Two years ago, Zechariah Osburn sat down to fill out the Common Application for college. He dreaded going to school and sitting at a desk all day, but he'd always done well, so an undergraduate degree seemed like a no-brainer. His parents had pushed it, too. But staring down the application at midnight one night during his senior year, Osburn decided to scrap the plan. "I felt like a fraud," he tells me.

He didn't know what kind of career he wanted, and didn't have the money for college. Instead of taking out student loans and spending a few semesters partying and soul-searching, he decided to focus on growing his landscaping side hustle into a full-time business. Now, at 20, he's the owner of Z's Exterior Services, which does lawn care, mulching, power washing, and other landscaping services in northern Virginia. He's hired a handful of full- and part-time employees and has plans to continue expanding. And, he says, he still gets a taste of the college experience when he visits his girlfriend.

It's not that Osburn is passionate about mulching, but he does love running the business, and it's rewarding to make customers happy. "How much work you put in is how much return you're going to get," he says. Studying for hours and pouring tens of thousands of dollars into a degree doesn't always yield the same results, he says, as he hears about people taking on lots of debt and then struggling to find work.

Many Gen Zers are eyeing the ever-rising cost of college tuition, along with roiling uncertainty in many white-collar career fields, and are choosing an alternate path.

Americans are losing faith in the ROI of a college degree. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 36% of respondents had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the higher education system, dropping from 57% in 2015. A Pew Research study in 2024 found that just 22% of US adults thought that college was worth it if a student had to take out loans to attend. Zoomers are also most likely to feel that getting a degree is a waste of time and money, a 2025 survey from Indeed found. Per Experian, the average Gen Zer has about $23,000 in student debt. That load is starting to feel heavier now that the perks Gen Zers most want — including work-life balance, financial stability, and a path to becoming their own boss — are disappearing from white-collar jobs. Managers are calling workers back to the office and dismantling the career ladder by assigning entry-level tasks to generative AI bots and agents.

A survey from the early career site Handshake found that 62% of college seniors who were familiar with AI tools said they were at least somewhat concerned that rising automation via AI would affect their career prospects, up from 44% in 2023. Once-stable jobs in tech, consulting, recruiting, and law are all at risk of seeing the entry-level tasks increasingly given away to gen AI. Roles for recent college grads "deteriorated noticeably" in early 2025, with their unemployment rate jumping to 5.8%, up from 4.6% a year ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. President Donald Trump's tariffs are creating uncertainty in the market and discouraging employers from hiring new workers, and white-collar workers are feeling stuck in their roles.

Meanwhile, blue-collar jobs — some of which pay a stable six figures — are starting to look more like an oasis.

The proportion of students at two-year colleges focusing on vocational studies compared to other associate degrees grew from about 15% in 2019 to nearly 20% in 2024, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The fastest-growing jobs in the country, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, are wind turbine technicians and solar panel installers, followed by roles in healthcare and some in tech, like data analysts or information security analysts. Jobs in construction, plumbing, electrical work, and transportation are all projected to grow faster than the average job-growth rate of 4% from 2023 to 2033.

The need for workers in renewable energy, commercial and home construction, and public infrastructure is expected to rise, thanks to projects like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and a global investment in new energy sources. Home prices are soaring in part thanks to construction worker shortages, and wages for those workers are up.

And just as demand is increasing, a swath of skilled, baby boomer laborers are getting ready to pack it up and retire. That will open up more gigs for people who want to work in these in-demand, automation-proof roles such as HVAC servicing, plumbing, and construction — and it's unlikely you'll hire a robot to come fiddle with your home's electrical wiring anytime soon. In fact, many analysts predict these fields could experience labor shortages, which is good news for Gen Z.

And where generative AI is stagnating growth in industries like tech or consulting, it's accelerating growth for young people who want to start their own businesses. ChatGPT and its ilk have become always-on assistants that help young entrepreneurs automate work like appointment scheduling and generating emails to customers — and they don't have to be put on payroll. And as the digital-first generation, Gen Z doesn't need school to train them on the kind of tech that can make these businesses more efficient.

"They're very used to working with technology; it's part of their daily life," says Gary Specter, the CEO of Simpro, which makes job and project management software for field service and trade contracting industries."You're seeing a coming together of technology and these hands-on jobs."

For some, a blue-collar pivot would mean abandoning the college dreams laid out by parents, siblings, and countless coming-of-age movies. As America's middle class grew, so did the drive for higher education. In 1970, just 11% of US adults had a bachelor's degree. By 2021, that number had swelled to 38%, according to US Census data. Sending kids to a university became less a privilege and more a given for many middle-class families. But that push ignored other viable career paths and gave rise to a stigma around blue-collar work that persists today, even as rising tuition costs have dampened the appeal of the college dream.

Ryan Daniels, 22, left behind college at the University of Florida after his freshman year in 2022 to pursue his pressure-washing business full time. "It was really shocking to people that I was going to let that opportunity go," he tells me. But he's not alone in that shift. The rate of young people enrolled in college dropped from 41% in 2012 to 39% in 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Enrollment in college peaked in 2010, but has since declined from 18 million students to about 15.4 million in 2021.

Getting young people into the trades will still take a mindset shift. In a 2023 survey of US high schoolers by Jobber, a software for home professionals, 74% said they thought there was a stigma around choosing vocational school instead of a four-year college, and 79% said their parents wanted them to go to college, while only 5% said their parents encouraged vocational school. A Gallup survey found that around 70% of high school students had heard a lot about college, while less than a quarter had heard frequently about apprenticeships and vocational schools. And it may be blue-collar influencers, rather than a vocational school rep at an assembly, who pull more young people into these fields.

"Gen Z really is facing a new set of challenges," says Jennifer Herrity, who follows career trends at Indeed. "Social media has really introduced Gen Z to what working in new fields can be like."

Day-in-the-life videos have flooded YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, giving people a peek into careers that many may not have known about unless a family member worked in them. There are some that show consultants or tech workers shuttling from an early morning at Equinox to their offices and then from meeting to meeting, $9 matcha latte in hand, but the more visually interesting videos come from people doing hands-on work in their fields. There are electricians, plumbers, landscapers, and more who show themselves out in the wild getting their complicated jobs done. Osburn tells me he watched videos on social media about starting his landscape business. Now, he has 45,000 followers watching him on Instagram as he drives his trucks around Virginia . Lexi Abreu, an electrician with 200,000 followers on YouTube, walks viewers through tricky wiring jobs and makes tongue-in-cheek visual gags about working as a woman in a male-dominated profession.

While college kids pinch pennies, those who go into trades can start earning immediately. Average entry-level construction jobs start at around $19 an hour, and rise to $45 at the top level, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maintenance and repair jobs start around $14 an hour but can go as high as $44 an hour. The average electrician and plumber make about $29 an hour, according to Indeed. Instead of surviving on cup noodles for four years, Daniels has built a business, RHI Pressure Washing, and can pay not just his own bills, but those of three employees. Already, people are increasingly seeing the value of working in the trades. In 2024, 66% of adults said they believed there were well-paid, stable jobs available to those with only high school diplomas or GEDs, up from 50% in 2018, a survey of about 1,500 people conducted by the think tank New America found.

The blue-collar perks don't mean college degrees are dying anytime soon. The median pay for a Gen Z college graduate in 2024 was $60,000, based on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared to $40,000 for a high school graduate. That gap widens as college-educated workers age and advance through their fields. And some of these stable fields are hiring for college grads, too: The fastest-growing industry for new college grads is in construction, LinkedIn says, and entry-level workers are also rising in number in the utility sector and oil, gas, and mining industries.

Daniels would have graduated from college this month, but in that time, he has instead spun out his high school side hustle of pressure washing into a full business. He spends most of his day running the business side. That means using ChatGPT almost daily, whether it's to draft responses to customers or mass emails, Daniels says. Gen AI might "take away from white-collar jobs, and it really helps us out here."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Famed for selling virtual goods, Roblox now allows brands and creators to sell physical items.
• Roblox's ambition is to capture 10% of the $180 billion global gaming market.
• Creator studio Twin Atlas is selling merch via Roblox, and Warner Bros. is selling movie tickets.

Roblox is known as a Gen Z destination for gaming and hanging out. Could it soon also be the place young people go to shop?

That's Roblox's stretch goal, at least.

Roblox on Thursday said it was expanding its commerce program, allowing more creators and brands to sell physical items — think hoodies, lipsticks, plushies, and concert tickets — without leaving the platform.

The commerce push forms part of a broader companywide ambition for Roblox to make up 10% of the $180 billion global gaming market. To do so, it's diversified its revenue streams, generating income from subscriptions, the sale of virtual goods bought using its virtual currency Robux, and through advertising.

"Everywhere there's digital goods being bought, we will look at ways in which there is an opportunity to actually buy physical goods," Louqman Parampath, VP of product for ads and commerce at Roblox, told Business Insider.

Starting in the US, creators can integrate items from their Shopify catalogs into the virtual experiences on Roblox for users ages 13 and over (and 18-plus in Texas) to buy. The company said more commerce partners and locations are on the way — it previously partnered with Walmart on a trial to sell physical items, for example.

Parampath told BI that over time, he envisions Roblox becoming more of a marketplace-style offering, and famous stores like the Nike store might appear across several popular Roblox experiences.

"Our plan is to have much deeper product-catalog integrations, which means the variety and diversity of products that will be available across our experiences, and perhaps even a marketplace, will continue to grow," Parampath said.

Roblox has been outlining its real-world commerce plans since at least 2023, and began testing last year.

The company said the creator studio Twin Atlas generated "six-figure commerce revenue" in a few weeks after it began selling T-shirts and hoodies in Roblox games like "Creatures of Sonaria" and "Dragon Adventures." Fenty Beauty and Warner Bros. were also early testers of the commerce program. Twin Atlas said around 90% of its merch sales now come via Roblox versus its own website. Elsewhere, pop star The Weeknd is launching a ticket bundle within Roblox for his coming feature film "Hurry Up Tomorrow," which will be released in movie theaters later this week.

