There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being young right now. Not the pressure of big decisions or rites of passage that every generation has known, but something more ambient, more grinding. The pressure of knowing that the road ahead looks different to the one your parents walked, and that a lot of the signposts they used namely a steady job, an affordable home, a sense of the future holding still long enough to plan, all have shifted or disappeared altogether.
That is the reality for many of the roughly 1.5 million young people aged 12 to 24 living in NSW. And yet, inside that reality, something else is happening too. Young people are not simply waiting for the world to sort itself out. They are dreaming, and in many cases, daring to act.
Dream
Ask young Australians what they want and the answers are, in many ways, deeply ordinary. According to Mission Australia’s 2025 Youth Survey, which reached more than 17,000 young people aged 14 to 19, the biggest hope that young people named for their future was not fame or influence but employment and career, followed by family connection and financial stability. Many simply hope to one day own a home.
These are not extravagant aspirations. They are the kinds of expectations that previous generations largely took for granted. The fact that they now feel uncertain is itself telling.
The 2025 Australian Youth Barometer from Monash University, which surveyed young adults aged 18 to 24, found that 85 per cent had experienced financial difficulties in the previous year, and only around half believed they were likely to achieve financial security in the future. Nearly two thirds expected to be worse off than their parents. Home ownership, once a reasonable expectation for a working adult in their late twenties, now feels to many like a different country entirely. Australian home values have risen around 47 per cent since March 2020, pushing median house prices in Sydney past 1.4 million dollars by the end of 2024.
And still, young people dream. The headspace National Youth Mental Health Survey from late 2025 found that the proportion of young people who believe they can achieve their personal goals has grown from 39 per cent in 2022 to 44 per cent in 2025. That is not a triumphant number, but in the context of everything else bearing down, it is a meaningful one.
Dare
The courage required of young people today is often quiet and largely invisible. It is the courage of getting out of bed when your mental health is poor, of finishing an assignment when you are also working two casual shifts a week to cover rent, of staying present in relationships when loneliness is pulling at the edges.
The data on youth mental health in Australia is not comfortable reading. Research from headspace found that nearly half of all young Australians, 49 per cent, are experiencing high or very high levels of psychological distress. For those aged 18 to 25, that figure climbs to 65 per cent. A report from Deloitte Access Economics noted that one in four young people aged 15 to 24 experienced loneliness in 2022, making Gen Z both the most digitally connected and the loneliest generation on record.
What makes this harder still is the backdrop against which it plays out. Climate anxiety is real and documented, with 27 per cent of young people in the Mission Australia survey naming climate change and the environment as a top national concern. Globally, young people are watching conflicts, economic instability, and rapid technological disruption and wondering what kind of world they are being asked to step into.
The journey to adulthood is not the linear progression it once appeared to be. More young Australians are living with their parents into their late twenties. Many are studying and working simultaneously, with one in seven full-time students also holding full-time jobs, double the rate from the 1990s. The path is longer, messier, and in some stretches harder to see clearly.
Daring, in this context, does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like asking for help, which is itself a quiet shift. The same headspace survey that recorded high distress also found that willingness to speak to someone about a personal or emotional problem has increased since 2022, particularly among younger adolescents. That is something.
Do
Here is where the story becomes, in its unshowy way, genuinely encouraging.
Across New South Wales, young people are doing. Not in ways that tend to make headlines, but in the kinds of grassroots, ground-level ways that build communities and carry neighbours through.
During NSW Youth Week 2025, the state government announced over 2.2 million dollars in grants through the Youth Opportunities program, funding 51 youth-led projects across the state. These projects ranged across sport, cultural connection, creative arts, financial literacy, job readiness, and community engagement. They were, by design, initiated by young people and shaped around what young people said they actually needed.
In communities across the state, young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds are running mentoring programs, building skills in advocacy and public policy, and co-designing services with the organisations meant to serve them. Young workers are organising around employment conditions in industries where casual and insecure work is the norm. Young women in rural areas are writing and presenting legal papers on gender equity and violence prevention. Young people who have experienced homelessness are helping design the housing programs that follow them.
None of this is simple. Not one of these young people is operating without the weight of the challenges described above pressing on them. They are tired, often underfunded, and frequently underestimated. And they are doing it anyway.
The 2025 Mission Australia survey also noted something worth sitting with: several key wellbeing markers have improved compared to previous years. Reports of loneliness are down. Psychological distress, while still high, has eased slightly. More young people say they feel a sense of control over their lives. These are not signs of a crisis resolved. They may, however, be signs of a generation finding its footing.
What this asks of the rest of us
Dream. Dare. Do. As a theme for NSW Youth Week, it has the kind of energy that could easily be plastered on a poster and promptly forgotten. What makes it worth holding onto is what it actually points to: that young people are not a problem to be managed or a cohort to be worried about from a distance, but people already shaping the communities they live in, doing so without fanfare, and doing so under real pressure.
The question for those of us further along in life is not whether young people are up to the task. The evidence suggests they are. The question is whether we are creating the conditions they need to get on with it.
