Why Gen Z Feels Lost Right Now (And What To Do About It)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I feel like I keep noticing the same thing with people in their 20s. And it's not that people are unmotivated or they're lazy. It's nothing like that. I feel like what I've been seeing is that a lot of people are actually doing everything that they're supposed to do. They're working. They're making money. They're trying to build their life, but they still feel extremely lost. It's like you're moving forward in life, but there's no real feeling that you're actually progressing or getting somewhere. And I think the reason a lot of 20-year-olds or just Gen Z in general feels this way is a lot deeper than what most people realize, especially the older generations. So, I know this is a little bit different than my normal videos, but a lot of people in the Discord really liked this idea, so we're going to run with it. And before we jump into the video, go ahead and comment down below. If you're in your 20s right now, do your 20s feel very clear to you or do you feel extremely lost? And I want you to add why. I really want to hear what people have to say regarding this. But I think one of the first things that's extremely challenging for Gen Z right now is that there's not like this default path in life that you have. Like if you imagine somebody from like the 1980s or the 1990s, they went to school, they graduated, they got a job, they would stay at the job long term, right? You just stay at one company for decades.

[00:01:03]You get promotions, you'd work your way up the corporate ladder. At some point, you know, probably earlier on, you get married, you have a family, you buy a house, and guess what? You could buy a house within 2 or 3 years. It didn't take you 8 to 10 years to save up to buy a house. And I feel like it was a lot easier to build just a stable life and have this really good sense of community. And I feel like yeah, you know, some people do deviate from that path, but a lot of people that was just kind of the baseline for them was as long as you followed this path, it was kind of set in stone for you. And of course, people would deviate from this, but it feels like for the most part, the path was pretty clear. For people in the ' 70s, '8s, '90s, compared to today, it is not that clear at all. There's not really like a default path anymore because there are a ton of different, you know, life paths you could take.

[00:01:44]Yeah, you could stay at one corporation and try to climb the corporate ladder, but as many of us know, you're just going to be sitting there getting two, three, 4% raises every year. Sure, you get a promotion, but then the new hire that is in the exact same role as you is making way more money. So, it's almost better to job hop, which is kind of annoying cuz you don't want to have to do that. So, there's the corporate ladder side of things, and then there's entrepreneurship. like of course you could do it back then, but nowadays it feels like there are so many different types of businesses you can open and especially when it comes to the internet or just AI, there's so many different things that you can do. And then one thing that's very interesting about Gen Z, even compared to millennials, is I feel like for a lot of us coming out of college or high school, this was the first generation where you could work fully remote. Like during COVID 2020, 2021, there's still people I know right now that work fully remote and that's their entire job. Like if you told that to somebody in 2017 or 2015, they would be like, "What the hell are you talking about?" So, that's another option. And then, of course, there's the content creation side of things. I mean, we have people that are making tens of millions of dollars off of Twitch streaming, Tik Tok, YouTube, you name it. And another career route that a lot of people tend to forget about are the trades. And I feel like that is a great path to go, especially right now, it seems like. So, you got that. Then, there's also freelancing, which you could always do, but then you could also relocate way easier nowadays compared to back then, it feels like. So, my point here is that for most people in their 20s, you have an insane amount of options. Like, the world is yours. And the reason that all of this matters is because when you have a default path, you can just follow it.

[00:03:07]Unless if you go out of your way to like consciously like try to reject it, right? But when there's no default path set up for people, every little decision that you make when you're 20, 21, 22, instead of asking yourself, oh, what should I do? I feel like the question tends to be more like, oh, well, who should I be and what am I going to become? And and I'm not saying it's a bad thing that there's not a default life path, but the fact that you have so many options, it's a very overwhelming thing. It's kind of like when you go to a restaurant and the menu has 200 items.

[00:03:32]It's like, well crap, there's probably 20 things from here that I could get, but I can only get one. So, you get really overwhelmed and you kind of get analysis paralysis from this. I feel like Gen Z definitely is feeling that right now. And to add on to all of this, the next thing that can be kind of brutal with, you know, nowadays being in your 20s is that you're not really competing locally. You're competing globally. And what I mean by this is basically how social media has just grown so much over the past decade.

