We’re all familiar with the Gen Z image: a young, fiery generation passionate about social justice, activism, and climate action, using dark humor to cope with the onslaught of threats to our future; rising carbon emissions and lack of government action, frightening new laws that promise to take away hard-fought human rights, and of course, a global pandemic. 

In May 2021, I, along with thousands of my peers, graduated college after spending three semesters learning from our childhood bedrooms and tiny college apartments. We were welcomed into the infamous “real world” with choruses of the dreaded question, “now what are you going to do?” followed by advice to start building good credit, to start investing, and making concrete career plans. Whenever anyone asks me what my five or ten-year plan is, my first thought is that there’s a very real possibility none of us will be here in ten years. That our planet will be completely uninhabitable, and it won’t matter if I built good credit or paid off my loans or got a good interest rate on my car. 

And yet, I find myself going through the motions anyway. I find myself imagining the distant future, casually daydreaming about my life twenty years from now, wondering what kind of adults my nephews will grow to be, what my cat will look like when she’s old, if my hair will turn gray or white. I’ve had countless conversations with friends about how we find ourselves picturing two mutually exclusive futures, each bringing its own set of anxieties. One future is long and promised, with plenty of time to build a career, explore our passions, maybe get married, travel, and eventually grow old. The other is short and frenzied, and at its core is the fear that we’ll run out of time before we even figure out how we want to spend it. 

When I express these fears to people of older generations, many of them tell me something about how my generation gives them hope, how we’ll be the ones to finally make a difference. And I hope they’re right, and I also believe we’re a passionate, driven enough generation to do it. But what if, by the time we’re finally the ones with any authority or power, we’re out of time? So, maybe we should just try to enjoy the present and foreseeable future - but even this feels impossible when we’re in a pandemic that shows no signs of slowing down any time soon, especially when the basic rights of every marginalized person in this country are actively under attack (many of us Gen Zers included).Should we worry more about the future or the present, when both feel so hopeless? When faced with such a multitude of problems, knowing we’ll be the ones stuck fixing them, where do we even start?