James Poulter, head of AI and innovation at the marketing agency House 337, said Roblox will need to ensure the commercial expansion of its real-world shopping efforts doesn't disrupt gameplay and provide adequate controls to prevent its young users from overspending.

"At worst, it risks becoming an Amazon-on-steroids scenario where children are immersed in a commercial environment that parents may not be comfortable with," Poulter said.

Roblox said goods sold must adhere to its newly published commerce standards and other applicable policies, such as its community and advertising standards.

Roblox sees commerce as a flywheel for its ad business

Roblox is also bringing virtual goods to the real world. Through its Approved Merchandiser Program, brands can add a Roblox badge to their packaging and merchandise that contains a code which can be transferred for digital items users' Roblox avatars can wear and use.

A Roblox spokesperson said that the company doesn't take a cut from sales of physical items bought through the Shopify integration but will earn a commission from any paired avatar item or developer product sold. Those fees can vary, determined by the total price and price ratio of both the physical and virtual item, exclusivity, and category of the item, the spokesperson said.

Parampath said Roblox is also hoping these efforts can help prove the effectiveness of its advertising to marketers.

"If you run a campaign for any particular product and that particular product is also purchased on our platform by a subset of our users, you can effectively close the loop," he said.

Chris Camacho, CEO of the ad agency Cheil UK, said commerce on Roblox will be of particular interest to fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands looking to reach younger audiences. Roblox said it had around 97.8 million daily active users as of its first quarter, 62% of whom were over 13.

"For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, seeing an avatar in a hoodie, a lipstick or a pair of trainers and being able to buy the real thing on the spot just makes sense," Camacho said. "This is commerce on their terms: instant, contextual, and embedded into the experiences they already love."

• David's Bridal is launching curated boutiques for Gen Z brides seeking affordable luxury.
• The first Diamonds & Pearls location opens Thursday in Delray Beach, Florida.
• The store is more intimate and elevated compared to a typical David's Bridal, the CEO told BI.

David's Bridal, the largest bridal retailer in the US, is opening a new higher-end boutique catered to Gen Z brides looking for a more luxurious, personalized, and curated experience.

The first Diamonds & Pearls store is set to open on Thursday in Delray Beach, Florida, with another location planned to open later this year. The store is smaller, more curated, and more upscale than the average David's Bridal store, which are typically sprawling, budget-friendly stores.

"It's definitely affordable luxury," Kelly Cook, the CEO of David's Bridal, told Business Insider of the new boutique. "The environment itself is much more refined and elevated. We have champagne, we have hors d'oeuvres, we've got free bags that come with your gowns."

Cook, who took over as CEO in April, said the mission of David's Bridal is to become "the largest AI, retail, media, and planning marketplace for brides." As part of that mission, the company, which in 2023 filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time, is focused on serving all brides, including higher-end ones.

That's where Diamonds & Pearls come in. The gown selection is more curated, with about one-third the number of products as a traditional David's Bridal store. The selling space is also smaller at about 2,000 square feet instead of the 5,500 square feet you'd find at a larger David's Bridal.

It's also the only David's Bridal location where brides can try on couture options from brands like Marchesa and Viola Chan. Though the dresses lean more upscale, Cook said there would still be more affordable options, ranging from $500 to $5,000.

According to the wedding website The Knot, the average cost of a wedding dress in 2025 is around $2,000. The Knot also found that the average cost of a wedding was $33,000.

Overall, the vibe of the store is more similar to an independent bridal boutique than a typical David's Bridal, according to Cook. There's velvet furniture, marble accents, and curtains separating the dressing areas and the back of house.

The store wants to cater to Gen Z's love of luxury as the generation continues to make up a greater share of America's brides, with its oldest members now 28. Gen Z consumers are expected to account for 25% to 30% of luxury market purchases by 2030, according to Bain & Company.

While many independent boutiques sell made-to-order dresses that can take nine to 12 months to receive, Diamonds & Pearls can deliver dresses in a week if needed due to David's Brial's own manufacturing, Cook said. They will also have dresses that brides can take home the same day.

"You're getting the intimacy of the boutique, but the global scale of David's," she said.

The stores also incorporate large, interactive digital screens that brides can use to browse David's Bridal's full selection or ask for suggestions from the company's AI-powered wedding planning tool, Pearl, which can make recommendations based on Pinterest boards.

Cook said that when they tested the store with brides who had previously shopped at David's Bridal, the customers said the shop felt more intimate and like they could get a more personalized experience due to its smaller size.

While only two Diamonds & Pearls are planned for now, Cook said the company has identified up to 100 potential markets for future stores.

• AI interviews can streamline the job-seeking process, but they also raise ethical concerns.
• There's also a lot of experimentation, meaning AI interviews can glitch, as one TikToker found.
• An AI communication and etiquette expert shares advice on how to prepare for a meeting with an AI.

There's a chance your next interview could be conducted by an AI bot.

That's what happened to a woman named Ken, whose AI assistant started glitching and repeating the words "vertical bar pilates" over and over.

In a recent TikTok, Ken shared a recording of this part of her interview. In comments, she explained she was interviewing for a job at a studio called StretchLab in Columbus, Ohio.

In the 25-second video, Ken recorded the AI assistant, named "Alex," malfunctioning.

"It was genuinely so creepy and weird," Ken wrote in the caption. "Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!! It gave me the creeps so bad."

StretchLab did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

AI hiring is inevitable

Emily DeJeu, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and an expert in AI communication and etiquette, said AI-powered video interviews are likely to become more common as companies seek to streamline and automate early hiring stages.

"In terms of whether or not this will become the norm, I think the jury's out," DeJeu told BI.

Any time technology promises to save time and money and make everything faster, "we by default pursue it — there's a kind of inevitability to it," she said.

AI is being increasingly used in the job-seeking and hiring process. Candidates are using it to help tailor their résumés, while employers use it to sift through the thousands of applications they receive.

Wider use of AI for interviews is potentially the next step, a natural response to a heated and competitive job market.

DeJeu told BI that AI systems can process information much more quickly and thoroughly. However, there are concerns about their impersonal and potentially unethical nature, especially for young job seekers who may not realize they are not talking to a person.

The human element has to remain in the process somewhere along the line, in DeJeu's view.

"The idea that I am going to make lots of positive facial expressions to convince this AI tool that I'm a nice person, that's just so weird," she said. "I'm trying to convince a non-human entity that I'm a smart, capable, warm human. There's a weirdness to it that makes me uncomfortable."

Disclosure is key, DeJeu said — otherwise people are likely to feel insulted when they expect to be interviewed by a human and are instead met with a bot.

How to prepare for meeting an AI

DeJeu's advice for anyone who knows they are going into an interview with an AI is to focus on the "three V's":

1. Visuals

The visuals are what you look like, so make sure your background is professional and you're dressed as you would be in any other interview situation.

"Wear your suit. Think about your background," DeJeu said. "You really want to think about how you use engaging expressions with your face and how you bring your hands into it. It's the same kind of prep that I would give if you were going to give a presentation."

2. Vocals

An AI is also taking note of your vocals — how fast you're talking, your vocal variety, how often you pause, and if you use a lot of filler words.

"Can you practice your response enough that you feel really fluent in answering and you're able to reduce your filler words?" DeJeu said.

"You don't have a lot of these backtrack, sidetrack, tangential statements built into your answer. You can speak directionally, answer the question in full, put a period at the end when you're done, and stop talking."

3. Verbals

Finally, you should notice the words you're using and the sentence structures you're building.

DeJeu said it's a good idea to mine job ads for keywords and make sure they say them repeatedly through the interview.

"I don't know that a human recruiter would be kind of tallying in their minds, 'they said collaborative leadership six times,' but an AI tool absolutely would be able to do that," she said.

"Your prep needs to account for the fact that AI is capturing and remembering so much more than your human interviewer."

AI interviews seem to be cropping up more often for entry-level and part-time jobs, meaning they'll likely affect young job seekers — Gen Zers — before anyone else.

"They really have to absorb a lot of the challenges of this disruptive moment in our history," DeJeu said. "They are being disrupted in a way that in my lifetime, certainly, it's never been disrupted."

• In summer 2024, I traveled with my grandma, mom, and sister to Montreal.
• I wish I'd thought more about my grandma's physical needs when planning the itinerary.
• It would've been nice to have more downtime in our schedule, too.

Despite living 1,800 miles apart, my 81-year-old grandma and I have always been close. We share a love for "Downton Abbey," cross-stitch, and strong coffee, and I couldn't imagine spending weeks in the summer anywhere but her sunny kitchen table in central Minnesota.

Of course, I'd be naive to assume my time with her is unlimited. That's one reason my grandma, mom, sister, and I decided to embark on a trip to Montreal together last summer.

Although I'm grateful we were able to take this trip, it could have gone a lot smoother had I known these three things about traveling with an older relative.

The itinerary should have reflected everyone's physical needs, not just my own

I'm the most frequent traveler in my family, so I took on all the planning myself and approached the task the same way I do for solo travel: leaving no stone unturned.

I thought my grandma would be well-prepared for the long days, given that she walks 3 miles a day and eats a far more balanced diet than I do.

What I failed to consider, though, was how difficult it would be for her to walk on the uneven cobblestone streets. On our first day in the city, we nearly missed an afternoon tea reservation since I didn't factor in the slower pace we'd have to take to accommodate my grandma's careful steps.

I also didn't realize just how exhausting a full-day Three Pines tour would be. Although fantastic — with stops at a monastery, local museum, and five-star resort for lunch — our visit to the villages that inspired the fictional location of my grandma's favorite mystery series was nine hours long.

As the day progressed, we took turns snoozing in the back seat of our tour guide's van. Upon arriving back at the bed and breakfast, my grandma exclaimed how long of a day it was; and I didn't disagree.

Similarly, I didn't consider my grandma's physical limitations when choosing restaurants. Although they weren't lacking in ambiance — picture patios swallowed in bougainvillea and cool, brutalist interiors overlooking Lake Saint Louis — the dim lighting and small font sizes made it challenging for her to read the menu.

My mom, sister, and I mitigated my grandma's vision issues by taking turns reading the menu aloud, line by line, but that got old fast.