[00:03:54]Because going back to like the ' 80s or '90s, when somebody compared themselves to other people, they were probably comparing themselves to like a co-orker or somebody that was in their class or somebody in their town, but what people were comparing themselves to now is somebody on LinkedIn or Instagram or people that are appearing to do really well online, even though that may not show you the full truth. And so that's a really hard thing, especially for Gen Z men right now because you see people that are making, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and you're 22 years old trying to figure out what the hell you want to do. You're looking at them and going, "Damn, they're way ahead of the curve. how do I get into this position? Like it makes you feel like [ __ ] about yourself, which makes sense why. Kind of like that old saying, comparison is the thief of joy. That is definitely the case. But when you have more things to compare to, then that joy is really, really getting ripped apart because you're now comparing yourself to like the top 1% of every single type of category online, whether it is lifting weights, whether it is making money. I mean, hell, you could even talk about cooking. Like any little thing you can find online, there's somebody that is phenomenal at it. And if you start comparing yourselves to them, you're going to go down a pretty negative rabbit hole. And as a lot of us know, social media is always around us. It is very hard to be off your phones nowadays. And the thing that sucks, too, is even when you're off your phone, you feel like you're disconnected from certain things. So, it's a balance that you have to kind of find. Some people don't use their phone at all, which is great. I'm not saying, you know, be addicted to your phone. But at the same time, I feel like if you don't use your phone or if you're not on social media at all, you may not, you know, be keeping up with like a lot of like current trends or modern things. I guess it also depends how much you care about that. But still, that's kind of two ways to look at that, I guess you could say.

[00:05:20]And I'm going to give you a little bit of a rant here, but when it comes to social media, there is one social media platform that I hate above all others, and it's not Instagram, it's not Tik Tok, it is LinkedIn. I hate LinkedIn because with Instagram, it's normally everybody showing the best version of themselves when it comes to like traveling, food, life, big life events or big things that are going on, right?

[00:05:40]LinkedIn is that exact same thing except it's on steroids and it's all career [ __ ] And honestly, LinkedIn is so cringey. Like, I hate LinkedIn. Nothing is more painful than opening up LinkedIn and seeing just some dumb [ __ ] like this. And then on top of that, you got somebody that you went to high school or college with posting some dumb [ __ ] and random people liking it when they're just using AI to type out all these corny ass posts. It's like this endless cycle of just motivational BS and slop.

[00:06:04]And I just cannot stand it. It It feels so fake to me. And that's coming from somebody who is saying Instagram already sets you up as, you know, kind of a fake environment. LinkedIn is that on steroids. I really do believe that. And it's all careerbased, which just makes it even worse because you're now comparing yourself career-wise or financially to other people, which is really, you know, hard to work through.

[00:06:21]It feels like LinkedIn is this endless cycle of who can just be the biggest cornball, and I just hate it. Don't even get me started on how horrible applying for jobs are on there. It is a nightmare. I absolutely hate LinkedIn just with my whole being. Anytime I get a new job, I basically just delete LinkedIn cuz I'm no longer searching for it at all. I could make a whole video just ripping on LinkedIn, but my main point here is that every single aspect of your life, you have social media just being thrown at you and there's all these people that are in really high percentiles that are showing it off and those are the people you're seeing the most. So, you're comparing yourselves to them and it's not going to make you feel very good about yourself, especially when you're 19, 20, 22 years old and you're just trying to figure it out. So, that's another thing that makes things difficult. Now, one thing I want to be clear about this video is this is not going to be just me being all doomer. I do think there's a way we can approach it and I'll talk about that more towards the end. But one thing that also makes things very difficult is it feels like the feedback loops nowadays are broken.

[00:07:13]You don't know if you're doing life right. Like how are you supposed to know that? Because I feel like with earlier generations, there was very clear feedback on how their life was going and how they're progressing, right? It was very clear like you got a job, you stayed, you got promotions over time and you built stability and very clear path and steps. And as your life progressed and your progress could have been slow at times, but it was very obvious still.

