Last summer, most of my clients as a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist were people at risk of burnout. Somewhere along the way, more and more of them turned out to be in their twenties. That’s how I became curious about Gen Z.

Around the same time I read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. The book is mostly about young people in the US and other English-speaking countries: less free play, smartphones and social media too early, and a sharp rise in anxiety and depression. I kept wondering what this looks like here. What does Berlin’s expat Gen Z struggle with? And what could I offer young adults who seem to carry so much of the world’s uncertainty on their shoulders?

Why I felt I could relate

I grew up in Ukraine in the 1990s, after socialism fell apart. My parents were just starting to take part in building a new democracy. Political uncertainty, an education system that promised nothing, and an economy at rock bottom were my starting point too.

Our challenges are different, of course. The dot-com boom is behind us, and the AI revolution is ahead. Young adults today have opportunities and information I couldn’t have imagined at their age. I also have to question my own grouping here: people who choose to live in Berlin are a special tribe of their own.

What I expected, and what I found

The young adults I’ve met so far (fewer than a hundred) crashed my expectations. I didn’t find any of the cliché adjectives that worried parents keep sharing on social media. Nobody struck me as lost or incapable.

What I found was something very painfully human, and at the same time a potential earlier generations could only dream of. They mix subjects, cultures and languages, and they think deeply about big problems.

They communicate well. They are emotionally articulate, informed, culturally aware and thoughtful about what matters to them. They have more words for their inner life, and a wider view of the world, than my classmates and I had at the same age.

We needed an extra ten years of trial and error to get there. Badly paid jobs that shaped us anyway, complicated relationships, career changes, and a few lessons from the school of life. Only then could we name what we were going through.

Same questions, different order

And yet Gen Z asks the same questions we asked in our twenties. How do I build a relationship with myself, and with others? How do I make choices that are really mine? Should I make my choice, or the smart choice? Is there anything in between?

The difference is that they already know the terminology. They can google, or Claude, their way to the right word in seconds. Knowing the name of a difficulty still doesn’t teach you how to live through it. Self-trust, boundaries, emotional understanding and the ability to sit with uncertainty all take time.

We Millennials had to learn this too, in a different order: experience first, words later. For Gen Z, the words come first. It’s like speaking a language fluently while still finding out what it means. As far as I know, they are the first generation in history to grow up this way. Just wow.

This is also why young people can be confusing for their elders. They dress as if they’d lived through a couple of decades of fashion experiments. They talk about attachment theory and their nervous system. And then they struggle to take steady steps towards their own long-term goals. Their knowledge is simply older than their emotional age. Their insight, and with it their expectations of themselves, arrived long before the lived experience needed to put it into practice.

Why I’m optimistic

Their time is coming. When today’s twenty-somethings reach their thirties, years of hard-won emotional experience will sit on top of everything they already know. They think across subjects and cultures. They can build on what earlier generations learned and add perspectives we never had. I expect that combination to produce solutions our world badly needs.

How we can help them get there

So what can those of us who are a bit older actually do? A few things I’ve seen make a difference:

Ask about their experience, and not only about their concepts. Share your own trial and error honestly, including the parts that went badly. Our detours can work as maps for them, as long as they don’t turn into lectures. Let them be uncomfortable without rushing to fix it. Tolerating uncertainty only grows by using it. If you lead a team, teach, mentor or parent someone in their twenties, treat their vocabulary as a strength and their missing experience as a stage of life.

And I still asking the Gen Z expats I meet: I’d love to hear from you. How is it to know so much about the world while still figuring out how to live in it? I’m asking with full empathy and a bit of childish curiosity.

Write in the comments or message me directly saienkomary@gmail.com.

If the words are there but living them still feels hard,

that gap is exactly what I work on with clients.