In retrospect, I wish I'd shown up equipped with solutions, such as finding the menu online so she could zoom in on my phone or reminding her to bring her readers, to improve everyone's dining experience.

A long trip means extended time away from routines

Everyone gets to a point on vacation when they're ready to return home, but I would argue that the feeling is stronger for older adults like my grandma, who travel once or twice a year and may be used to a strict daily routine.

Although my grandma never expressed this feeling to me outright, I noticed as the days went on, she became less game for her granddaughters' plans.

For example, on our last evening, my sister and I wanted to check out the shops lining Saint-Laurent Boulevard, but my grandma preferred to have takeout in the hotel.

We compromised, and my sister and I walked to the boulevard to pick up dinner, but we ditched our shopping plan since we felt bad keeping my mom and grandma waiting.

I wish we'd had more downtime together

Instead of jam-packing every day with new experiences, I wish I'd taken my foot off the gas as the trip progressed — for my grandma's sake as well as my own.

As we reached days five and six of the trip, my excitement for the activities I planned dwindled, and I found myself wishing I hadn't planned them at all.

Besides, the memories I cherish most from the trip weren't the museums or guided tours, they were the unplanned ones: a shared bottle of wine with our bed and breakfast hosts, a visit to an outdoor antique market, and a nightcap at a speakeasy.

Despite the challenges, I'd love to travel with my grandma again

To anyone contemplating a multigenerational trip, I say do it, but be more considerate than I was. Take time to plan the trip together, think of everyone's needs, and be content with slowing down.

Strolling through the city hand-in-hand with my grandma, I learned that it's OK to leave some stones unturned, because the real joy comes from who you're turning them with.

If you're an American who buys things or sells things, you're going to take a financial hit from President Donald Trump's tariffs. The science of economics might be dismal, but it's good enough to tell you that when the government increases the price of imported goods by anywhere from 10% to 145%, someone has to pay — be they importer, buyer, manufacturer, seller, or consumer. That's just the way the Great Material Continuum works.

Now, a basic Gen Xer like me — and believe me, we're pretty basic — has seen versions of this before. We've lived through two dot-com busts, the Great Recession, Black Monday, and the economic skadoosh of COVID. Line goes up, line goes down. But younger Americans just now maturing into solid consumers weren't born in this darkness. So to the newly minted adulters of Gen Z, I say: Welcome! This is going to suck.

And it's going to suck for Gen Z in particular.

By dint of being new to the workforce, Gen Zers typically earn less than other age groups. And economic shocks, as a rule, disproportionately hurt poorer people. But in this case, tariffs won't just raise prices on stuff we all rely on. They'll also increase the cost of a lot of products that appeal specifically to Gen Z. It's hard to say by how much. A team of economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta calculates that even moderate tariffs — 10% on China, 25% on Canada and Mexico — could raise the price of everyday essentials by 1.63%. Some manufacturers and retailers may find ways to absorb the added costs. And Trump keeps monkeying with the levels and the timing: On Monday he temporarily reduced his China tariffs to 30%. But in the worst-case scenario, industry analysts I spoke with say the president's tariffs could wipe out some Gen Z products entirely. They'll just cease to exist.

So, at the risk of stereotyping Americans between the ages of 13 and 28, here's a rough accounting of what's likely to happen to four things Gen Z buys a lot of.

(1) Beauty products

For years, beauty goods have been reliably recession-proof — industry watchers call it "the lipstick effect." Beauty spending beat everything else during the Great Recession, and again after 2020. But this time? Not so much.

Gen Z spends a lot of money on cosmetics — about $2,000 a year on average, according to one survey. Only millennials reported spending more, but then again they also earn nearly twice as much. That might explain why the Gen Zers who responded to the survey were also much more likely to report regretting how much they'd spent on beauty products.

High on the list of favorites: unguents and potions from countries with famously intense skin- and hair-care-regime cultures depicted by influencers on social media — like South Korea and Japan. The United States is South Korea's second-largest market for cosmetics. And a lot of high-end American brands do their manufacturing there — meaning those products will also be subject to tariffs.

What's more, many cosmetic companies buy almost all their packaging from Asia. And entire categories of products — sheet masks, eye patches, pimple patches — come almost exclusively from Asian factories, no matter the company or the price point.

Now, big transnational conglomerates can often afford to absorb some new costs while sorting out their margins and their supply chains, instead of passing the increases on to customers. But niche products — especially those produced by small, independent outfits — will suffer more. "Some products and brands will have no choice but to raise prices, at least in the US market," says Kelly Kovack, the CEO of BeautyMatter. "Brands are investing in their hero products, so I also expect to see a lot of out-of-stock situations. We will see fewer gift sets this holiday — gift sets are low-margin in the best of times."

This doesn't necessarily mean we've lost the forever war on zits and wrinkles. But like all wars, this one depends on logistics. "For 'can't live without' products, people will most likely remain loyal and continue to use them," Kovack says. "But they may cut something else out of their regime, or use them more judiciously to make the product last longer." And if half of a product's customers suddenly switch to buying it only half as often, it might not survive. When it comes to Gen Z's favorite beauty products, things are going to get ugly.

(2) Tech gadgets

A few tech titans had the foresight to buy front-row seats to the inauguration of Donald Trump. They've also, perhaps not coincidentally, been granted some exceptions to tariffs on the smartphones and laptops they manufacture, at least for now.

But they're not the only tech companies that depend on international supply chains. And the companies that make the dizzying array of cheap options you see when you scroll down on Amazon can't just raise their prices. If they do, well, they won't be cheap anymore. Expect them to just disappear.

"It reduces the options and selection people have within a price range," says Rick Kowalski, the senior director of business intelligence at the Consumer Technology Association. "And it changes the dynamic of how people think about replacement cycles." Translation: Maybe people keep their old earbuds instead of springing for the new model. That drives down sales and puts yet more pressure on manufacturers to either raise prices or cut back on production.

Think headphones, Bluetooth speakers, soundbars, even e-bikes. What used to be a casual purchase won't be so casual anymore. "Gen Z is a generation that considers technology essential to their daily lives," Kowalski says. "They identify with it and see it as a means of self-expression. They don't have as much to spend on it, but they're passionate about it, and they will be affected disproportionately."

(3) Boba tea

Gen Zers eat in restaurants less than other demographic groups, and they're more price-conscious. They're also, on average, more ethnically diverse, more likely to buy snacks and treats, and more likely to seek out new foods to try. Add all that up and you get a craze for boba tea: Asian-originated flavors mixed with tiny, chewy balls of tapioca starch, slurped through oversize straws. It's fun!

It's also incredibly popular. In 2000, America imported 1.2 million pounds of tapioca from Taiwan. Today we import 34 million pounds (and another 2.9 million from China). And unless something changes, imports from Taiwan are set to be tariffed at 32% starting in July.

Huge fast food chains like Starbucks sell boba tea — as do big Asia-based retailers and thousands of little mom-and-pop places. The big chains will have an easier time finding new supplies for starch, flavored syrups, and teas. Or they'll just slurp up the added cost. But the smaller the shop, the more likely its owners will have to raise prices, or simply eighty-six high-tariff items from the menu. If that includes your usual medium sweet wintermelon hojicha milk tea, you're out of luck.

(4) Meds for anxiety and depression

For years, young adults have been reporting higher levels of mental health concerns. Between 2005 and 2020, the percentage of 18- to 25-year-olds reporting at least one major depressive episode in the prior year doubled. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that somewhere around 15% of GenZers suffer from depression; teenage use of antidepressant medications has gone up 38% since 2015. Diagnoses of ADHD have also been on the rise among Gen Z.

Meds aren't like face masks or cool earbuds or boba tea. They're essential for the health and well-being of millions of young Americans. And a lot of them are likely to be subject to tariffs. More than 60% of the world's generic pills, which already run on thin margins, are made in India. And even drugs made in the US contain ingredients sourced from overseas.

There's some good news here, for which you can thank the Drug Enforcement Administration. "ADHD drugs are Schedule II controlled substances, and the DEA requires that the active ingredient and the finished product are made in the US," says Marta Wosińska, an economist at the Brookings Institution's Center on Health Policy. "Tariffs might squeeze margins, but I don't expect to see manufacturers walking away."

But now for the bad news: Antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are not subject to the same restrictions. So depending on where they come from and who makes them, the cost of getting them to the US is likely to go up, especially if they come from Europe or India. Wosińska says Americans who use name-brand drugs will probably be hit with higher prices — as will those whose insurance plans have high deductibles that don't cover the cost of generic drugs. But the most likely outcome of tariffs on drugs, she says, is that they'll drive up premiums. So one way or another, Gen Zers will likely wind up paying more for their mental health.

Taken together, Trump's tariffs are going to land hardest on those who can least afford them. And that doesn't even take into account the president's elimination of the "de minimis" exception, which took effect May 2. Direct-to-consumer retailers like Shein and Temu weren't the only companies that depended on the exception, which effectively made it free to ship cheap stuff from China. In 2023, that duty-free rule applied to 7.3% of all the consumer goods imported by the US. Because Gen Zers have less income than older generations, they're going to wind up paying a steeper price for all the budget-friendly stuff they've come to depend on. From moisturizers to mental illness, the bottom line on Trump's tariffs is clear: The younger you are, the more painful this is going to be.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

• Gen Z workers are "conscious unbossing" and avoiding management roles to preserve their wellness.
• Their preference for autonomy and better work-life balance may lead to big corporate culture shifts.
• Workplace culture experts say the trend should be a wake-up call for business leaders.

As the oldest Gen Zers approach their 30s, they're taking a Gwenyth Paltrow approach to work: Instead of "consciously uncoupling" from their spouses, workplace culture experts say they're "conscious unbossing" at the office.

Gen Z prefers to avoid leadership roles at work in favor of a better work-life balance. And this preference should be a wake-up call for corporate leaders who need to develop the next generation of leaders to keep their businesses running.

Well-being over leveling up

Boomers have traditionally preferred a hierarchical leadership style and stayed in one workplace for many years. Gen X bridged the gap between boomers and millennials, with a slightly flatter corporate structure and more autonomous work styles, and millennials, who prioritize collaboration, will take on leadership roles — albeit reluctantly.