[00:07:34]And with careers not being this linear thing anymore, I mean, hell, you could go from working a nineto-five to being like a digital nomad and living in a completely different country and then you could come back and do something else. Like, you can do all kinds of stuff these days. And so, because careers are so much different nowadays where it's not like you started a company and you just stay at it for 20 plus years. I feel like those days are long gone. Job hopping is way more normal. I feel like that is a very common thing. If you want to get good raises in your salary and your overall pay, you got to job hop. I'm just telling you. Unless if you have a company that treats their employees great, which some do, and if you are in one of those, do not job hop. But for most people that work at a corporation that's only thrown you 2 3 4% raises, job hopping is definitely a solid move.

[00:08:13]So that's been extremely normalized. And then now it honestly feels like just for the average person, you have to have some kind of side hustle because the money you're getting from your 9 to5 might not be enough. So you have to find some way of getting more money to come in. So side hustles are just, you know, a thing that everyone's talking about.

[00:08:28]There are two million YouTube videos talking about either passive income or different side hustles that you can grow over time. And so because the path to becoming successful is a very inconsistent thing. There's a thousand different ways to do it. People have no clue on how to gauge whether they're doing well, whether they're right on time and they're, you know, exactly where they should be or whether they're completely behind. And it makes things very hard for you. Because of that, if there's no clear signal that you're on track, it's going to create a lot of uncertainty which then creates a lack of confidence in yourself, which is very hard to work through. And one thing that's also kind of interesting, even when I was researching this video, I was thinking about this is that there's a total delay in adulthood nowadays. Like it's not that Gen Z just feels lost.

[00:09:06]They are entering traditional adulthood standards way later than previous generations. And these delays are making people, you know, feel worse about themselves. But it honestly makes sense why we're seeing these delays. So, for example, compared to every previous generation, Jenzi is getting married later on. They're having their first kids later on. Home ownership is happening way later on. And I think everybody knows this. Whether you're 22, 25, or 29 years old, everyone's super aware of this right now. And this isn't because the 22-year-old is lazy and he's doing something wrong. This is not a Gen Z problem. It is a broad societal problem that we are seeing across the board. It is what happens when you see housing get more and more expensive every single year. You see inflation going up every year, and you are not seeing wages match that at all. I'll even give you guys a quick example of this. My cousin is 10 years older than me. I'm 27, so he's 37 years old. I remember when he was getting out of college, he was starting a job at a pretty big corporation. And I remember him specifically saying his starting pay was going to be $60,000 a year. And so assuming he got out of college at, let's say, 22 years old, he's 37 now. That was 15 years ago. But 15 years later, aka today, most of Gen Z is still getting paid 60K. So no wonder we're starting everything way later. Our economy is way harder to do well in. I mean, it is a very challenging thing. And I'm not saying that I'm struggling, but I'm saying I completely understand how the average person right now is. especially an average younger person. And I haven't even opened up Pandora's box about how horrible this job market is that I'm seeing right now. And so when you look at people that were in their 20s, whether they were in the 80s, '9s, maybe even the 2000s, settling into adulthood was way quicker then. It was a lot easier compared to now because of these situations that we're having to navigate. It's happening later on. And for a lot of people, this is going to create this feeling of being lost. And the reason for this is because if you think about like your parents, right?

