Name: Imagine being 22 while the world is collapsing
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T08:14:50.000Z
Duration: 38 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And the funniest part is when you're a kid you can't wait to grow up.

Now I trade all my adulthood for a Capri sun and a nap after recess.

Transition words & phrases

People don't have hope for the future is because it seems like we are trying to destroy ourselves as a species from the inside out.

Life has gotten so expensive that it's not even worth trying to be frugal anymore.

The older I get, the more I realize that everyone is just like in massive debt and they don't seem to care about it.

I got laid off from my corporate job yesterday and I think that this is the reality for a lot of Americans right now.

I was like, oh, 37 years until I retire, I could do this.

Maxwell House, the coffee company has announced that they are rebranding to a new name, Maxwell Apartment.

Society will be really fractured and a lot of people will be heavily depressed.

A lot of tech companies are going to leverage this for profit.

I have my rights and I to keep on figuring and figuring and turning more tripula trees into thieves and nothing is going to stop me.

By now it's pretty much old news that Gen Z's future is bleak to say the least.

Yet conversations keep circulating about how they're ever going to navigate it.

And that's because they're in a really unique situation.

Sure, every generation had anxieties in their youth about their future, but

none of them have gone so far as to collectively completely lose hope in all that is good.

Like since the pandemic, their path into adulthood has been plagued, pun intended, by a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, a job crisis, and

as a cherry on top fears of a global war.

But the question I want to ask today is whether the world Gen Z is experiencing right now really reflects the future they're heading toward or if we've just overburdened them with worst case fears of the future.

And the reason I say that is because if we know anything about it's that they're not going to just sit back quietly and let the world burn around them.

Just look at how they were the first generation to really push back against toxic workplaces and refuse to be underpaid and overworked.

Or how they unapologetically redefine traditional life milestones that had a chokehold on humanity for centuries.

So that is what we're going to get into the storms Gen Z faces ahead and whether their resilience will be enough to carry them through foreign.

Now, before we get into it, I want to say that this is not an exhaustive list of all of Gen Z's problems, but

With that, this isn't a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of propaganda, but

rather a dissection of what options there are given this depressing situation.

When adults used to say, you're gonna see one day.

I see why my parents used to just sit in silence after work, staring at the wall.

I used to think adults were being dramatic.

Every day is a new episode of why Is this My Problem?

You start saying stuff like, these weeks are flying by, and

that's how you know your soul has clocked in permanently.

So to start off strong, we need to talk about Gen Z's debt problem, because it is a big one.

A recent poll showed that Gen Z's average personal debt was 94,000, far above millennials and Gen X, which is also adjusted for inflation.

Well, at this point, most of us are familiar with the players in the game that quietly siphon money out of our wallets.

Companies like Klarna and Afterpay have perfected this model on top of everything in our lives, slowly converting into subscription models.

we noticed that on the screen, you can't use navigation unless you pay a subscription fee for it, right?

Like, you can't just hook your phone up and use navigation on your phone.

So we looked at the subscription fees, and it's 15amonth.

It's also 15amonth to stream music to the actual screen in your car.

And then, just as Gen Z was entering adulthood, they were faced with this dumpster fire of an economy.

Meaning that unless you're making an above average salary or are partnered up with someone who's also making an average income, there's a good chance you're struggling to pay for rent and groceries.

And I think this is something that most of us know by now, right?

Like, it's not just that young people are spending too much money on Matcha Lattes, it's their basic necessities that are becoming too expensive.

And so they're succumbing to Debt as a last resort.

Because what else do you do when you already don't have a lot of disposable income and an unexpected expense comes up?

Well, you don't have much other choice than putting it on credit.

I just need somebody else to tell me that they're living paycheck to paycheck and putting themselves into credit card debt out of necessity, not because of fun.

We have no kids, me and my fiance, and we're still barely scraping by.

Our bills are paid, but we can't save any money, we can't go on vacation.

I mean, we do little things here and there, but

realistically we don't really do anything and we still live paycheck to paycheck.

A recent study found that one in four Gen Z respondents would max out their credit cards to bail themselves out of a tough financial situation.

Also, it is important to clarify that yes, there is a group of Gen zers that are just bad with money and accrue debt like they're investing in their real life animal Crossing island, except they don't have the luxury of paying it back with bells to a cutesy pixelated raccoon dog.

I think people forget that every generation has a subgroup of people who don't give an F and will never get it together.

The difference here is that Gen Z was dealt a sabotaged hand from the start, leaving them just trying to stay above water.

The issue isn't that Gen Z is reckless or bad with money.

The issue is that they're operating in an economy fundamentally different from previous generations.

As you can expect, one of the byproducts of this is that a lot of Gen Z has just given up because they don't have hope that things will get better.

The veil of the optimistic future sold to them in childhood has been lifted and they're left empty handed and in a constant state of money dysphoria.

What that means is that many of them jump on short lived financial trends using coping mechanisms like little treat culture and just overall feeling chronically behind.

You want a crashing out video about cost of living?

So last month our water bill was pretty high.

We did everything right for the entire month.

We turned off the sink while we were doing our dishes.