Understanding today’s youth is perhaps one of the most pressing social needs of our time. We often try to understand an entire generation through a single label—Gen Z. But can the name of a generation alone explain its aspirations, anxieties, restlessness, ambitions, relationships, and changing worldview?
The answer is probably no.
To understand young people today, we need to look beyond their smartphones, social-media profiles, and digital habits. We need to understand the world in which they are growing up—their families, education, employment opportunities, social environment, relationships, and, above all, their inner psychological world.
My conversations with young people and my observations in recent times have led me to believe that the story of today’s youth is much more complex than the popular image of a digitally obsessed generation. It is a generation negotiating between ambition and anxiety, independence and belonging, modernity and tradition, and technology and spirituality.
The Job-Seeking Generation in an Age of Startups
One of the most common assumptions about young people today is that they want to become entrepreneurs. The language of startups, innovation, freelancing, and entrepreneurship dominates much of the public conversation about the younger generation.
Yet the reality is more complicated.
A large number of young Indians continue to spend years preparing for government examinations and seeking stable employment. For many, a government job represents not merely employment but financial security, social respect, stability, and a sense of certainty in an unpredictable economic environment.
A youth-focused initiative by NITI Aayog also reported a strong preference for government employment among its participants. Similarly, a recent India Today–CVoter survey found that 53% of Gen Z respondents identified employment and jobs as the most important issue facing young people.
These observations invite us to reconsider the way we talk about ambition.
Instead of asking a young person, “Why do you want a job? Why not start a business?”, perhaps we should ask:
“What need, aspiration, or dream lies behind the job you are working so hard to secure?”
For one young person, it may be economic independence. For another, it may be family responsibility. For someone else, it may be social recognition or the desire to build a secure future.
The desire for a stable job, therefore, should not automatically be interpreted as a lack of ambition.
Ambitious, Yet Anxious
Another popular perception is that young people today are impatient, easily frustrated, or quick to react.
There may be some truth in observing a culture of immediacy around them, but the reasons behind it deserve deeper consideration.
Today’s young people live in two demanding worlds simultaneously. The first is the world of intense competition, where millions compete for a limited number of educational and employment opportunities. The second is the digital world, where information, communication, feedback, and entertainment are available almost instantly.
This environment can create an expectation of immediate results.
At the same time, social media constantly exposes young people to other people’s achievements. One person has secured a government job; another has moved abroad; someone else appears to be earning millions; another has become an influencer or built a successful online career.
The young person is therefore not merely living their own life. They are constantly looking at hundreds of other lives.
This can intensify comparison and uncertainty.
A young person may appear impatient while actually being anxious about falling behind.
They may appear restless because they are deeply concerned about their future.
They may be ambitious and anxious at the same time.
This contradiction is important. It reminds us that young people should not simply be labelled as impatient or aggressive without understanding the social and psychological environment in which they are making their choices.
Has the Changing Family Structure Changed the Young Person?
Perhaps one of the most significant changes in Indian society is the transformation of the family.
There was a time when many Indian children grew up in large family networks surrounded by grandparents, maternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and other relatives. Traditional joint families certainly had their own conflicts and limitations. They were not perfect social structures.
Yet they provided children with exposure to people belonging to different generations, personalities, experiences, and perspectives.
Today, many families have become smaller and more nuclear. A child’s immediate social environment may increasingly consist of parents, school, tuition classes, and a smartphone.
Does this transformation influence the emotional and social development of children?
It would be premature to offer a definite answer. Family structures differ greatly, and a child’s development depends on many factors.
However, this certainly raises an important area for social and psychological research:
“What happens to a child’s social behaviour, emotional development, patience, and ability to negotiate relationships when the larger family network becomes less present in everyday life?”
This is not a question of declaring the joint family superior to the nuclear family. Rather, it is a question of understanding what forms of emotional and social support children receive in different family structures.
Siblings, Comparison, and the Experience of Belonging
The relationship between siblings also deserves attention.
When there are two siblings, competition and comparison may take one form. In larger families, other dynamics may emerge—alliances between siblings, perceived favouritism, comparisons, or the feeling of being left out.
But once again, we need to be careful.
The number of children in a family does not, by itself, determine their psychological development.
The more important factors may include the quality of communication, emotional support, parental behaviour, conflict within the household, and whether children feel equally valued and heard.
Similarly, it would be inappropriate to conclude that having one son and one daughter automatically leads to better upbringing or stronger values.
These questions should therefore be treated as areas for further research rather than established conclusions.