[00:10:52]When they were 22, 25, 26, they might have been married by then and they might have already had you compared to if you're 25, you're single, you're still trying to get your income up, you want to have a little bit of stability before you jump into all these big life milestones. It makes sense why you feel lost, especially if you're comparing yourselves to them. Because like I just said, the older generations, they would lock into a full-on life structure at way younger ages than Gen Z and a lot of people in their 20s are now. And when you have a whole generation where all these milestones are getting hit later on, it makes them feel like they're in this weird like purgatory type state almost where they're not fully young anymore, like they're not in school, but they're not fully settled into adulthood either. They don't feel like they're really hitting the ground running. It's very hard to feel good about yourself because like I said, all these milestones are being delayed. And then on top of that, you got social media and just there's so much noise and BS going on all around you 24/7. And for a lot of Gen Z right now, we are spending more time in a transition phase, exploring new things, trying new things. And I actually think one thing that's very cool about people in their 20s right now is we're not really accepting that norm of, hey, I'm going to just stay at the same company for 40 years. I'm going to work till I'm 65 years old, then I'm going to retire and that's my whole life. Like a lot of us are not really subscribing to that mindset. Now, how we approach getting away from that is completely different depending, you know, person to person. Some people go very deep in the paint like Amari Stoddmire and you know try to get that early retirement whereas a lot of people are just honestly giving up too and I see all sides of this. And so when you have no clear path in life you got social media all around you making you feel like you're not doing well. You look at the older generations compared to now and you're like [ __ ] I feel behind in that regard. Of course you're not feeling great about yourself. And to add on to all of this dating scene right now is completely cooked. The food that we're eating is completely just messed up. I mean, they're trying to sneak in fake meat into like actual meat sections of grocery stores. So, we don't even know what the [ __ ] we're eating at this point. And it honestly just feels like everything is off. Like, it's not even just careers and money. It just feels like everyday life is just completely off. Like the systems that we were raised to believe are just completely messed up at this point. So, like starting out with dating, like dating back in the day, it used to just be a way smaller pool of people. It was a way more local thing and it was honestly just seemed like a lot more commitment driven. At least that's how the movies portrayed it. But a lot of times, but what I mean by this is when you don't have phones and social media, I mean, you'd have to call somebody and, you know, literally plan a date. Hey, all right, Friday, we're going to go here.

[00:13:09]I'll pick you up at this time. And yeah, you can still do that today, but you could also be texting five other people on the side or they could be texting five other people. Like, it makes it way harder to like be able to gauge whether people are truly loyal to you or not, which is very difficult. And the thing that's very tough about dating right now is you have guys that are very normal, well-rounded people that are completely giving up on dating because they open a dating app and because they don't have the best profile pictures or the best pictures even though they are good people and they're very normal people and they have good values, they're getting killed on dating apps. Where on the flip side, you got women that can open up the app and they instantly have 100 likes and they're pretty normallooking people. It's not like, you know, they're total supermodel. And so women get validation from the dating apps whereas men get way more discouraged. And I feel like that's a very recurring theme. Even if like you're a semi-attractive guy, like if you're not good at taking pictures, then you know, sorry, bro. And that's kind of a frustrating thing. So, I can see why a lot of people give up in that sense. At least a lot of guys in that regard. And with this day and age of texting and social media, like I said a second ago, like relationships can be replaced way quicker than they could, you know, decades ago. And so, it makes people feel like they have more options or they don't have to stay either as loyal or as committed to one person. Because even if you're not in a relationship, if you were to match with somebody on a dating app, but then in your mind you're like, "Oh, well maybe there's somebody that's better than them and I could just find them in a couple of swipes," you might keep swiping. Compared to like back in the day, that was not the case at all.

[00:14:28]And so that's the dating side of things.

[00:14:30]But when we talk about our food right now, like, oh my gosh, like even if you want to eat whole foods and healthy whole foods, then you have to go down this rabbit hole of like what is truly healthy and what's good? What has different dyes and preservatives in it?

[00:14:42]What is like a very natural food? Like back in the day, our food used to just be so clean. Like for example, if you look at like a Ritz cracker for example from like the 1980s and you look at the ingredients, I think there was like 5 to 10 things on it. Now it's like a whole massive list of stuff. And there are so many examples of this where like things used to be really good back in the day and really whole and healthy things with only some ingredients. And now because of just huge corporations wanting to make better margins on their stuff, they're using lower quality ingredients.

[00:15:09]They're putting tons of dyes and [ __ ] in food. They're putting carcinogens left, right, and center in all of our stuff. I mean, hell, there was even something that came out recently talking about how like processed meat is a carcinogen.

