Read any expert commentary and Gen Zs are often described as anxious, fragile, and less resilient than the generations before them.
Spend a few minutes on social media, and you will find posts, studies, and expert opinions that say it’s a generation that simply cannot cope.
But, has anyone paused to ask themselves whether all these issues simply say more about the world they are inheriting from older generations than about Gen Z? What if their perceived fragility is in fact a nervous system responding to prolonged instability? It’s a curious generational dichotomy that begs unpacking.
Jogini Packery, Head of Campus at SACAP (South African College of Applied Psychology) Johannesburg and a counselling psychologist, said the narrative needs recalibrating.
From a developmental psychology perspective, she said that what we are witnessing is not weakness but heightened stress responses unfolding within unusually unstable conditions.
“Adolescence and early adulthood are naturally periods of emotional intensity, identity exploration and uncertainty,” she said. “What’s different today is that these developmental tasks are unfolding against constant economic insecurity, social instability and global crises that feel immediate and inescapable.”
Much of today’s crises is environmental
Emotional volatility in youth is nothing new. She said that every generation has wrestled with self-doubt, comparison and the pressure to find direction.
“What has changed for Gen Z is the landscape in which those developmental tasks now play out,” Packery said. “Previous generations certainly faced hardship, including political upheaval, recession and violence, yet many still moved along relatively visible pathways into adulthood. Education often led to work, and work, however imperfect, led to a degree of independence.”
Today, Gen Zs are facing unstable job markets, rising living costs, more than a decade of persistent load shedding, climate anxiety, and rapid technological change. All while being measured against curated digital lives that never switch off.
The pressure is not simply to survive but to perform, to demonstrate emotional intelligence, social relevance and economic productivity simultaneously.
“The pressure is not only to survive,” Packery said. “It is to perform emotionally, socially and economically at all times.”
In South Africa, where youth unemployment remains high, this performance pressure smashes head-on into a milieu of limited opportunity. Stable work and financial independence once marked the transition into adulthood, she said. helping consolidate identity and self-worth.
“When those markers are delayed or inaccessible, young people can experience something called suspended adulthood. This is when work and financial independence are uncertain, and in turn erodes self-worth,” she said.
“Psychologically, this uncertainty interferes with Gen Z’s identity consolidation, which is a core developmental task of early adulthood.”
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Struggling with public identity
Packery said that the resulting anxiety, shame, or disengagement are therefore not evidence of laziness or entitlement, but reflections of structural constraint.
“Sustained effort does not always translate into reward, and that mismatch has psychological consequences.”
Anxiety, consequently, is often treated as a problem to be managed.
“Anxiety can be an adaptive signal,” she said.
“In contexts where the future is genuinely unstable, anxiety may reflect attunement rather than pathology.”
Calming anxiety, she suggested focusing on regulation, helping Gen Zs understand what their anxiety is signalling and equipping them to respond constructively before it becomes overwhelming.
Pathologising normal responses to structural instability risks invalidating lived realities, she added.
“Developmentally, identity formation requires space for uncertainty, mistakes and revision,” Packery said.
“Social media collapses that privacy.”
In turn, Gen Z sometimes take a step back.
“Disengagement becomes concerning when it is driven by hopelessness, isolation, or emotional shutdown,” Packery said. “However, in many cases, disengagement is a rational response to burnout, unrealistic expectations, or systems that feel inaccessible.”
Disengagement is a response to burnout
Gen Zs are expected to define who they are across gender, sexuality, race, politics, career and digital presence under public scrutiny.
“Developmentally, identity formation requires space for experimentation, mistakes and revision. Social media compresses that space, turning exploration into performance and private uncertainty into public branding.”
She cautioned that carrying multiple identity expectations at once increases self-monitoring and intensifies the fear of getting it wrong, which can stall healthy development and amplify anxiety.
Supporting Gen Z’s and teaching resilience without addressing or understanding context can unintentionally burden young people with a responsibility to adapt to systems that are not functioning well, Packery said.
“Well-being is shaped by environments as much as by personal skills. Supporting Gen Z therefore requires more than encouraging mindfulness and grit. It calls for fairer systems, meaningful work opportunities and greater socio-economic stability.”
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