Gen Z is 1.7 times more likely than previous generations "to avoid management roles to protect their well-being," according to research by the management consulting company Development Dimensions International.

"They're really asking better questions that I think we've all silently been asking for decades," Megan Dalla-Camina, founder and CEO of the leadership development program Women Rising, told BI of Gen Z. "But they're very open about redefining power models and where they find their purpose, and particularly good at prioritizing their mental well-being. They're just not willing to compromise their life to fit into these outdated leadership models."

And who can blame them? Business Insider previously reported that managers are overwhelmed, their roles are increasingly targeted for cuts, and many younger workers find the pay isn't worth the stress of supervising others.

"I think what they're doing is taking a step back to see how they can actually create lifelong employment and professional growth that is sustainable, because I think there has been such high frequency and prevalence of burnout," Julie Lee, a Boston-based clinical psychologist specializing in supporting Gen Z professionals and co-president of Harvard Alumni for Mental Health, told BI.

Kathryn Landis, an executive coach and New York University professor of marketing and public relations, told Business Insider that Gen Z workers value autonomy and flexibility in their workplace, prioritizing transparency and collaboration more than climbing the corporate ladder.

Landis added that Gen Z employees are also more motivated by social responsibility and doing work that makes them feel like they're helping others than simply showing up to collect a paycheck. That means even higher-paying roles are less attractive to Gen Z employees if the work doesn't feel meaningful.

But, Landis said, "that doesn't mean that they won't necessarily step up or won't work hard."

They're just not going to stick around the office for eight hours if they can get the job done in five — and they won't ask their colleagues to do so, either, she added.

Dalla-Camina added that Gen Z's approach to leadership can benefit most working people and flatten traditional hierarchical models that the corporate world is used to.

Businesses still need a leadership pipeline

But, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects Gen Z will make up 30% of the workforce by 2030, it's a problem for businesses if the next generation of leaders doesn't develop the skills to run the place.

Tony Davis, a leadership training expert at Crestcom International, told Business Insider that if workplace leaders don't intentionally motivate, empower, and engage their Gen Z workforce by leaning into their work style and preferences, those businesses will have a hard time creating the necessary leadership depth to scale their teams and grow their business.

In other words, he said, this is an existential moment for corporate leaders to learn from — or risk being left behind.

"The difference between a growth-minded company and a fixed-minded company is creating those types of mentalities within their employee base and developing those leaders," Davis said. "And a company is doomed to failure if they have a fixed-minded culture, because then they're on their heels and they're reactive, and there's nothing, nothing in business that is better done reactively than proactively."

The "how" for keeping Gen Z workers engaged will vary by industry and each specific workplace, but some options include offering flexible working hours, providing more opportunities to volunteer, and outlining clear paths for career progression that focus on achieving individual employees' long-term goals while prioritizing a sustainable balance.

It's no easy task to adapt to Gen Z's more laid-back work style, given how the "hustle culture" and "hardcore" work mode have been a staple of the US workforce for so long — and are still promoted by some Gen X business tycoons like Elon Musk. But no matter how current corporate leadership feels about it, workforce experts say the change is underway.

"This is a massive call to shift how we work, and to shift leadership models," Dalla-Camina said. "The organizations and leaders who can make that shift will really thrive. And the ones who don't are really going to struggle attracting and retaining, not just Gen Z, but also other people who are really ready for change."

• Frich CEO Katrin Kaurov highlights the common financial pitfalls many Gen Zers face.
• Her experience as a young model taught her financial independence early.
• Kaurov says common errors include relying on buy-now-pay-later apps, and waiting too long to start investing.

Money mistakes can start early, and Gen Zers are at risk of making some big errors, according to Katrin Kaurov, the CEO and cofounder of social financial platform Frich.

She says modeling between the ages of 14 and 24 taught her to manage her money in a way many that age do not have to.

"I would spend three months in Milan, three months in London, and three months in Hong Kong," Kaurov told Business Insider. "So I basically had to become financially independent and be an adult at the age of 14, 15, 16 when everyone else was going to parties."

When she moved to New York in her 20s, Kaurov realized this wasn't the norm. She saw her friends flounder when it came to their finances. They had no clue how to manage their money, yet seemed to be living lavish lives on social media.

Kaurov and her friend Aleksandra Medina founded Frich in response to what they saw, aiming to help young people learn "radical transparency and honesty" around money.

"Money shouldn't be lonely and sad and anxiety-inducing," Kaurov said. "We know that money is behind every decision that you make in life, and it doesn't have to be scary."

Here are some of the biggest mistakes Kaurov thinks Gen Zers are making, and what they can do to fix them.

1. Believing everything on social media

Social media, especially TikTok, is full of financial advice. Not all of it is good.

Kaurov said that while TikToks and Instagram Reels are great for opening up the conversation about money, much is "not really verified."

"You see a 17-year-old TikTok who is like, this is how I built a seven-figure business overnight, I'm 17 and I'm already retired. I think it creates very unrealistic portrayals of how people are managing money," she said. "It creates an idea that Gen Z has it together with money, when in reality, most people don't."

Young people shouldn't compare themselves to these posts, Kaurov said, and instead think about their own goals and aspirations.

2. Not getting real about credit card debt

Gen Zers are racking up a lot of credit card debt. They need to get real about this if they're going to face all of their challenges, Kaurov said, such as saving enough for a down payment on a house.

Social media, again, plays a part here. "Especially in cities like New York or London, it just seems like everyone is having dinners out every night and they go on these amazing trips," she said. "It just makes you wonder, wait, why am I always broke? Am I doing something wrong?"

You never see whether your peers are in debt, "which most of them are," Kaurov said.

"You never really see the truth. Maybe their card is getting declined at the restaurant."

3. Making budgets too restrictive

Kaurov said people can create budgets with too much enthusiasm and optimism for how little money they will spend from month to month.

She said a budget should be about creating a realistic guideline for spending and saving — and if it's too restrictive, then rethink it. "Trial and error is crucial and will allow people to find what kind of budget works best for them."

4. Not setting aside enough time

Kaurov recommends young people set aside about 30 minutes a week for a "money date."

"The same way we review our fitness goals and our career goals," she said. "Review what you're doing with money, what are your goals, where are you going?

"Having a money date when you actually review what you're spending on, and go step by step."

5. Reliance on BNPL apps

Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services such as Klarna and Affirm have made it easier than ever to spend.

Kaurov warned that relying on them can be catastrophic. "Recently, I went to a bar and I saw that you could pay for your drink with Afterpay," she said. "I was essentially taking a micro loan to have a drink."

It's a sign that things have gone too far, Kaurov said. "That is one thing that I would really highlight for people to be careful."

6. Waiting too long to start investing

When it comes to investing, "You just need to get started," Kaurov advised.

She waited years to start investing, but said it doesn't have to be daunting.

Kaurov said she started micro-investing — setting up automatic investments every week — and it only took about five minutes.

"Things are not as hard and scary as they look," she said.

Kaurov added that being in your 20s really works in your favor because even small contributions, like $50 a month, add up over time.

"I always like to compare that to running a marathon. You're never going to do it on day one."

• "Pinterest is where Gen Z goes to shop," CEO Bill Ready said on Pinterest's Q1 earnings call.
• Gen Z has been "raised on an internet of visual content" and likes to search visually, he added.
• Pinterest reported that revenue rose 16% in Q1, sending stock up as much as 18% after hours.

Millennials had the mall. Gen Z has Pinterest.

On its first-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Pinterest's CEO, Bill Ready, said Gen Z users are engaging heavily with the image-sharing platform. Gen Z are those who were born between 1996 and 2010.

"We've made Pinterest a destination for our users, particularly a shopping destination," Ready said on the call. "Pinterest is where Gen Z goes to shop."

Ready said that a key driver of Pinterest's success is its ability to connect users to products and aesthetics "they may not have the words to describe."

"This is especially relevant for Gen Z, our largest and fastest-growing user cohort, who have been raised on an internet of visual content," and like to search visually, the CEO said.

Pinterest execs also touted Gen Z in examples of how advertisers are finding value on their platform.

Chief financial officer Julia Donnelly said advertisers valued Pinterest's insights into consumer behaviour, especially for Gen Z users who are making "significant" decisions such as selecting insurance or a credit card for the first time. The CEO highlighted PacSun, a clothing brand he said was popular with Gen Z, and said the retailer saw a higher return on ad spending with new Pinterest features.

The company's first-quarter revenue grew 16% to $855 million compared to the same period last year. Monthly average users, an important metric for media companies, grew 10% year-on-year.

AI also played a role in the company's strong quarter. Ready said Pinterest has been using AI to personalize user experience and to improve the platform's visual search capabilities.

"It also makes us a highly valuable partner to advertisers that are looking for early signals on how consumer trends may be shifting before it shows up in traditional purchasing data," he said of AI.

Pinterest stock jumped as much as 18% after-hours on Thursday on the heels of encouraging second-quarter guidance.

Pinterest, which is most popular for searching travel, style, and home decor ideas, saw a slowdown in user growth post-pandemic. It has since rebounded due to increased focus on shoppability and engagement from Gen Z users.

Gen Z, most of whom are in their 20s, has a reputation for taking their life and careers slow. Some research shows members of this generation are not drinking, driving, working, or taking risks as much as other age groups did at their age.

In addition to Pinterest, Gen Z is being credited for the revival of the image-blogging platform Tumblr, which reported that 50% of its active monthly users in 2025 are Gen Zers.

When it comes to their shopping habits, Gen Z is often associated with "underconsumption core," a trend that's all about buying less and rejecting influencer marketing.

Pinterest did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

• Gen Z's intrigue with the papal conclave surged because they'd had a juicy primer in the film "Conclave."
• The movie offered a fictional glimpse into the secretive papal selection process.
• "Conclave" became a box-office hit, resonating with Gen Z's love for drama and exclusivity.

I have a confession.

I saw "Conclave," the movie, five times in the theater.

It's shocking, I know, in an era when movie theater attendance has been tanking, but it meant I was well-prepared for this week's real-life event and the inner machinations of the cardinals who ultimately selected Robert Francis Prevost to be the next pope.

