Yes, Mental Health in Your 20s is About More Than Having a Job

When I have nothing but time for more than six months or so, my depression soars. My anxiety about money is through the roof. And the pressure to make something out of each day, when all I’m really doing is writing little words on my little Word Doc, words that people may never see and I may never get paid for—all while convincing myself, in the se

This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood. But “at a certain age,” writes the psychotherapist Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.

The pointlessness of my existence would often hit me in the midst of some ordinary task—buying groceries, boarding a train—and I would become paralyzed by confusion and indecision. Any discrete action, detached from a larger context, comes to seem absurd, just as a word considered on its own, removed from the flow of language, quickly becomes meani

the assessment by Jean Twenge, a leading social psychologist: I think the research tells us that modern life is not good for mental health…. Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress, and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s a paradox

This young generation has “high expectations for work,” explains psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, an expert on the mindset of the modern postgrad. “They expect work to be not just a job but an adventure[,] … a venue for self-development and self-expression[,]