Most young people are worried about the future

Worry about the future is the majority experience for that generation, not a minority mood.

In one of the largest studies of its kind, ten thousand people aged sixteen to twenty-five across ten countries were asked how they felt about climate change. Fifty-nine percent were very or extremely worried, and eighty-four percent were at least moderately worried. Whatever your own view of the issue, the finding about young people is stark. Worry about the future is not a minority mood among them. It is the majority experience.

It helps to read this as a fact about a generation's state of mind rather than as an argument about any single subject. Climate is the specific question the researchers asked, but the feeling it reveals, a low, steady sense that the future is not safe, spreads across the other things young people are anxious about too, work that may not exist, housing they may never afford, technology reshaping careers before they have begun. The climate figure is a window onto a wider unease.

That matters because a whole generation carrying background dread is not only an individual problem, it is a social one. Anxiety about the future isolates people. It makes it harder to plan, to commit, to imagine yourself as part of anything lasting, and those are exactly the ingredients that community is made from. Fear and loneliness feed each other. People who feel the ground is unstable pull inward, and pulling inward makes everything feel more unstable still.

The Tribe was started partly in response to this, for people who are anxious about what is coming and tired of facing it alone. We do not offer false comfort, and we are honest that we are early. What we are building is the thing that actually helps when the future feels uncertain, which is not a solution to every problem but a set of people to face it with. If the majority of a generation feels this way, the answer cannot be to feel it privately. It has to be shared.