It also meant I understood all the Gen Z hype around it.

First, there's "Pope Crave," a play on the popular "Pop Crave" X account, which has transitioned from sharing "Conclave" film memes to reporting live from the event itself.

Then there were TikTok edits and betting pools. Even NBC's Steve Kornacki, another unlikely Gen Z icon, jumped in, breaking down the conclave à la his popular election coverage — signature khakis and all.

So why the huge surge in interest in the real conclave — and the film?

Gen Z loves access, exclusivity, and drama

In an age when social media and direct virtual access have come to dominate politics, the movie gave Gen Zers a fictional glimpse at what might happen behind closed doors — an inroad into a ritual that, by design, is shrouded in secrecy and pomp. When the real event rolled around, anyone who had seen the film could feel like they were already in on the secrets.

Some of the most affecting parts of the film are grounded in the humanity of its holy men: The throughline of Ralph Fiennes' Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the "Conclave," is his growing detachment from his own faith. Factions snipe at each other, the purest of men are petty and short, and the desire for power and institutional stability is a blinding force for some. Those are certainly themes that are resonant for younger viewers who have often joked about constantly living in unprecedented times.

And those themes resonated with audiences: Conclave also emerged as a surprise box-office hit, a standout in a time when big superhero franchises and reboots are floundering. And, yes, it amassed its own barrage of TikTok edits — another Gen Z hallmark.

The film primed Gen Z for the actual event

It's like knowing Taylor Swift's catalog so well that you can spot the Easter Eggs in her newest music — you're naturally going to be a bigger fan, notice the inside details, and debate what it all means in the group chat.

The actual conclave meant that, unlike dramas such as "Succession" or "Game of Thrones," the movie crossed a little bit into reality; Gen Z came in with an acute, gossipy understanding of what might be happening behind closed doors and was ready to speculate. That offered the opportunity to edit, post, and bet away.

The film, and the actual event, also came at important times for Gen Zers. "Conclave" gained box office steam right around the 2024 election, suggesting an appetite for a contained story about a high-stakes and tumultuous election; the film's box office yields for the Friday and Saturday following the election both came in over $1 million. (I did not pay for five individual viewings. As a sober-curious, subscription-maximizing young person, I'm a member of AMC A-List, which allows me to see four movies a month for just under $30.)

The appointment of a new pope comes at a consequential life stage for many Gen Zers, even as the share of young Catholics in the US shrinks: Many in my age cohort are considering marriage or having their first children. A new pope might dictate how much, if at all, they choose to be involved in their religion or raise a child within it.

Now, ironically, we're in a world with a new pope tailored to the Gen Z age: Folks are already combing through his X account and finding his political takes. Welcome to the official Pope Crave era.

Do you have a story to share about the conclave (real) or "Conclave" the film? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Anima Anandkumar says the one skill AI can't replace is human curiosity.
• The Caltech professor tells students to use AI as a tool, not fear it.
• She says great programmers who guide AI will be in high demand — but bad coders will be in trouble.

One of AI's leading researchers has a simple piece of career advice for young people worried about future-proof skills in the ChatGPT era: be curious.

"I think one job that will not be replaced by AI is the ability to be curious and go after hard problems," Anima Anandkumar, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview with EO Studio that aired on Monday.

"So for young people, my advice is not to be afraid of AI or worry what skills to learn that AI may replace them with, but really be in that path of curiosity," Anandkumar added.

Anandkumar, a former senior director of Nvidia's AI research and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services, left the private sector in 2023 to return full time to academia. She has served as the Bren Professor in the computer science and mathematics department at Caltech since 2017.

"I can't imagine a world where scientists will be out of jobs," Anandkumar, who previously helped build an AI-based weather model, added. "A scientist tackles open problems — from subatomic matter to galaxies — and there's an endless list of those."

She also said that while labs like Google's DeepMind are exploring "AI scientist" models, she believes the real limitation is practical validation, not a lack of ideas.

Still, she's skeptical of the hype around fully autonomous AI scientists.

"The bottleneck is going to the lab or going to the real world and testing them. That is slow, that is expensive," she said.

Coding is changing, but great programmers still win

Anandkumar also shared career advice for those in software development, which is being significantly disrupted by AI.

"A bad programmer who is not better than AI will be replaced," she said. "But a great programmer who can assess what AI is doing, make fixes, [and] ensure those programs are written well will be in more demand than ever."

Her point echoes what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in March: students should "get really good at using AI tools" as models increasingly take over routine code generation.

New graduates are feeling the pressure, though. A 2025 Handshake survey of over 3,000 college seniors found that 62% of those familiar with AI tools said they were worried about how those tools might affect their careers, up from 44% the year before. Among computer science students, 28% described themselves as "very pessimistic" about their job prospects, citing shrinking openings and fiercer competition. Job postings fell 15%, while applications jumped 21%.

Meanwhile, some tech leaders are openly sounding the alarm. Victor Lazarte, a partner at investment firm Benchmark, recently warned that AI is already replacing workers, and said lawyers and recruiters should be especially concerned.

Anandkumar, by contrast, stresses that the key advantage still lies with humans who guide the systems.

"You have the agency as a human to decide what tasks AI does, and then you're evaluating and you're in charge," she said.

"Don't be afraid of AI," she added. "Use it as a tool to drive that curiosity, learn new skills, new knowledge — and do it in a much more interactive way."

• GenZers working in clean energy are facing multiple career roadblocks.
• The Trump administration slashed Biden's big energy investment and fired thousands of workers.
• Two laid-off federal workers said they are optimistic and open-minded, despite the setbacks.

In just four months, Aaron Yang's young career in renewable energy had hit the highs and lows you might expect of a more seasoned worker.

Yang, 22, graduated from New York University in December and landed a job at the Department of Energy in an office doling out grants to nascent clean technologies like hydrogen, advanced nuclear, and long-duration battery storage.

By April, he had been fired, rehired, and accepted a voluntary buyout under President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's efforts to shrink the federal government. Renewable energy programs were a top target, with Trump on January 20 signing an executive order freezing funding authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden's signature climate law. Since then, thousands of federal employees working on clean energy, environmental justice, and climate science have been terminated.

"Throughout college, I worked toward this career path," Yang told Business Insider in April at a career fair in Washington, DC. "Then I got into the DOE and felt that was a huge achievement. So to then immediately get laid off has been tough to reconcile."

Yang is among many Gen Zers entering a job market defined by hiring slumps in industries like tech, finance, and consulting. The upheaval in Washington has further clouded their career paths, particularly in the renewable energy industry, as tariffs and frozen federal funding have led companies to delay new projects or scrap them altogether.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers cited Friday's strong jobs report to say that Trump was bringing jobs back "and making America the world's manufacturing powerhouse once again." A DOE spokesperson told Business Insider that the department was still reviewing its organizational structure to align with the president's priorities.

"The American people provided President Trump with a mandate to govern and to unleash affordable, abundant, and secure American energy," they said, adding, "No final decisions have been made and multiple plans are still being considered."

Canceled clean energy factories

At a job fair during DC's inaugural Climate Week, more than 50 companies and trade associations met some 1,200 job seekers. They lined up to chat with firms including Amazon, the solar manufacturer Qcells, and Arcadia, an AI analytics platform for energy.

Zainab Mirza organized the job fair for Clean Energy for America, a trade group that lobbies Congress and the administration on issues like protecting tax credits for renewable energy.

Mirza experienced similar career setbacks as Yang. She graduated from American University in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, which thwarted her plans to pursue a career in international development overseas. In February, she was laid off from the DOE's Loan Program Office, where she had just become a full-time employee after being a contractor for two years.

The slashed investments go beyond the federal government. In the first three months of 2025, companies canceled, closed, or downsized projects totaling nearly $8 billion in investment. This affected 16 new factories for electric vehicles, batteries, and hydrogen — more than three times the cancellation rate over the previous 30 months, according to an analysis by E2, a business group that advocates for clean energy, and the think tank Atlas Public Policy.

"If this self-inflicted and unnecessary market uncertainty continues, we'll almost certainly see more projects paused, more construction halted, and more job opportunities disappear," Michael Timberlake, spokesperson for E2, said in a statement.

Between January 2024 and March 2025, the number of new job postings across renewable power — including solar, wind, nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal — dropped by more than 20%, indicating a slowdown in labor demand, an analysis Revelio Labs conducted for BI showed.

Some companies continue to invest in the energy transition. In March, 10 solar, EV, and transmission manufacturing plants were announced, which, if built, could create 5,000 permanent jobs. That includes Tesla's plans to build a battery factory near Houston.

Billions of dollars deployed

Despite the hurdles, Mirza was optimistic about the future. While the DOE is expected to be less active and shift away from wind and solar projects, it may help finance nuclear, geothermal, and power grid resilience.

Katie Mehnert, CEO of ALLY Energy, an online career and networking platform, said the energy industry is always changing. Mehnert lives in Texas, where layoffs are also hitting the oil and gas sector. The rise of artificial intelligence is ushering in another transformation of how businesses operate. But there will be jobs, Mehnert said. ALLY recently partnered with Parallell, an AI-driven jobs platform that aims to make job hunting more efficient and better match people's expertise to openings.

"We need more energy, we need sustainable energy, we need affordable energy," Mehnert said. "And there's plenty of money that's been deployed. Now we need to find the best talent and match them with opportunities quicker. That way, we can minimize the disruption in job marketing and people's personal lives."

Mirza, for her part, encouraged young people to be open-minded to positions they may not have considered.

"I'm not sure where I want to go next," Mirza said. "I've had a blast putting this event together. I think that people here can meet with employers they might not have heard of or thought about, or a skill that they haven't developed. There are upskilling opportunities. There are incubators. Maybe you've had an idea for so long, and now you can test it out."

Yang said he's open-minded, too. Although his time at DOE was focused on long-duration energy storage like batteries, he is open to other technologies. During his undergrad internships, Yang worked on transmission infrastructure, sales teams, and policy development.

For now, Yang decided to accelerate his pursuit of a master's in energy, policy, and climate at Johns Hopkins University while looking for a full time job. He's come close several times, but ultimately, someone with more experience was hired.

