’ll turn 30 in your parents’ basement, unemployed, in debt and glued to your feed.
Researchers believe ambition is shaped by both personality and circumstances. A landmark 2012 study led by Timothy Judge, a psychologist who studies attitudes toward jobs and success, analyzed the trajectories of more than 700 people over 70 years and found that the most driven people grew up middle class: not too rich to be complacent, not too poor to dream big. As the middle class shrinks, it seems as if ambition may be shrinking, too. Mary Volmer, a chaplain and lecturer at St. Mary’s College of California, told me that students no longer ask themselves “What can I achieve?” but “What do I need to survive?”
Mecca Durhal, 24, is one graduate I spoke to who thinks primarily about survival. Mx. Durhal has no 10-year plan, five-year plan or even next-year plan. The child of a software engineer, they grew up working class to middle class in Detroit and graduated in May from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They took liberal arts classes that excited them most intellectually — sociolinguistics, internet culture, Egyptology — and earned a bachelor’s of general studies. What comes next? “I super don’t know,” Mx. Durhal says.
The feeling that higher education’s fundamental promise has been violated isn’t limited to humanities majors. Nathan Majeed, who recently graduated with a computer science degree from St. Mary’s, said he had once expected a streamlined path: “Go to college, put in four years of work, then you get out. The job is basically guaranteed, it falls into your lap.” That’s no longer the situation. Mr. Majeed applied to almost 200 I.T. jobs without any luck, then finally found a role through a former boss.
Before starting college, Mx. Durhal hoped to become a writer or a Japanese translator. But in the years they’ve been in school, they’ve watched A.I. platforms become commonplace and creative jobs evaporate. Now they have no expectations of working a job that they like. They are applying online to administrative assistant roles, trying to dodge A.I. résumé filters and hoping for a yearly income of $40,000. That comes out to $3,300 monthly, before taxes — though they are currently paying $1,700 a month to share a townhouse with three friends. They fear they will be paying off student loans until they die. When people ask what their goals are, they reply, “The economy and society that we live in is not structured right now for me to have good answers.”
Gen Z’s relationship to labor is more transactional than sentimental. Eight out of 10 students who graduated from high school in 2022 don’t expect work to be an important part of their life, nor for their job to be particularly interesting. This lack of present, or future, reward is pushing some young people to reject the grind entirely. In Mx. Durhal’s worldview, delayed gratification just isn’t worth the wait. “I think looking only ahead to the future is actually detrimental to you,” they said. Mr. Majeed told me a different version of the same thing. “Our generation recognizes a bad deal when they see it,” he said. “If I have to go through pain, I’d rather it be on my own terms than the terms you made.”
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in Gen Z’s emphasis on “mental health,” defined more by self-care than by psychiatric disorders. While millennial work culture might be best typified by the character of Andy in “The Devil Wears Prada,” who placates her abusive boss in order to climb to her dream job, Gen Z idolizes Alysa Liu, the raccoon-haired Olympic figure skater who quit the sport in 2022 because she no longer enjoyed it, then returned of her own accord and won gold. Ms. Liu is the latest in a string of athletes lauded by youth for saying no, from the tennis player Naomi Osaka, who at one point refused to speak to the press, to the gymnast Simone Biles, who withdrew from several Olympic events. For many, the lesson is that there is a limit to the personal costs of achievement.
Mx. Durhal’s hopes are more humble than winning an Olympic medal — they want to be able to make an occasional plane trip to visit friends in other states. As for owning a home, that might as well be an alternate reality. “I don’t think that’s feasible or realistic for me to want, so I’m not wanting it,” they said. In essence, Mx. Durhal has made peace with falling out of the middle class. One study found that nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds now live with their parents — one of the highest rates since the Great Depression. Other students I spoke to acknowledge that doing work they care about will mean renting forever — if they can afford even that.
I admire these students’ Zen-like ability to enjoy today in spite of tomorrow. But their powerlessness saddens me. In 2024, an Emory University professor, Stephen Nowicki, observed that his college seminar students felt less control over their lives than the average prisoner felt in 1966. The belief that you shape your own destiny strongly tracks with health, income and happiness. People who feel they have agency tend to eat better, apply for more jobs and recover more easily from setbacks. It’s true that in times of uncertainty, despair is a rational response. But when young people stop believing that long-term effort will improve their lives, something larger is lost: the capacity to imagine a meaningful future.
Ms. Perez and Mx. Durhal have a lot in common. Neither cares about prestige or job titles. Both want the income and flexibility to live according to their personal values. Timothy Judge, a professor at Ohio State University and an author of the foundational ambition study, told me that compared with previous generations, his current students think harder about what they want out of life. “Now’s the time to question it — early in your career, when you’re in the formative stage,” Dr. Judge said. “I think it’s a good thing.”
There’s a lot for us still to learn from the way Gen Z approaches work. Years of research have shown that extrinsic motivators like money and fame make people miserable while intrinsic motivators like enjoyment or self-mastery fuel satisfaction. In Dr. Judge’s study, the most ambitious people died slightly younger than those with less drive. He thinks it’s because those who focused on accomplishment experienced more stress and neglected their health and relationships.
While talking to students, I found myself questioning my own choice to worship at the altar of work. I wrote much of this article on weekends, sometimes while my toddler begged for me; I have chronic pain triggered by sitting too long; I don’t know how to turn off my drive. Before talking to these students, I never really considered what “success at any cost” actually cost me.
At the same time, ambition isn’t just about personal accomplishments. It’s also about having faith in our ability to shape the future. Speaking to Mx. Durhal and other young adults for whom tomorrow seems uncertain, I see a generation that’s learning not to hope too hard. Humans are future-oriented creatures. Not being able to look ahead deprives us of what matters most. Data collected in an ongoing study on people’s well-being showed that young adults across the world score low not just on happiness but on eudaemonistic well-being, including meaning, purpose and fulfilling relationships.
As an adolescent, I took solace in the saying “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” This aphorism, often attributed to Martin Luther, wasn’t about the joy of digging holes. It represented defiant optimism in the face of uncertainty. In the hardest moments of my youth, my goals gave me dignity and agency. When the present felt unbearable, my aspirations allowed me to transcend my surroundings. I think about sitting in the back seat of my rusty car, clutching an SAT book. I still bear the scars of my work ethic; I wish I’d known, like today’s youth, how to give myself more grace. But I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground.
Emi Nietfeld is a journalist and the author of the memoir “Acceptance.” She’s writing a book about how technology is reshaping families.
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