[00:15:19]Like bacon is a carcinogen. If you would have told me that when I was younger, I would have been like, "No way." Like, that is not a real thing. Yeah. No, it is. Same with like processed ham and just basically any processed meat. It seems like I want to be able to just go buy foods, feel good about the food I'm eating, and not have to stress that it's poisoning me. And obviously, that's a thing that applies to everybody in regards to the food. But, you know, compared to previous generations, they had a lot cleaner food, it seems like.

[00:15:40]And that's part of the reason some people love to go to Europe or go on vacations because the food over there is not just filled with tons of chemicals.

[00:15:46]It is real food. So you can actually eat whole foods and not feel like complete [ __ ] afterwards. So that's something I did want to touch on. But another thing I mentioned a little bit ago is that it feels like that something is going on or something big is about to happen. And it's because Gen Z grew up in this non-stop news cycle social media environment. Every single day you could open up an app or turn on the TV and you could see financial uncertainty talking about how the market's going to tank.

[00:16:09]You could see political tension. You could see things about layoffs and how AI is going to be getting rid of tons of jobs. Pretty recently, we've been seeing stuff about wars, obviously, as we've seen. And then you have these like economic fear cycles talking about how everyone's going to lose their job and everything's going to tank. And so, everyone's kind of on edge about when is that going to happen or is it going to happen at all? And it feels like even if your personal life is still good, it feels like the world around us is always just so unstable, especially the past like couple of years, it just feels like ever since co kind of that's at least that's how I felt. Maybe I'm wrong there, but that's just kind of the feeling I've been having. And that's part of the reason I actually stay away from the news and I'm not constantly trying to look at that stuff. And so I know I'm like 20 plus minutes at this point of just hitting you with doom doom doom. So how do you actually navigate this? And how do you actually go about, you know, approaching this the best way that you can because you're not going to fix feeling lost by just finding the perfect answer. You're going to have to fix it by reducing a lot of noise and BS in your life. And you're going to have to just commit to a certain direction.

[00:17:03]One of the first things that I would recommend you do is stop trying to solve your entire life at once. A lot of anxiety that people have comes from this question of what should I do with my life and they're trying to answer it or they're asking themselves, am I behind in life? Am I making the wrong decision?

[00:17:16]And when you're asking yourself these really big questions, it's way too big of questions to be solving mentally in like a 5 to 10 minute period. All you're doing is stressing yourself out here because remember, you're 21, you're 22, you're 25 years old. It's okay if these things take time. You're in your 20s.

[00:17:31]You're not supposed to know it all.

[00:17:32]Nobody expects you to. You don't need to sit here and have a 20-year plan. You don't need to know every single step in the direction that you're going. What I feel like will help for a lot of people is making a decision and sticking to it.

[00:17:42]And then you'll have more clarity and you'll have more information later on.

[00:17:46]And then you can decide from there what you want to do. You don't want to sit there and just try to be planning, planning, planning every little aspect of your life. Just try to jump into it and take a risk if you can. Which leads me to my next point I want to make and that is to pick something and commit long enough so that you can actually get feedback. Whether it is you staying at a job and getting feedback, your own business and getting feedback from customers, do something where you can get information back based on you trying something. Because what happens to a lot of people right now is they're switching things way too early on. They're trying to optimize things way too quickly and they're just constantly restarting.

[00:18:17]They're never actually diving head first into something and sticking to it.

[00:18:20]Because if you truly want to feel like you're progressing in life, you have to stick with something long enough to actually see if it's going to play out or if something good is going to happen.

[00:18:28]You don't need to have this perfect path along the way. You just need to be consistent and learn from reality instead of learning from things that you're just imagining in your own head.