The real issue may not be how many children a family has, but how those children experience love, attention, comparison, responsibility, and belonging within the family.
Why Is Gen Z Returning to Its Roots?
Perhaps the most fascinating feature of today’s youth is the apparent coexistence of modernity and tradition.
The same young person who is digitally connected, questions established norms, values individual freedom, and seeks independence may also visit temples, practise yoga, meditate, participate in religious journeys, listen to devotional music, or explore spiritual ideas.
A report associated with the 2021 MTV Youth Study found that 62% of Gen Z respondents said spirituality gave them clarity, while around 70% reported feeling more confident or more in control of their lives after praying.
In 2025, Deutsche Welle also reported on the interest in spirituality and religion among India’s Gen Z, citing YouGov-Mint data. The figures cited in the report indicated that 53% of Indian Gen Z respondents considered religion important, while 62% said they prayed regularly.
These findings are interesting because they challenge the assumption that modernisation necessarily means a rejection of tradition.
Perhaps today’s young person is not rejecting tradition; they are reinterpreting it.
They may not listen to a religious discourse for several hours, but they may watch a one-minute Reel explaining the Bhagavad Gita.
They may not spend hours sitting in a temple, but they may listen to a ten-minute meditation session on their phone.
They may question a tradition, but that does not necessarily mean they reject it.
Instead, they may want to understand it through their own language, experiences, questions, and individual choices.
Social Media: Creator of Spirituality or New Medium for It?
This raises another important question: Has social media increased spirituality among young people?
The answer may be both yes and no.
It would be inaccurate to claim that social media created religious or spiritual interest among young people. Religious and spiritual traditions existed long before digital platforms.
What social media has done is create a new space where these interests can be accessed, discussed, displayed, and shared.
A study focusing on young people in Delhi found that platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp had a significant influence on young people’s religious perceptions.
At the same time, another recent qualitative study found that family influence played a more significant role in shaping religious behaviour than social-media influencers.
Together, such findings point towards an important possibility:
Today’s youth is not being shaped by social media alone. It is constructing its identity at the intersection of family heritage and the digital world.
A young person may inherit a religious tradition from their family, discover new interpretations of it online, question some of its practices, retain others, and eventually create a personal relationship with spirituality.
This is not necessarily a rejection of tradition. It may be a process of negotiation with tradition.
Gen Z Is Neither Entirely Modern Nor Entirely Traditional
Perhaps this is where our understanding of Gen Z needs to become more nuanced.
It cannot be adequately described as either “modern” or “traditional”.
It can be both.
Young people want employment, but they also want dignity and respect in the workplace.
They want independence, but they continue to value emotional connection with their families.
They question established ideas, but they also search for spiritual answers.
They spend significant time in digital spaces, but they continue to seek genuine relationships, emotional connection, and a sense of belonging.
They are ambitious, but they may also be uncertain about the future.
They are technologically confident, yet they may still be searching for emotional and existential stability.
These apparent contradictions are not necessarily weaknesses. They may simply reflect the complexity of growing up in a rapidly changing society.
From Judging Young People to Understanding Them
Perhaps the greatest mistake we can make is to approach young people with the intention of constantly correcting them.
We tell them what they should study.
We tell them which career they should choose.
We tell them how much time they should spend on their phones.
We tell them what traditions they should follow.
We tell them what kind of life they should lead.
But perhaps what they need most is not another lecture.
They need someone to listen.
We need to understand their concerns about employment.
We need to understand the pressure of competitive examinations.
We need to understand the changes taking place within families.
We need to understand their experiences of loneliness and their increasingly digital lives.
We need to understand their ambitions as well as their fears.
And we also need to understand their search for meaning, identity, and spirituality.
Simply telling young people, “You are the future of the country,” may not be enough.
They need to feel that their present matters too.
They need to feel:
“Someone is listening to me.”
Perhaps this is the most meaningful conversation we can have with today’s youth:
“Your questions are not wrong. Your restlessness is understandable. Your dreams deserve respect. We are not here to change you; we are here to understand you and walk alongside you.”
Because today’s youth is not merely the future of India.
It is one of India’s greatest strengths today.
The challenge before society is not simply to direct that strength, but first to understand it—to understand the circumstances that shape it, the anxieties that accompany it, the aspirations that drive it, and the values it is choosing to carry forward.
Perhaps the real need of our time is not to ask, “What is wrong with today’s youth?”
Instead, we should ask:
“What is today’s youth trying to tell us?”
The answer to that question may help us understand not only a generation, but also the changing India that is being created through it.
