In the past few months I've been to two family weddings and a PhD graduation. I heard the news of a pregnancy, watched one young couple buy their first home and another couple's marriage begin to come apart, and helped a kid I love get ready to leave for college. I am thinking about the young people in my life a lot right now, cheering them on, worrying a little, showing up where I can. They are the reason for this issue of Field Notes.

A few weeks ago I wrote on Substack about the Professional Precariat: the reality that professional work has quietly grown more precarious as the old contract between people and their careers has frayed. I wrote that one for my professional audience. Then I went to those family events and sat across from my 20- and 30-something nieces, nephews and godchildren, and the whole thing stopped being an idea. What they, and their children, will navigate over a lifetime landed squarely in my heart.

Maybe that just means I'm getting older. (I am.) Or maybe it means the lens has become personal. Either way, I want to open a conversation here about what the young people we love are staring down, framed as this question I keep turning over:

This post is about the things I've noticed and am thinking about, but I'll be honest that I don't have a tidy answer.

Here are a few of the data points that have helped me see these talented young people, and the lives ahead of them, more clearly.

For the 20-somethings

• 5.7% recent-grad unemployment, 41.5% underemployed in Q1 2026, above the national rate, inverting the old "a degree protects you" rule. (NY Fed)
• First-time homebuyer median age hit a record 40, up from the late 20s in the '80s; first-timers are just 21% of buyers, a record low. (NAR, 2025)
• Workers 16 to 24 are 4x more likely than older workers to hold contingent or temp jobs. (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023 Data)

For the 30-somethings

• 33% of 18- to 34-year-olds live with a parent (57% of 18- to 24-year-olds). (Census/Pew)
• 43% of 25- to 29-year-olds carry student debt, up from 28% in 1993; about $33,000 to $35,000 on average for 25- to 34-year-olds. (Pew, 2024)

For those with children, or deciding whether to have them

• Childcare runs $13,128 a year on average, more than a mortgage or in-state tuition in most regions. (Child Care Aware, 2024)
• The US fertility rate fell to a record 1.599 in 2024; people cite money, insurance, and childcare -- not desire. (CDC/NCHS)

Here's the story these numbers tell me. For those in their 20s, the first rung of the ladder my generation stepped onto is simply gone; the steady job that leads somewhere and the affordable starter home are simply out of reach in a way they never were for us. For those in their 30s, even the lucky few who bought a home are carrying student debt and childcare on top of work that can disappear without much warning, and the ground never quite feels solid under them.

You'll hear people my age, and plenty of politicians from my generation and the one before it, insist the data looks great and these kids will be fine. In the aggregate, you can almost make a believable case; young people have, on paper, never been wealthier. But that data rests on home-price gains for the ones who already owned, it hides a wealth gap inside the generation far wider than anything we faced, and the math doesn't account for the roughly one in five young adults living back home, whose net worth gets counted under their parents' roof. Meanwhile consumer sentiment just hit a record low across the 74 years the University of Michigan has been asking. The spreadsheets and the lived experience disagree, and I have come to trust the lived experience, because what it measures is risk.

They are inheriting a world stripped of predictability. For my generation, security felt like something you could earn, one steady step compounding on the next. For younger generations, that confidence is mostly gone, and uncertainty has become the baseline condition of a life. My generation could see a path to solid ground, even when the walk was hard. The young people I love, and the kids at their feet, mostly cannot.

So what do we owe them? I honestly don't know. Maybe it means getting out of the way. Maybe it means handing something down, or finally letting go of advice we built for a world that's gone. Probably all of it, and a great deal of grace for what they're navigating that we never had to. These are brave young people. They will build something out of this that we can't picture and won't be here to see.

For me, the gift I can actually give is to support them with hope instead of fear, and to listen out of love.

What will you do to support the younger people in your life? I would love to hear.

More soon,

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