"That's no fault of my own," Yang said. "There are a ton of talented people out there right now, and I haven't worked full-time yet. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I don't know what my future holds."

Do you have a story to share? Contact this reporter at [email protected].

• Dr. Giselle Prado-Wright, a cosmetic surgeon, has seen an uptick in Gen Zers asking for fillers.
• She said many ask for under-eye filler, partly due to social media filters.
• Under-eye fillers can start migrating weeks after being injected and come with risks like blindness.

In the past four years, cosmetic surgeon Dr. Giselle Prado-Wright noticed an uptick in younger, first-time clients asking for fillers.

She chalks the trend up to pandemic lockdowns and more time spent online. "You're looking at yourself on camera, you're seeing everybody perfectly filtered on social media," Prado-Wright, the co-owner of EXERT BodySculpt in Florida, told Business Insider. "All of a sudden, you feel less than because you're noticing a little bit of darkness, a little bit of wrinkles."

Some of her clients in their early 20s initially come in for lip filler. Then they start asking for under-eye filler.

While Prado-Wright occasionally offers under-eye filler to help clients with "very sunken under-eyes," she said she's very conservative with how much she uses. Most of the time, she says no to under-eye filler because she believes that, at best, the results are usually very mixed — and that the greater risks are not worth it.

Short-lived Instagram Face

Like Botox and other fillers, under-eye filler is appealing to clients because there's no downtime. "You might get some slight bruising, but compared to surgery, it's not something where you have to do this big recovery, this big investment," Prado-Wright said.

Under-eye filler also looks great right after injection. On social media, post-filler videos are usually shot a day or two after the treatment. "The problems come months down the line, maybe weeks later," she said.

Fillers, which usually contain hyaluronic acid, draw in moisture. Over time, the under-eye area can become really puffy, with the fillers impairing lymphatic flow and potentially causing blockages.

"The immediate before-and-after is being propagated a lot on social media, versus 'let's see what that looks like a year from now,'" Prado-Wright said.

Risks include blindness and strokes

In the worst case scenario, Prado-Wright said under-eye fillers can pose serious health risks. If a syringe pokes the infraorbital artery, a significant blood vessel below the eyes, it cause cause blindness. It can also create a blockage called a vascular occlusion, which can lead to a stroke.

More likely, the filler will look amazing at first and swell later, she said. Ultimately, if the filler migrates or puffs up, it can be removed. But the process isn't easy — or cheap.

The filler itself, at its cheapest, will cost you $500 to $600, she said — though it can cost up to $1,500.

The cost of getting it dissolved is charged per vial of Hylenex, a solution that dissolves hyaluronic acid. That can range from $250 to $600 per vial. Because the solution has to be injected exactly where the filler is, it can take multiple sessions to get rid of all of it.

Try tretinoin and lifestyle changes

Prado-Wright said she sees a lot of clients who keep wanting to add more filler. She tries to counsel them into dissolving some of it and looking for other anti-aging solutions.

One is using collagen injections instead of hyaluronic acid fillers. Collagen injections, made from cow collagen, are also used to add volume to the face and reduce fine lines.

Because collagen is naturally occurring in the skin and collagen injections have a thinner consistency than filler, there are lower risks of vascular occlusions or bad reactions, she said. Injecting collagen closer to the nose and cheeks can fill out the face and camouflage any under-eye hollowness.

She also suggested going to offices that offer other treatments besides filler, as under-eye concerns vary and can't always be fixed with injections. Laser treatments can help with dark circles, for example.

Before you do all that, she said it's worth making some simple skincare changes. You can try tretinoin, a prescription retinoid that boosts cell turnover. "It's the gold standard just to help that skin quality look better, look brighter," Prado-Wright said.

Of course, nothing will help if you're not maintaining good sleep, decreasing your alcohol intake, and drinking enough water. "Not just your under-eyes are going to look better," she said. "Your skin overall is going to look much better."

A few years ago, Nehemiah Jordan was a sophomore at Liberty University studying film and writing, with dreams of becoming a Hollywood director, when he was rejected for an internship. The setback helped him realize how long a path he faced before he could land a role in the movie industry with creative license. So he started poking around for something that might give him more immediate control of his time and money. He found an online sales course called Closer Cartel, which touts itself as a cheaper, easier, and lucrative alternative to college.

"Instead of having to listen to broke professors teach you about an average life," Closer Cartel's website says, "you get to learn a skill from someone who is actually doing what you want to do in life."

In a promotional video, Luke Alexander, Closer Cartel's Mercedes-driving, yacht-sailing 25-year-old founder — and a proud college dropout — breathlessly lays out the stakes. "The safe path of going to school, getting a degree, and then working a job until you retire is no longer the safe path. It's one of the worst paths you can have if you want time, vocation, and honestly, live freedom." Instead of falling for the "scam" of higher ed, Alexander says, for only $1,000 (which seems to be perennially on sale from $2,997), he'll teach you the sales skills that have helped "20-year-olds all over the world earn more than a doctor's salary."

Jordan gave it a go. Within a few weeks, he finished the self-guided course on remote sales. Then, Jordan says, Alexander told him he could learn more about sales if he took a course run by his friend Iman Gadzhi, a 25-year-old Russian-born British YouTuber with 5.5 million subscribers.

Gadzhi runs a small empire of online-course platforms that claim to teach people how to start various online businesses. Among them is Educate, which aims to "revolutionize the education system" by offering "world-class learning" modules on sales and dropshipping. Course titles include "Six-Figure Sales Rep," "Pathway to Profits," and "The Art of the Deal." Other modules marketed to young men, some taught by Gadzhi himself, include "Boxing Fundamentals," a holistic health detoxing course, and a self-styling guide that helps students "achieve confidence in your fashion choices." Educate's website claims that more than 30,000 students have been "transformed through our programs."

Gadzhi, who brags about being a "high school dropout," also proclaims in many videos and promotional materials that college is a propaganda-filled, sheep-producing money pit. "Ninety-nine percent of the people who go to college are fucking dumbwits," he says in one YouTube video. In another, titled "Iman Gadzhi CONVINCES Kid To NOT Attend College," he tells a high school senior that he risks "wasting four years on outdated knowledge and, quite frankly, getting ripped off." In another, he calls the college-degree system "modern slavery."

Jordan says he parlayed his connection to Gadzhi into a gig working as a sales coach at Educate, recruiting young men like him to take courses like the ones he'd just taken. Gadzhi and Alexander did not respond to multiple interview requests and requests for comment.

Americans' faith in college is in rapid decline. A 2024 Gallup poll found that only 36% of respondents had a "great deal" of confidence in the higher education system, down from 57% in 2015 (22% had "very little" confidence, up from 9%). A Pew Research study last year found that only 47% of US adults believe that college is worth it if a student doesn't have to take out loans; if the student does have to take out loans, that number drops to 22%. (The average loan debt for US college students in 2024 was $38,000.) The study also found that only 25% of adults believe college is essential to getting a high-paying job.

Young adults, meanwhile, see a high-paying job as increasingly essential. A 2024 survey from the financial services firm Empower found that the average Gen Z respondent believed that an annual salary of $587,797 — some 10 times the median income in America — and a net worth of $9.47 million are necessary to achieve "financial success." (Baby boomers in the same survey put the success threshold at $99,000 a year.)

Professors across the country have also noticed that students are changing. They've reported an uptick in undergraduates daunted at the prospect of reading a book, increasingly reliant on ChatGPT, and who view the college experience as a transactional means to get a job. "Younger people are also becoming much more aware of the necessity of big economic changes that allow them to have a better shot at economic security when they're out of college," says Jon Shelton, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and the author of "The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy." "They're recognizing that even if they major in the right thing and get a job, they still might be working at Starbucks."

Now, a new type of "professor" is offering a faster path to prosperity. Capitalizing on Gen Z's rising doubts about higher education, social media-fueled attraction to easy riches, and a crisis in masculinity, a cottage industry of online business course gurus has arisen. Beyond Alexander and Gadzhi, the ranks include Jordan Welch, a dropshipping entrepreneur with 1.8 million YouTube subscribers; and Dan Lok, a self-described "King of High Ticket Sales" with 5 million YouTube subscribers. Dozens of men in their 20s and 30s are selling, predominantly to men in their late teens and early 20s, unregulated courses on building online businesses, and marketing them as "alternatives" and supplements to college that yield many more returns with much less wokeness.

In slickly produced videos, these gurus relentlessly lambast how the Ivory Tower "brainwashes" people into taking "mediocre jobs," while splicing in images of the lavish lifestyles that dropping out (as most of them ecstatically have) and building online business empires have afforded them — Ferraris in Dubai, G Wagons in Miami, caviar bumps on private planes. The message is clear: Buy my course and you too can "escape the matrix" and win.

A few months ago, I received a marketing email for an Educate program called Digital Launchpad. It presented two choices. One, pay many tens of thousands of dollars toward a "traditional degree, only to find yourself among countless others with similar qualifications." Or pay just $37 a month and "gain instant access to cutting-edge online strategies that are working right now." For the purposes of this story, I took the red pill.

Digital Launchpad "equips you for success," its website reads, by teaching you the fundamentals of making money through online ventures and helping you make your first $1,000 online. (Another Gadzhi program, Agency Accelerator, costs $1,500.)

Upon opening Digital Launchpad, I'm greeted with an introduction video by Gadzhi, called "How to Unf*ck Your Life." "Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your life. And most importantly, welcome to freedom," he says. He speaks in a confident, flat tone while gazing into the camera — the same approach deployed by the dozens of young, male online-course gurus I received ads for while reporting this story.

Watching Gadzhi's tutorials at times feels like reading a paragraph-long summary of a book. Details on effective business strategy are often thin and rote. At one point, Gadzhi makes a point about the importance of packaging by saying that consumers choose their ice cream based on the best-looking cartons, before moving on.

