Lanre Dokun, a psychiatrist in New York, has a lot of clients with financial anxiety. For the older ones, the stress is usually situational: Perhaps they’ve lost their job, or they’re worrying about medical costs. But for young adults, he’s noticed, the concern is downright existential. It’s a “chronic background stressor,” he told me, or even “a character in their lives.” Clients who are objectively on solid ground are worried they one day won’t be. Some are obsessive about budgeting. Others are scared of being replaced by AI. One high-earning client consistently saves 40 percent of her income, yet still feels she’s behind.Gen Z does seem to be a financially savvy and hypercautious bunch. A 2024 Charles Schwab survey found that the average Zoomer started saving at age 18, younger than other generations had. (The typical Boomer, for comparison, began at 34.) Nearly half are investing, and most began that before age 20. According to a study by the Investment Company Institute and the University of Chicago, which adjusted for inflation, Gen Z households have nearly three times more assets in defined-contribution retirement accounts than Gen X households did at the same age.Joelle Remy, a financial adviser in Chicago, told me that she’s noticed young people trying to earn extra high-school credits so they can graduate from college early and save on tuition. Others are getting retail jobs at 16 in order to stash wages away for an eventual master’s degree. Some of her Gen Z clients have saved more than a lot of her Millennials have.All of that might seem counterintuitive for a generation with a bit of a Peter Pan reputation—known less for buying bonds than for living in their parent’s basement. And it’s true: A ton of young people are postponing the traditional adulthood milestones, putting off having families or buying homes at least in part because they don’t feel they can afford them. But what seems like falling behind could actually be planning ahead: watching and waiting, always trying to prepare for the future. Maybe young adults, far from being in arrested development, are growing up exceptionally fast.Gen Z has been coming of age in an über-expensive world. Child-care costs have been rising for years, outpacing inflation. Home prices are exceptionally high—especially in cities, where a whole lot of entry-level jobs are located. Pensions and “jobs for life” have practically gone extinct. Much of Gen Z dreams of house deeds and baby carriages; those landmarks are simply taking longer to reach.But the irony is that for all that time young adults spend not achieving their goals, many of them are quietly squirreling money away instead. The prototypical grown kid in the basement, as easily as he could be labeled a degenerate, may be amassing a nest egg from what would’ve been rent or mortgage payments; the paycheck diverted from diapers could be funneled into savings or investments. Michael Tenam, a 23-year-old IT worker, told me he makes $90,000 a year—but he’s living with his parents in Brooklyn, chipping away at his student-loan balance, wondering whether he might be ready to move out by 26 or 27. (He’d rent; home ownership, he said, “seems like an impossibility.”) Nearly all of his friends moved home too, so he’s not particularly ashamed of it, and he knows he’s lucky to have the option. “Realistically,” he said, “I could do a lot better for myself in the future if I just stay at home longer and just don’t waste that money this early on in my life.”Young people today are surrounded not only by high sticker prices but by reminders to be careful, to plan ahead. The glossy-haired finance influencer “Mrs. Dow Jones” might pop up on their TikTok, chatting about tax withholdings; an infographic on compounding wealth from “Matt the Money Guy” might appear on their Instagram feed. (When I was growing up, the financial-advice icon Suze Orman was sometimes on TV at night, breaking the hearts of callers who asked “Can I afford it?” by shouting: “DENIED!” But Orman did not live in my pocket and follow me around giving tough love.) And more employers are enacting “opt-out” retirement plans, meaning that workers are automatically enrolled.[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]Young adulthood was once a time to take risks, to try things, to be a little reckless before assuming the burden of real responsibility. But now financial-health tricks and economic-news headlines can feel inescapable, and blissful ignorance near impossible. In a sense, the modern lifespan holds less breathing room for play or exploration—for youth. Shannon E. Cavanagh, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, remembered talking with a graduate student who was saving part of her meager stipend for retirement. The decision struck Cavanagh as almost strangely conscientious for somebody so young, making so little. When Cavanagh was that age, she told me, she simply had faith in Social Security and her own ability to find work.A certain amount of financial conservatism is a good thing. Facing reality head-on can make people less anxious, after all; as Remy, the financial adviser, put it, “Discipline is freedom.” But I’m not sure I’d describe Gen Z as free. Today’s young adults have particularly high rates of anxiety. They are famously risk-averse and moderate: drinking less and having less sex than previous generations, eschewing romantic passion for lower-stakes situationships. “There’s so much delayed joy,” Cavanagh told me. And Zoomers—many of them the children of Gen Xers who lost work in the 2008 financial crash—are particularly stressed about money. Leading up to the 2024 election, a University of Chicago study found inflation to be the No. 1 issue for young adults, across race and party affiliation.Of course, money stress is rarely just about money itself. In an age of war and widespread mistrust, of AI infiltration and climate gloom, it may well be about control. “Financial anxiety often stems from the illusion that their perfect decision making will guarantee their safety,” Dokun told me. “But we all know that’s just not true.”