Young, anxious and signed off sick — why so many twentysomethings aren’t working

This comes as little surprise to Ryan Lowe, clinical director of the Therapeutic Consultants, who work with children, adolescents and families across London and the southeast. In recent years she has seen a noticeable rise not just in the number of people seeking their help but in the seriousness of the issues they are dealing with, as the NHS’s mental health services have been overwhelmed by demand.

Trends they saw a few years ago were worsened by the pandemic, with young people taking disorders experienced as teenagers into adult life, where they are often incompatible with the workplace.

Lowe believes society is starting to wake up to the dangers of social media, which she regards as “a socially acceptable form of child abuse”, and that we will start to restrict young people’s access to it, including by banning phones at school. Social media, she says, “messes with children and young people’s capacity to develop an identity. A great deal of what’s on social media is not true. It’s either a very idealised version of people’s reality or a very dramatically awful version. It’s never a valid, real picture. If you try to build an identity based on what you see on social media, you are going to fail.”

Education has become a more competitive environment and young people are daunted by the rat race they are constantly told they will need to compete in. “Kids are told from age 14, when they start GCSE prep, ‘It’s really competitive out there. It’s really hard.’ That paints this picture of work as an extraordinarily big frightening thing — ‘a monster’s coming!’ — and then they get there and don’t want to face the monster.”

The professor Robin Dunbar’s latest book, The Social Brain, looks at the workplace

ANDRE CAMARA

The pandemic had a deleterious effect on many students, who were isolated at home or in halls of residence. Those who were already leaning towards refusing to go to school often became implacably opposed to going after lockdown. “They realise how much anxiety relief they get from not being faced with it. And the problem with any anxiety or any phobia is if you give into it it gets worse,” Lowe says. Now many of those students are equally intimidated by workplaces. “The group who are between 16 and 24 now are going to need a lot of support. I hope they will find the solidity of their identity as they get older,” Lowe says.

In his latest book, The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups, co-authored with Tracey Camilleri and Samantha Rockey, Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, looks at the workplace. He is best known for his work on friendship groups and in particular the famous “Dunbar’s number”, his theory that we can sustain no more than 150 social connections.

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Even before the pandemic, there was an epidemic of loneliness among young people, especially those in their first jobs in a city, he explains. Meeting colleagues predominantly or exclusively through Zoom hardly helped. This loneliness has had devastating consequences. “The single best predictor of your psychological health and wellbeing and your physical health and wellbeing is the number and quality of close friendships,” Dunbar says. “If you want to know how to solve the NHS funding black hole, it’s easy: find a friend for everybody.”

A Gallup poll found that of the women who answered yes when asked if they had a friend at work, 63 per cent said they felt engaged at work, compared to only 29 per cent of those who answered no. The Microsoft Work Trend Index found that those who felt they were most productive also reported stronger workplace relationships.

Employers can do their bit, Dunbar suggests, to make workplaces into much more social spaces. That will be good for the employers and good for struggling employees. It might even keep them from going off sick and be a step towards tackling the epidemic of unhappy, unproductive young people.

Ceci Browning: “A friend spent days curled in the dark, texting his boss”

CHRISTOPHER L PROCTOR FOR THE TIMES

It may at first seem strange that twentysomethings are more likely to be out of work owing to mental health than those in their thirties or forties. New graduates are supposed to burst through university gates raring and ready to go, right? Don’t young people enthusiastically fill out the ranks of start-ups, local businesses and multinational corporations? Aren’t they the backbone of the modern workforce?

As someone aged 23 who has recently graduated and popped out into the real world of work, pink and gooey like I’d been born all over again, this news actually isn’t that surprising. Covid struck when I was in my first year at university. Just before the Easter holidays were due to begin, everyone was sent home from the safe haven of our student halls and forced into lockdown, sandwiched between siblings on the sofa as Boris announced how crucial it was that everyone stayed at home. Reluctantly, I nestled back into my childhood bedroom.’

Lectures were no longer great halls stuffed full of inquisitive strangers. Instead, they were essentially YouTube videos that could be watched from under the covers. Course deadlines were extended indefinitely by professors. If you needed extra time for an assignment owing to “extenuating circumstances” you could have it, of course, no problem. Exams were cancelled. Grades were fabricated. Human company was culled. I didn’t see any of my friends or my course mates for months.

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Two years later, I had done enough studying to receive a ribbon-tied scroll and graduate successfully with a degree in politics and international relations, but the job market I emerged into seemed like a terrifying prospect. I moved back into my dad’s house, where I applied for precisely 52 jobs, listing each in the Notes app of my phone. Only 23 companies got back to me. The others said nothing. Eventually, as my self-pity swelled dangerously, months of effort were rewarded with three interviews and two job offers. I started work in London a week later.