Like many other programs in its orbit, Digital Launchpad isn't simply a guide to making money, it sells a lifestyle fashioned in the likeness of its founder. In another video, Gadzhi walks me through "Monk Mode," his name for a distraction-free, laser-focused mindset that maximizes productivity and helps you "surpass the competition." Monk Mode entails daily exercise, meditation, abstaining from alcohol and weed, limiting social media time, and unfollowing everyone on Instagram that you haven't spoken to in the past year. After extolling the virtues of meditation, Gadzhi smirks at the camera and says, "I don't know if I should tell you this," pauses for a second, and confesses he doesn't meditate anymore. Instead, he engages in a more advanced practice he calls "bioenergetics." He offers no further explanation.

Gadzhi's evangelist tendencies have not gone unnoticed. Matthew Remski, an author and the host of the podcast "Conspirituality," says he learned about Gadzhi when his preteen son was served an ad for one of Gadzhi's online seminars called The Rescue, which promises to "reveal to you all the traits that the current Education system has been keeping away from you during your entire life and how to use them to succeed outside of the system." Remski reported the ad to his son's school, which blocked the ad from students' Chromebooks. Gadzhi, he tells me, is very adroit at identifying "very specific economic and status grievances related to his clients' state of alienation or commiseration within capitalism, he's able to speak to those young people as though he's their confidant, as though he's taking them seriously for the first time."

Remski and his cohosts have dedicated two hour-long episodes to dissecting how "Gadzhi is reaching more aggressively into the brains of pre-teen boys around the world with a morbid fantasy about the origins of public education." There are also dozens of Reddit threads and YouTube videos criticizing Gadzhi's marketing tactics and questioning the value of his courses; including a series of lengthy videos from Spencer Cornelia (550,000 followers) alleging Gadzhi makes his students "empty promises."

"People are always looking for the golden ring, the easy money appeal," Steven Hassan, a cult expert and author "The Cult of Trump," tells me of online course gurus broadly. "They show images and videos of Rolls Royces and mansions and beautiful women and say, you know, it's simple, it's easy, it's fast, be like me. If the person is very convincing with certainty, ask them to see the last three years of their tax returns, which they will never share. Then you know that it's a fraud or you know that the Rolex is a fake knockoff."

Digital Launchpad includes access to the Digital Accelerator Discord server, where Gadzhi's community of pupils convenes. Upon entering, I'm immediately ranked within a feudal hierarchy. Participants in the course are given titles and little badges that show up next to their names. Since I'm new, I'm an Apprentice, and there's a bronze hexagon next to my name. Once I reach month two, I'll level up to Craftsman. I'll be upgraded to Diplomat after three months, Lord after four (when your hexagon gets little wings attached to it), Prince at six, and King after a full year. The only requisite to leveling up appears to be continuing to pay for the monthly Digital Launchpad subscription. There aren't any tests to pass, essays to write, or assignments to turn in. Students can jump directly to the King level if they buy the yearly subscription instead of the monthly one.

Krenar, a 21-year-old fellow Apprentice, says that Digital Launchpad "offers me this great community of like-minded individuals." A current computer science major, he believes the lessons taught on Digital Launchpad are "way more relevant than anything a marketing degree could teach you." (He requested I not name the university he's enrolled in or his last name to not jeopardize future job prospects.) Just a few weeks into his Digital Launchpad path, he's confident he'll eventually be able to start his own marketing agency.

Jamal, a Grand Vizier (a rank above King), briefly attended a community college in Washington state before dropping out. He felt he didn't fit in at the school, and the courses weren't preparing him to land a job. He turned to Digital Launchpad to "learn the skills needed for me to be able to thrive in the sales market online," and to network with "like-minded individuals," a phrase I encounter repeatedly in the Discord channel. Other common expressions include "achieving financial freedom," "becoming a sovereign man," and "escaping the rat race." In the student introduction channel, one person says, "I've been wanting to escape the matrix for a while now."

In another channel, pupils seek advice on how to advertise their dropshipping venture. One dropshipping disciple says he's down to the last $15 in his bank account and wants advice on which social media platform he should use to spend his last dollars to advertise his store. Others need assistance identifying scam emails from people posing as Shopify representatives. Another claims he'll forward a job opportunity in Dubai — but only if he receives a follow-back on Instagram. Some messages are more hopeful, with some students posting screenshots of money they say they've earned as a result of following Educate's teachings.

Bryce, a 20-year-old from Utah, has been enrolled in Educate for nearly a year. He hasn't attended college and doesn't feel the need to achieve his goals, he says. "All that I need to do to get into the business world is put myself out there and market myself. So it gave me all the things I needed," he says. When I check in with him a few months later, in late April, he tells me, "I haven't made any real money from it yet."

Nehemiah Jordan ultimately decided to finish his degree. He doesn't believe online programs like Educate can fully replace college, at least "outside of the classroom," Jordan tells me. "Just being around people that are your age at the same stage of life, there's a lot of growth that happens on a college campus, I believe that is difficult to replicate digitally." Still, he's frustrated with the lack of clarity on what college has prepared him for. "What are we actually learning? What are the actual skills that we are building? That gets very lost."

The purpose of higher education extends beyond improving one's financial prospects. But values like becoming an informed citizen, developing critical-thinking skills, and learning for the sake of learning can get lost amid a shaky, pressure-cooker economy and ever-rising tuition costs. "Colleges could really be doing a lot better than they currently are to educate people for careers and for the workplace," David Deming, a professor of political economy at Harvard University, says. "There's a lot of teaching of things that are very abstract and not that related to the things you need to know."

Deming stresses that "it still turns out that for most people getting a degree versus not getting a degree is worth the investment." In 2023, the median annual salary for bachelor's degree holders was $60,000, compared to a high school graduate's median salary of $36,000. By a mid-career age of 45 to 50, college graduates make 60% to 70% more than peers who didn't attend college.

"We effectively make a promise to students when they come in: You get a degree and you'll be better off," says Neil Kraus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin River Falls. "We effectively promised them that as a society."

But "what you're seeing is young people are saying, well, I have to borrow all this money up front today to undertake this risky investment, it's not going to pay off for 20 years," Deming says.

Online-course gurus are far from the only ones sowing the seeds of doubt about higher education in America. In April, Palantir announced it was starting a Meritocracy Fellowship for "the best and brightest graduating high school students," encouraging them to "skip the debt, skip the indoctrination" of college. In an interview with Theo Von published earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg said, "I'm not sure that college is preparing people for, like, the jobs that they need to have today." The Harvard dropout added, "I think there's going to have to be a reckoning with and people are going to have to kind of figure whether that makes sense."

Watching these entrepreneurs' flashy videos, I feel a tinge of envy. Most of these men are around my age, some younger, and they say they're worth millions. Should I have traded in my liberal arts education for a dropshipping empire?

In a recent video, called "Brutal Honest Truth On How To Get Rich (In 17 Minutes)," Gadzhi trains in the boxing ring, takes a cold plunge, and drives around a Middle Eastern city in a sports car with a friend who sports an identical haircut and identical sunglasses. At the end of the video, sitting shirtless in a red-light sauna, Gadzhi explains the plight of the investment banker, whose best hope is to retire to the beach after toiling for decades of no "time freedom." Meanwhile, the man who starts an online business now "can live that lifestyle right now. He can run his business from a paradise city and live that same chill lifestyle by the beach," Gadzhi says. "While he's still young, and that's so important." The choice is yours, young man. Chain yourself to the system for 50 years, or click the link below the video and enroll in Gadzi's Make Money Online LIVE Challenge: "Let's build your first Digital Product, LIVE, together, over the course of 5 days."

Miles MacClure is a freelance journalist based in Chicago.

Elise Monsanto plans to get around to some of the "grown-up" milestones that generally mark early adulthood; she's just not in a rush. She didn't get her driver's license until she was 20. She and her friends still haven't had their first boyfriends. Now, at 22, she doesn't drink, though she's sure at some point she will. "I think it's more of a hesitancy thing, a little bit scared to start," she told me. "I guess the same thing with driving."

Like a lot of people in Gen Z, she doesn't feel like there's a need to hustle into adulting. "There's no urgency," she said. "Even people I see graduating, I'm like, 'Oh, there's no urgency to look for a job or look for a place.' They're kind of OK with being like, 'Oh, I'll just figure it out when it comes along.'"

There's been a lot of chatter, culturally, about things Gen Z isn't doing. As the narrative goes, they're not drinking or driving or working or really taking risks. But the reality is more complicated. Gen Z isn't foregoing typical adult activities — most will eventually launch their careers or wind up getting married — but they're taking their time. They're following a pattern of people living life more slowly. Their parents nurtured and supervised them more, meaning they're sluggish to adapt to adulthood's lack of supervision. They're also staring down an economy where a lot of elements are sort of stuck in place. Many aren't in a hurry, but even if they were, it's hard to get moving.

Gen Z is becoming the Take-It-Slow Generation.

In casual conversations with people in the alcohol industry, one thing I sometimes hear is that they don't necessarily buy into all the headlines that Gen Z isn't really drinking. They're obviously self-interested, but they're not sure Gen Z is some special sober generation that will buck the trend of everyone who came before. Yes, Gen Z is drinking less right out of the gate than other generations — underage drinking rates have declined steadily in recent decades. When they do hit the kosher age threshold, young people aren't jumping in headfirst. But there are some signs that Gen Zers will eventually revert to the American norm as they develop a relationship with alcohol. Some older members of the generation, who are hitting their mid-20s, are starting to look pretty similar to millennials or Gen Xers when it comes to the amount of booze they consume.

"These are students that did not have a regular college experience because of COVID, and also social media is a bigger part of their lives so far," Nadine Sarwat, an analyst who covers beverages and cannabis at Bernstein, told me in an interview earlier this year. "The data indicates that once those people turn 24, 25 and enter full working adulthood, they're sort of consuming like previous people would at that age."

Drinking is a function of both economic and social forces, and Gen Z is playing catch-up on both fronts. Essentially, 25 is the new 21.

It's not just cultural signifiers where Gen Z is behind the curve. An analysis from Pew Research Center found that in 2021, 21-year-olds in the US also financially lagged far behind people of the same age in 1980. They're much less likely to have a full-time job or fully support themselves financially. But here, too, the younger generation is making up ground: By the time they're 25, today's young people look similar to 21-year-olds in the 1980s and are caught up with 25-year-olds of that era. In the US Census Bureau's 2021 American Community Survey, about two-thirds of 25-year-olds said they had full-time work, like 21-year-olds in 1980 and only slightly behind 25-year-olds at that time. Six in 10 said they were on their own financially, which is actually ahead of 21-year-olds in 1980 and in line with 25-year-olds of the time.