[Read: America isn’t ready for what AI will do to jobs]In this context, information abundance can turn from a gift to a curse. Having finance influencers in your ear 24/7 can amplify the turmoil you’re already feeling. You might get great investment advice from one, but misinformation from another. In fact, many young people may have heard so much about how chaotic and terrible the world is in general, and how doomed they are as a cohort, that they have over-indexed on prudence. I share a funny sense of culpability for this with Cavanagh and her husband, Robert Crosnoe, a fellow UT Austin sociologist. They recently published a book titled The Journey Into Adulthood in Uncertain Times; we all make our living in part by describing the obstacles in Gen Z’s way. “I do think that we might have made it worse,” Crosnoe told me. “They think it’s even worse than it really is.”In the midst of writing this story, I took a break to speak on a radio show. The topic was an article that I’d written about how hard it is to be a young woman in 2026; I was joined by Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist I’d interviewed for it. Traditionally, Jay said, young adulthood is a time of “unrealistic optimism,” when people let themselves imagine they’ll never have to dial back their dreams. But in recent years, she’s found the opposite problem with her clients: unrealistic pessimism. They’re crouched, hands over head, waiting for a big blow that may never come.I’ll now state the obvious: Not every young person is saving. Many people simply don’t have the means. Others hold an attitude that Rebecca Palmer, the head of financial guidance at Fruitful, a fiscal-planning company for people in their 20s to 40s, called “financial nihilism”: They don’t see the point in working slowly and steadily toward a goal that seems unlikely to ever be reached. Earlier this month, a study from the financial-services company Northwestern Mutual found that nearly a third of participants ages 18 to 29 said they were considering or already putting money into sports betting and prediction markets. Eighty percent—more than any other generation—said they might invest in such “high-risk or speculative investments” because they feel financially behind.That might seem to contradict my point about Gen Z’s financial wariness. But hypervigilance and nihilism are just two different responses to the same uncertainty: If you don’t know what the future holds, you might scrupulously manage every cent to your name. Or you might laugh darkly, mutter “What future?,” and log onto Polymarket to try to make a quick buck. These are both classic strategies in times of economic strife, Crosnoe told me. Some people become very focused on the short-term problem of making ends meet, which researchers call an “income effect”—a phenomenon most common among those “in dire straits,” Crosnoe said, who might not have any savings or familial support to fall back on. Others become fixated on the long game: a “substitution effect,” in which they try to position themselves for eventual prosperity. (That helps explain why U.S. college enrollment went up after the 2008 downturn, even when tuition wasn’t easy for many to afford.)[Read: My year as a degenerate gambler]So the super-savers are a lucky bunch: privileged enough to fret over the future, rather than treading water just to stay afloat in the present. But all of the “delayed joy,” all of the worry and austerity, is still taxing. Cavanagh and Crosnoe have found that the people most panicked in rocky economies aren’t typically the ones in the worst circumstances; they’re the ones who are downwardly mobile, less wealthy than their parents. And perhaps they’re less wealthy than they feel they should be; maybe they imagine that they can fix everything if they push a little harder or sacrifice a little more. “There’s just so much shame” among this cohort, Dokun told me—a feeling of inadequacy compared with peers who always seem to be doing fabulously on social media, but also compared with previous generations.In all likelihood, much of Gen Z will land on two feet. As Baby Boomers downsize, move into retirement homes, or—sorry—die, more homes will come on the market, according to Daryl Fairweather, a chief economist for the real-estate company Redfin. That should make buying property much easier by about 2035, she predicts, as a lot of Zoomers hit their mid- to late-30s: approaching peak first-time-home-buying years, these days. People like Michael Tenam will move out of their parents’ places, and they’ll be richer for the time spent there. Many will eventually end up with the wedding ring and the mortgage and the baby, just like their folks. Cavanagh and Crosnoe reviewed five decades of data for their book, and found that even the Great Depression and the Great Recession didn’t affect young people’s life outcomes all that much. Individuals did suffer, but in the aggregate, Crosnoe told me, “10, 20 years after the fact, it’s really hard to pull out a cohort that looks really different from the ones before or after it. Historical change is just much more gradual than that.”The more pressing question may be whether young people are okay right now—because there is a cost to putting today off for tomorrow. Lora Park, a University at Buffalo psychologist, has studied the well-being of people who are particularly fixated on long-term goals. She’s found that they tend to report feeling anxiety, guilt, and regret when doing anything other than working toward their narrow mission. And when they stake much of their self-worth on financial success, they tend to feel less autonomy, not more.While we were talking, Cavanagh plucked a quote from the historical data she and her husband had used for their book. This was from someone weathering the Great Recession. She summarized: “I’m extremely frugal, I save every penny I can, I don’t trust banks. I keep all my money in cash.” That woman wasn’t even saving for a discrete goal such as marriage, Cavanagh noted. “It just felt like a barrier against the unknown.” I wondered for how many years she was bracing, and what she gave up before the unknown arrived anyway.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.