Why Young Adults Don’t Feel Like They’re Enough

“Sometimes you might feel like you’re not good enough or unique enough, but everyone is! Everyone has different personalities.” – Astrid S

We live in a time of unprecedented change. More freedom, more anxiety. More choice, more depression. More convenience, more addiction. Higher highs, lower lows. Finding one’s centre is becoming harder as the world gets louder. The exchange of information has never been so fast. We know more now, as a collective, than we ever have before. Whilst I am grateful to be alive today, I feel compelled to write about what I see and hear from sitting in the Counsellor’s chair as wonderful souls from a multitude of demographics and backgrounds sit opposite me with various ailments, hopes and ambitions. Although we each have our own story, when similar stories are told, trends and themes arise. One of the most common themes is the expectation of knowing what one should do with their lives from such a young age.

The Youth of Today

I never thought I’d work with adolescents and young adults; but the modern world had different plans. Despite my love of existentialism, death and dying, and relationships, the demand of youth affected by mental ill-health speaks for itself. Young adults are struggling to make sense of an increasingly complex world. What is my purpose? Who am I? What should I do? With so much choice and opportunity, how do they make value judgements? How do any of us?

Young adults today are suffering. Their mental health is declining. They are isolated, addicted and separated. They are struggling in their search for identity. They don’t know who they are, where they’re going, or how to let their authenticity flourish. They have been led to believe that “happiness” is the norm, not the exception, and are struggling to cope with the expectations put on them by a society that never lets them forget they could have anything they could possibly want.

This sense of dislocation is what drove the “Columbine Shooters” to kill over twenty of their classmates in 1999 before ending their own lives. Multiple youth shootings are on the rise. So is the suicide rate; but it doesn’t have to be this way. None of this is their fault, despite what older generations might insinuate. They don’t need to be in pain. It can change, it can get better. I know this because I used to be them.

I’ve spent the past eight years trying to understand why a privileged man like myself—with a near perfect upbringing and education—could wind-up contemplating the worth of his own life.

Throughout my twenties, I was plagued by suicidal thoughts, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic attacks and depression. The worst of it was the sense of nothingness. The void I felt I was always moments away from falling into. I was a ghost, isolated, hollow, separate to everyone else. I felt ashamed. How could this be? I was supposed to be happy! I had a great family, good friends, went to a great school and had more opportunities than most. But something was missing. I had no purpose. I numbed myself from the pain. I lived behind a glass wall. I spoke to a therapist for six months when I was at my worst. I was so scared. I remind myself of that fear when speaking to my clients because, now that I’m a counsellor, I realise my situation wasn’t unique.

Managing Expectations—And Whose Are They, Anyway?

One of the keys to properly diagnosing individuals (not that I am necessarily in favour of throwing out diagnoses left, right and centre) is to ascertain whether their behaviour is consistent with, or common in their respective culture. Although not always the case, if their behaviour reflects that of others in their community, then the issue lies not in their mind but in the social ecosystem.

Young adults do not feel enough in today’s world. They feel they must know their purpose and have their lives in order prior to commencing their year 12 exams. The pressure placed on them is something I am at odds with. Whilst we can all agree that challenge and pressure is necessary for the cultivation of emotional and psychological maturity, impossible expectations seldom, if ever, lead to the best outcomes.

I might well be biased in my opinion, considering that, as a Counsellor, I speak only with those struggling in their personal lives. Still, feeling enough—and feeling like one is doing enough—in an unforgiving world is a modern struggle for the young adult; it is not an indication of some individualistic imperfection or condition.

Although feeling enough sounds simple—even trivial—it’s not. Feeling enough might just be the most influential factor to showing up in the world, authentically and meaningfully. Feeling enough encompasses everything. When we feel enough, we feel that we are doing enough. This is not the same as thing as feeling that we’ve “done” enough.

One of the major barriers to self-acceptance is that young adults conflate it with laziness. Likewise, self-care is often conflated with self-indulgence. Intuitively, we know that a light, technology-free walk is not the same thing as eating a big, cheesy pizza on the couch, watching a movie. Still, the expectation that we must always be working—always studying, always “grinding”, as the kids say—prevents us from relaxing and enjoying our lives, which would only help us meet our ridiculous expectations.

One of the difficulties of the modern world is finding that sweet spot between self-acceptance and personal ambition. As entrepreneur Leah Hormozi so wonderfully articulates, “Maybe it’s not a problem to be solved but a dichotomy to be managed?” Acceptance and ambition are two sides of the same coin. The coin represents fulfilment, a dynamic force. Progressing in life is conducive to feeling enough. Loving who we are becoming binds both self-acceptance with goal-driven determination. Through this lens, being enough and doing enough work together. They aren’t two mutually exclusive entities. Wanting to become a better version of ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean we hate ourselves; it might just mean we’re interested to find out what more we’re capable of. Wanting to be more and actualise our potential doesn’t have to be fuelled by self-loathing. Curiosity catalyses forward movement too. If we try to do more to fill in that bottomless pit of inadequacy, we will never feel enough. Rather, if we feel enough and enjoy all the doing simply because it’s fun and meaningful, we’ll win.

Pressures of the Education System

Many of the young adults I speak with today struggle to decide whether they should go to university or get a job and learn as they go. Some adults in their twenties, too, resent their tertiary studies because the content isn’t “up to date”—something that universities will continue to struggle with as the exchange of information in our technological world grows faster and faster.

