Why the promise that you can be anything is quietly failing a generation

At 2.13am, the room is lit by a phone screen. A young graduate scrolls past another announcement. Excited to share… Someone launching something. Building something. Becoming something.

Degree framed on the wall. CV polished. Options everywhere. And yet, something doesn’t settle. Not panic. Not collapse. Just a low, persistent weight. A quiet question: What if I choose wrong? We told them they could be anything.

The numbers behind the feeling

It is tempting to treat this as an emotional claim. It is not. In South Africa, according to Statistics SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey, the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 24 sits at 57%. For the broader 15 to 34 cohort, 46% are out of work. Nearly 5.8 million young South Africans are unemployed – three out of every four unemployed people in the country. Among those looking for their first job, 58.7% have never worked at all.

Globally, the mental health picture is not much kinder. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) marshals data showing that rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide more than doubled across the developed world after 2012. His causal claim – that smartphones drove the shift – is contested; developmental psychologist Candice Odgers, writing in Nature, argues that the evidence is equivocal and the real story is multi-causal.

Both can be true. The rise is real. The cause is plural. So the anxiety this piece is naming is not imagined. And it cannot be reduced to one villain – not phones alone, not parents alone, not the economy alone. Something has shifted underneath all of these, and it is harder to name. I want to try to name it.

Anything, and the weight it carries

I have seen this shift before – long before degrees and LinkedIn profiles.

In the village, it did not look like anxiety. It looked like something else. Young people growing up without scaffolding. Energy without direction. Strength without structure. Not because they lacked potential – but because they lacked formation.

In Village Boy, I wrote about a generation shaped by what I called the crushing rock of fatherlessness – leaving behind toxic masculinity, violence and poverty. At the time, it looked like an economic crisis. Over time, it revealed itself as something deeper: an identity crisis.

Today, that crisis wears a different face. Not just violence – also anxiety. Not just absence – also internal instability. Not just poverty of resources – also poverty of identity.

At the centre of it all is a message we rarely question: You can be anything you want. It sounds harmless. Inspirational, even. But beneath its optimism lies an omission we are now paying for. We told them they could be anything. We did not teach them how to become someone. And the gap between those two ideas is where the anxiety lives.

To be anything is limitless possibility. To become someone requires a centre. Possibility without a centre is not freedom – it is exposure.

Because if you can be anything, then every decision feels final. Every delay feels like failure. Every comparison feels like evidence you are falling behind.

A note on medication

It would be easy at this point to blame antidepressants and move on. I want to be careful here. For millions of people, clinical treatment is not a cultural failure. It is a lifeline. Depression and anxiety are not character weaknesses to be disciplined out of existence, and any honest conversation must say so plainly.

What I am pointing at is different. It is the quieter phenomenon of a whole generation reaching, first, for any external regulator – a pill, a podcast, a productivity system, a five-step routine – before asking the slower question of who they are becoming.

The issue is not that treatment exists. The issue is that formation has been outsourced. A good doctor and a formed life are not in competition. Most people who flourish have both.

What ‘formation’ actually means

The word “formation” keeps appearing in this essay. It deserves a definition, because it is doing real work. I do not mean discipline in the narrow, military sense. I do not mean being quiet about your feelings. I do not mean “toughen up”.

By formation I mean the slow, mostly invisible process by which a person acquires a centre – a set of commitments, habits, relationships and limits that remain stable when circumstances do not.

Concretely, it is smaller than it sounds. It is a weekly practice you keep even when no one is watching – whether prayer, journaling, a sabbath, or an hour with a mentor. It is a short list of people whose honest opinion of you matters more than a stranger’s applause. It is a non-negotiable you will not trade for opportunity. It is the capacity to sit with a difficult feeling long enough to learn what it is telling you, rather than immediately soothing it.

Formation is built in the ordinary. It is why a grandfather who prayed at the same hour every morning could carry losses that broke wealthier men. It is why an athlete’s tenth year looks nothing like her first. It is why some people walk into a room and the room becomes calmer.

It is not mystical. It is maintenance.

What we taught, and what we didn’t

We told them: chase your dreams. Find your passion. Build your platform.
We did not teach them how to wait. How to be unseen and still show up. How to interpret resistance as formation rather than failure.

Scroll through any phone and the pressure intensifies. A constant stream of curated outcomes. Peers launching, travelling, speaking, influencing.

What is missing from the scroll is context – the years no one saw, the discipline no one applauded, the ordinary life that made the outcome possible.

Exposure without preparation has been normalised. And it costs. Visibility does not create stability. It reveals what is already there. If there is depth, it multiplies impact. If there is insecurity, it multiplies instability.

This is why so many young people are not just tired. They are internally divided – pulled between who they present and who they actually are.

Mental health, in this sense, is not only about chemistry. It is about coherence.

Do I know who I am when no one is watching, when nothing is working, when the applause is gone? If the answer is no, no amount of success will stabilise you. Success cannot carry what identity has not formed.

The economy is real. So is what it cannot fix. Someone will rightly ask: What about unemployment? What about an economy that has failed young people? They would not be wrong. But unemployment does not only remove income. It removes rhythm. It removes the quiet dignity of being needed.

And when that disappears, the question stops being: How do I earn? and becomes: Who am I when no one has chosen me? No government programme answers that question. Which is why even where opportunity does exist, the same pattern appears: burnout, fragility, inability to carry pressure. The issue is not only access. It is capacity.

Become someone

So perhaps the question is no longer what we are telling young people.

It is what we are willing to become in front of them. Because a generation cannot rise higher than the adults who are watching them scroll. They are not waiting to be told they can be anything. They have heard that. It did not hold.

They are waiting to see what a formed life looks like – up close, in someone they know, over a long enough stretch of time to believe it is real. That is a harder thing to give than advice.

It cannot be posted. It cannot be rushed. It asks more of us than of them. But it is the only thing that has ever actually worked. Become someone. And let them see it. DM