Another friend managed this feat at around the same time. Not long after starting real grown-up life, her inbox filled with out of office messages. She was told there was a girl who wouldn’t reply to emails because she was on sick leave. Having only just passed her probation, she’d had to take time off for undisclosed reasons.

“How long will she be out for?” my friend asked.

“Nobody knows,” her supervisor sheepishly informed her.

This isn’t unusual. As my friends have also grown up, graduated and got to grips with their various new jobs, they’re all wondering how generations before us managed to do this whole work thing without wanting to bury their heads into the corporate sand every single day. One is employed by a bank but has dreams of being a screenwriter. Another decided to do a PhD mostly because of the flexibility it gave him to work from anywhere, rather than because he’s especially interested in medical trials. A third has been jobless for 18 months. At the ripe old age of 25, he has never held a full-time position.

One very intelligent friend of mine, the proud owner of two Cambridge degrees in maths (supposedly one of the most employable subjects), retreated back to his childhood home in the countryside after graduating. He claimed this was to “upskill” himself over the summer and to see some more of the world, but he ended up doing hardly any travelling. Really, I suspect that the bloody battle for City jobs frightened him. He postponed making any moves as long as he could, then found a job in London last month.

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Back in mossy Oxfordshire, where I grew up, a schoolfriend who chose not to go to university left his dream job after consistently failing to turn up to work. He spent days curled up in the dark, texting his boss that he couldn’t come in because he had unexplained migraines and wasn’t well enough to leave the house.

It doesn’t surprise me that twentysomethings are panicking. Within our lifetimes, the world of work (and the world in general) has changed unrecognisably: the internet exists, working from home happens and jobs aren’t for life any more, they’re often just for Christmas. It’s not that we’re afraid of the hard grind, or desperate to avoid it, there are just more pressures on us than there have been before. We can’t afford to pay rent with our salary — is it surprising that our mental health has taken a hit? In simpler terms, we’re the first generation where the “life” part of work-life balance is the more important side of the equation. Is that so bad?

Zak Asgard: “I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but things look a little bleak for Gen Z right now”

GEMMA DAY FOR THE TIMES

I asked a friend of mine, a manager at a restaurant, why she thought we were all too anxious to work. She said it was to do with progression, or lack thereof. “Older generations were expected to have families by the time they were in their late twenties and early thirties. The 18 to 24-year-olds today know they won’t be ready by then and we feel a pressure to achieve at a young age in our careers.”

They say we’re a soft generation, a generation of demanding, phone-addicted moaners. They say that we have the constitution of a wet sock. And now it’s been reported that our mental health is so bad we’re taking time off work.

There’s no denying that we feel a crippling pressure these days. I look at my parents’ careers and wonder how they built success from nothing. I look at the world around us, the jobs on offer, and I’m aware that things have changed, that the world feels gloomier than it did ten years ago. Perhaps that’s why twentysomethings are more likely to take time off for mental health issues than fortysomethings. We know just how bleak the world has become.

We’re the generation that came of age in isolation. All the momentum I had built up in the first 18 months of studying was crushed, replaced by a hermitic lifestyle of watching teleshopping, day drinking and staring at the fan by my bed until I could feel the pulse in my head. And when Covid was over, the world brushed me down, gave me a slap on my back, and said, “Go get ’em, kid!”

We weren’t ready for what awaited us. The fickle promise of a brighter future was nowhere to be seen. I was only offered one “real” job in my first year after graduation: writing slogans for a teddy bear company just outside London. I should have taken it.

Thousands of other mentally fractured twentysomethings found themselves in the same spot. Unable to find a decent job, living off meal deals. Looking for a job becomes a job. And when you find one it’s low-paid and devoid of career progression. You stare at Windows 11 as your line manager tells you how he was just like you once and how you’ve got real potential. And you know you can’t afford to move out on your current salary; you wonder why you studied English and philosophy to wind up in a low-level insurance firm in Bromley. And one day you snap, have a breakdown, take time off work or quit altogether.

I think a lot of young people are starting to question what they’re working for. I know I have in the past. We’re told life is sequential, that there’s a sense of purpose. “If I work hard for the next five years and I save … I can get a car, and then a house, and maybe a nice dog.” Now it’s: “If I work hard, I might have enough money to fix my boiler, and if I fix my boiler I won’t be so cold at night, and if I’m not so cold at night I might not be so depressed, and if I’m not so depressed I might go back to work.”

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but things look a little bleak for Gen Z right now. The government has recently spoken of its £2.5 billion Back to Work Plan helping one million people to find work. It’s a nice idea, yet it won’t solve the problem. We’re not worried because we can’t find work, we’re worried because we can’t find our futures. No wonder Gen Z are having a collective mental health crisis at work: the pressure and fear of what lies ahead is too much to bear.