Universities have always served those with wealth and/or a valuable network. Now, the internet has wiped out the middleman and, if you really wanted to, you could educate yourself for free. When it comes time for young adults to decide what they should do after school, the trade-offs between going to university to get a conventional, yet tangible education or starting their own business, for example—using YouTube to figure it out along the way—is a topic of discussion that appears regularly in my clinical practice.

What I quickly realised was that the discussion about needing to figure out what to do after high school was a symptom of a deeper problem. A productive conversation about future planning is one thing; working on panic reduction strategies because a sixteen year-old doesn’t yet know what their career will look like is another. Who on earth pushed the agenda that young adults must have their lives figured out? I could count the number of times our conversations about unfair expectations really stuck. “You’ve got so much time to figure your life out”, was a sentence I quickly parked on a high shelf in the clinic after multiple failed attempts at easing their suffering. Before that, I even used humour to try to shatter these unfair expectations: “Colonel Sanders was a year away from fifty before he perfected his eleven herbs and spices, and you’re worried about not knowing what your purpose is?” Nothing worked. It was only when a twelve year-old girl came to see me, terrified because she felt that her life had no meaning, that I would be pushed to breaking point, determined to hold accountable these unfair expectations we place upon our kids and young adults these days.

Unfortunately, systems are driven by exceeding KPI’s, and the high school education system measures its success, among other things, upon the number of students who continue on to university. So, a student who prefers working in a chicken shop after school to save money to travel and be a kid, struggles to feel enough because the system she finds herself in measures—and this is a key distinction—success based upon performance, not contentment. This, unfortunately, ripples down to the individual who seeks therapy for their “anxiety”, “depression”, and inability to “sleep without smoking weed”.

I benefited greatly from the education system because I came to fall in love with learning and academic pursuits. Perhaps this is why I was so blindsided and confused about the difficulties the young adults who came to see me faced. I remember struggling with anxiety upon the eve of an exam; I remember high school hierarchies and volatile social dynamics. But when school ended, so did social interaction, for the most part. Social media, back then, wasn’t like it is today. Apart from receiving an occasional text message on my Nokia “brick” phone—painfully interrupting a game of Snake—or a message sent via MSN to my rather embarrassing email address that began with greeneggsandham, I heard from no one. These days, adolescents and young adults never get to leave the social dynamics of school. Furthermore, what they post online will stay there forever. These, we are aware of. What is seldom discussed, however, lies at the root of these growing unfair expectations.

Wanting to be the best in the class, I think, is a fair challenge—and it might even be an expectation one places upon oneself. With the rise of social media, anyone with a smart phone can access and follow the best in the world at what they do. So, a young adult who expects themselves to be good at sports or ace an English exam might well be exposed to the best sportspeople, writers and child proteges of the contemporary world.

It is impossible not to compare oneself to the lives of others. Comparison serves an evolutionary function of safety, and I think it’s more adaptive to move with our biological underpinnings, rather than pretend they don’t exist—or that they’re not over 210 million years old! So, if we are to compare—whilst keeping it in check, of course—what might social media be doing for a young adult with concerns about not being enough? The answer, to me, is obvious. For a high schooler with a proclivity for anxiety and insecurity, social media is constantly telling them they aren’t enough and that they’re not doing enough as every happy, laughing, successful faces glides along their screen. The hierarchy extends well beyond the grades of the class, out into the wide open world and young adults are now, either consciously or subconsciously, comparing themselves with the best the world has to offer. Social media has fiercely raised the stakes.

It’s Not All Doom and Gloom

Expectations can either be highly damaging or wonderfully motivating. If they’re challenging and fair, they will pull us forwards; if they’re subconscious drivers, derived from the opinions of others, they will overwhelm and make us feel worthless. Expectations can be placed on us by our parents. They can also be placed on us by the societies and communities we are a part of. Some expectations are good: Thou Shalt Not Kill, for one, still works! But the ones we should really pay attention to are the ones that influence the vision we have for your lives.

Many sacrifices must be made to be the “best” at something. Young adults want to be the best because they see people “living their best lives” every time they unlock their phones, and, consequently, don’t feel enough. In a world that demands more open-mindedness than ever before—catalysed by the ability to connect with strangers from all over the world with opposing worldviews—it has never been more important to understand what drives us. We all—not only young adults—must develop our self-awareness such that we can fully own our expectations.

Expectations can pull us forward up the mountain. They can make us feel fulfilled when what we’re doing is working; when we see the progress and fruit of our labour. They can also make us feel like failures as the summit of the mountain grows more distant, and people surpass us by the hour. In these moments of hardship, we should all ask ourselves what it would take to be enough. Where did that expectation come from? The expectations we place on ourselves should be—must be—consciously imposed.

If we want to be the best, we should own it. It will come with great sacrifice; but owning it will, paradoxically, make that far easier to deal with. Agency over choice fosters independence and self-worth. What I’ve come to learn from working with these incredible young adults is that it isn’t the height of the mountain that leads to suffering. Rather, it’s failing to recognise that we can choose which mountain to climb. Coming to this realisation, I stopped bringing up Colonel Sanders and began to ask them a different question—one that significantly changed the energy in the room: “Who do you want to become?”

I watched them closely as they were pulled into their imaginations, standing in awe at the foot of thousands of newly erected mountains, each with its own wondrous adventure awaiting. Now that it was their decision to make, life became not about mitigating their pain, but filtering it willingly into a life path that would demand everything from them. And, as far as I could tell, they couldn’t wait to take that first step.