[00:18:35]So that's another thing I think a lot of people lack. And that's even something that took me a little bit of time to figure out is to actually stick with something cuz I used to do this. I would literally even before my job hopping phase, I was job hopping even quicker than that where I was like job hopping veteran where I would literally stay at a job for like 3 or 4 months then job hop. It's like no, you got to stay for like at least a year and a half, two years, maybe 3 years, see how it plays out and then hop. But at least try to stick there long enough to see if something plays out. And I'm not saying you have to go do this in a corporate sense, but just anything in your life, try to pick something and truly stick to it. The next thing I want you to do is anything that is causing you stress or anxiety that is coming from your phone, get rid of it. So, like I said before, I hate LinkedIn. So, anytime I go to get a new job, guess what I do after I get the job? I delete LinkedIn because it is not good for me. I don't like going on there and seeing people just talk a bunch of BS as you could tell from my rant earlier. And so, try to sit there and think of, okay, well, if that's what LinkedIn is like for you, what apps are doing that for me? Is it me watching the news? Is it me being on Tik Tok or Instagram? Is it certain social media platforms where you're feeling worse about yourself than others? Because if your brain is just constantly consuming other people's success stories and you're constantly comparing yourself to other people and you're sitting here watching a highlight reel of everyone's life, you're not going to feel very great about yourself when you're laying at home in the dark not really doing much right. And it's not that you're doing anything wrong. It's just that what you're consuming is making you feel like what you're doing is wrong. And the only way to actually get out of the cycle is to buy one, quit consuming it, and two, actually try to do something.

[00:19:57]Take a risk. Take a chance if you can because you want to really focus your time on building your life up. You're not consuming other people's lives. You know what I mean? And I think it's a really important thing a lot of people should at least try to do. Another really big thing that's important is to understand that feeling lost in your 20s is actually a very normal feeling. This is a very important thing to distinguish because the sooner you recognize this, the better you'll feel about this cuz you'll realize, oh well, this is just part of it. I remember even my mom told me that. She was like, your 20s, you're going to feel pretty lost and that's okay. You're not going to have everything figured out when you're in your 20s. and maybe even some for some people in their early 30s. I mean, if you're 35 or 40 and you're still figuring out the basics, okay, that's on you. But, you know, you've had a long time at that point. I'm sorry. But for somebody that's 22 that is fresh out of school, you don't have to have it all together. It's okay. And be patient with yourself. Feeling lost does not mean you're off track. It probably just means that you're just figuring it out. And that's okay because nobody is going to have this confidence and this clarity when they're put into a totally new environment. And in order for you to build up this confidence, it comes from you doing something very consistently over a period of time. I mean, that is anything in life if you really think about it. Think about any sport you've played. It's not like the first time you played it, you were just balling out.

[00:21:03]Like, it probably took you a lot of drills and a lot of practice and a lot of time in order to get pretty good at something. And that's normal. And that's how adulthood honestly is too. And so, those are a couple of things that I think you can do that could really help your mental health and help you start to build more confidence and get you to a place of no longer feeling lost. Quit trying to solve your entire life in one day. It's okay. It's going to take time.

[00:21:23]You know, pick something that you want to take a risk on or something that interests you and stick to it. Stick to it long enough to where you can at least see results or get some type of feedback and then go from there and decide what you want to do. And then for all the noise that you're seeing online, try to see what things are making you feel lost and get rid of those things and block those things out. You don't need to be on your phone 24/7. It's very healthy to not be on your phone and to go touch grass and get some sunlight. And then finally, be patient with yourself because feeling lost is a lot more normal than I think a lot of you guys realize. And you're probably even going to see that in the comments, too.

[00:21:53]Because I know when I was 22 years old, I felt so lost. It was insane. And even now at 27, I feel like I have more of my life together. But I don't even have it all figured out. And that's okay. I've accepted that. So Jenz is not some broken generation. They're just navigating a world that is a lot different than it was even 10, 15, 20 years ago. And so you got to be patient with yourself about that. But the nice thing about a lot of this is because of the amount of options we have, you're not stuck into anything. You're not permanently, you know, stuck into a certain career that you hate and you have to work your way up the corporate ladder. You have a lot more flexibility and options and you can actually use that to your advantage, which is really nice. So, hang in there. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, drop a like down below. Hit that subscribe button. I'll see you in the next one.

[00:22:31]Peace.