"On the economic milestones, you can sort of say that 25 is the new 21," said Richard Fry, a senior researcher focusing on economics and education at Pew Research Center. "They really do ramp up."

Fry said education may be partially responsible for this shift — people are waiting to get their first full-time gigs until they're finished with their education, and they're focusing on their studies instead of picking up part-time jobs along the way. Almost half of 21-year-olds were enrolled in college as of 2021, Fry said, while back in 1980, it was only three in 10. "Clearly, schooling and college are a more important endeavor for young adults today than they were 40, 45 years ago," Fry told me. There are some variations by gender — young women are caught up with their 1980s counterparts, while young men, particularly those without a college education, lag behind.

On either side of the college experience, Gen Zers are also hanging back from the workforce. On the younger end, teens aren't taking that first job that will propel them into adulthood. The proportion of teens working or looking for work has been declining for decades. In 1980, about 55% of people ages 16 to 19 were participating in the labor force. Today, that number is closer to 38%. On the postgrad side, the share of people in their early 20s in the workforce has declined over the past decade, Nicholas Tremper, an economist at Gusto, a human resources platform, said in an email. Because older workers are sticking around, they're becoming a bigger share of the workforce — and making it harder for younger workers to elbow their way in.

"The primary way workers advance in their careers is through job mobility, which opens up positions for others who are entering the workforce," he said. "Without open positions, Gen Z workers have not moved into the workforce."

On nonfinancial, more emotional adult milestones, such as getting married and having kids, Gen Z is following a long-term trend of people putting off such events until later in life. The number of people getting married and having kids by 24 has collapsed. The median age of a person's first marriage has gone from 25 and 22 for men and women, respectively, in 1980 to 27 and 25 in 2000 and 30 and 29 in 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Census Bureau. People are beginning to have children later in life, too, and even putting off the littler things, such as driving.

Aveyshla Jimenez, a 25-year-old publicist in Miami, told me she used to idealize what her current age would look like — a house, marriage. Instead, she's still getting settled in her career. "It's not necessarily that I don't want to be traditional. It doesn't seem realistic," she said. "It seems like I just entered the workforce." She started working as a teenager and can't imagine what it feels like for others who are behind her in terms of job experience. "I don't expect everyone to have worked as a server until 6 a.m., so if I'm not where I want to be, I can't imagine other people my age," she said.

One of the reasons that Gen Z feels less pressure to jump into these life experiences is fairly straightforward, said Jean Twenge, a psychologist and the author of "Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America's Future." Young people nowadays simply have more time to live than their predecessors.

"Psychologists call this a slow life strategy, and it happens when people live longer," Twenge told me.

As life expectancies have crept higher, and people have started to get used to those longer lifespans, they are moving through life at a decelerated pace. Teens are putting off dating and driving, young adults are settling into families and careers later, and middle-aged people look and feel younger than their grandparents did at their age. "It starts in the '90s, but it's kind of slow, and then it gets going through the 2000s and then really accelerates in the 2010s once you transition to Gen Z," she said.

Gen Z doesn't have these new attitudes only because they feel they have all the time in the world to grow up. They're also being raised differently, with more attention and, some would say, coddling. As parents have fewer children and later in life, they nurture them more carefully, which, in turn, delays independence. Gen Z has been under more adult supervision than previous generations — their playdates were carefully watched; their parents have monitored their whereabouts on their phones — which may be safer but means they're not figuring things out on their own.

"Parents are more hesitant. They are less comfortable allowing their children to be uncomfortable," Haley Stephens, a pediatric psychologist at UVA Children's Hospital, said. Confidence and skills such as problem-solving and conflict resolution are born from discomfort, which parents and schools increasingly shield children and teens from. This has some good effects — young people are cultured and sensitive and aware of what's going on in the world. It's a positive that they're not drinking and are avoiding what are generally considered negative outcomes, such as teen pregnancy. But it also means they're having a hard time fully leaving the nest and are more anxious.

Technology, of course, plays a role. Young people spending so much time on the phone makes face-to-face interaction rarer, meaning they're slower to develop that muscle. They avoid driving not just because it's scary but also because the party is on Snapchat or TikTok anyway. They're good at setting boundaries at work to protect their mental and physical health, but they may boundary so hard that their boss starts to wonder whether they can handle the day-to-day of the job.

Jessica Lautz, the deputy chief economist and vice president of research at the National Association of Realtors, said this hesitancy to take the full leap is showing up in the housing market. While people 18 to 25 are just a small slice of homebuyers, when they do take the plunge, they do so closer to their families. "If we looked at Gen Xers, we would see they do not want to be close to home, for instance," she said. "But for young millennials and Gen Zers, this does seem to be much more important for them."

Lenny Zaleski, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Dayton, plans to move back in with his family in Chicago after he graduates from college in the spring and starts his full-time job. It sounds "crazy to say out loud," he told me, and isn't what he thought would happen, but it makes sense, given skyrocketing rents. "If homes are out of the affordability range and a studio apartment in the city your job is in is $2,000 a month, at a certain point, you can't just bootstrap that," he said. He acknowledged that living with his family is a pretty decent lifestyle. His grandparents are in the area, as is his dog, and it will let him save up for when he's ready to strike out on his own. And when he does buy, he plans to do so nearby.

Writing about young people always has a sort of old-man-yells-at-cloud bent to it. Every generation gets pinned with a stereotype, and everyone takes their turn at diagnosing the "problem with the kids these days." I'm a millennial, and all we got to hear about is how our avocado toast habit locked us out of the housing market — not, you know, a global recession and a real estate meltdown. But just as millennials are somewhat begrudgingly aging into their parents and grandparents, Gen Z is also coming around to the grown-up thing. It's just taking them a smidge longer to get there.

There is no "right" way to age, but much of America is stuck thinking that baby boomers should be the mold. As mentioned, younger people across generations are just moving through life a little more slowly. They're also aging into a very different world from that of someone in, say, the '80s. Technology is much more prevalent. The economy is more unequal. The world feels pretty unsteady.

Take, for example, the workplace. Managers and companies have launched all sorts of complaints that Gen Z seems ill-prepared and immature at their jobs. This may be true of many young workers, but it's not necessarily their fault. Many businesses have done away with robust on-the-job training, meaning entry-level workers are left to fend for themselves.

"The boomers entered the workplace with robust training and development programs and clear career ladders, things that organizations have dismantled over the years to save money," said Kenneth Matos, the director of market insights at HiBob, an HR-tech company. "In such an environment, I would expect people to 'grow up slower' because opportunities are fewer."

Grant Dutro, a 22-year-old senior from Wheaton College, told me he thinks there's a level of "safetyism" in his generation. "There are people that it is taking a little bit longer to launch," he said. Some of his peers' parents have tracked them on Life360, especially when they were younger. He started driving at 16, but he's got friends who didn't get their licenses until much later — he even taught one to parallel park. The type of stuff the psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes in his book "The Anxious Generation," Dutro said, may be "holding people back" in his age cohort. Like any generation, Gen Z is not a monolith, he said, but "my generation really grew up with a smartphone in hand, and I do think that has had a big impact, because why go out and see people when you can stay in?"

There's a temptation to put a value judgment on what Gen Z is and isn't doing. No underage drinking: good. No working: bad. But the reality is more complicated. When you put things into those two opposing buckets, you miss the bigger picture and what's contributing to it. Parenting, schooling, and working are different now, as is society as a whole. To expect Gen Z to do everything at the same pace as previous generations wouldn't make sense. Sure, maybe 25 is the new 21, but just because Gen Z is taking longer to hit some benchmarks doesn't mean that they'll be duds as adults.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Denmark's Princess Isabella just turned 18, and her birthday portrait was distinctly Gen Z.
• The royal family posted a candid picture of the princess decked out in regal garb and holding an iPhone.
• Her official birthday portraits were more formal and smartphone-less.

Apple's iPhone has found its way into the most Gen Z royal portrait ever.

The Danish royal family put out a celebratory Instagram post on Tuesday, a day after Princess Isabella's 18th birthday.

The princess looked regal in a silky orange off-the-shoulder gown, accessorized with a turquoise tiara, earrings, a teal sash, a gold ring, and a tennis bracelet. A miniature portrait of her father was pinned to her sash.

But one accessory in the picture made her look more like a Gen Z teenager than anything else — she was holding an iPhone, as though she was mid-text when her mother, Queen Mary, snapped the photo.

It was not immediately clear which iPhone model the princess was using.

In the caption of the candid picture, the princess wrote, "Many thanks to everyone who took part in celebrating my 18th birthday.

"It has really been delightful that so many have used time, thought and effort to make my day truly special. It means a lot to me," she wrote.

The princess's official portraits, posted on the royal family's website, were more formal and did not feature the smartphone. She wore the same floor-length orange gown, with her hand resting on an ornate gold table.

Princess Isabella is the second oldest of King Frederic's four children. Her older brother, Prince Christian, is 19 and first in line to the throne. She also has two younger twin siblings, who are 14.

Representatives for Apple and the Danish royal family did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• Take a look at any Gen Z or Gen Alpha's bag — chances are, multiple charms are hooked onto it.
• The hottest trend of late is bag charms: Cute keychains and figurines that can be hooked on zips and straps.
• From showcasing personality to being a marketing tool for brands, here's why everyone's crazy about them.

Gone are the days when the clickity-clack of stilettos used to signal a woman's entrance into a room. It's now replaced by the clickity-clack of the dozen charms she's hooked onto her handbag.

Bag charms — small, decorative keychains — are quickly making their way onto the clasps of Gen Zers' bags. From miniature stuffed toys and cute figurines to beaded chains and even tiny framed pictures of their favorite artists, bag charms vary dramatically in size and form.

For some, the charms just help to spice up an otherwise boring bag. For others, the importance of the charms goes much deeper — they are an extension of their personality, as much a fashion choice as their clothing.

"Whether they're adorning the 'it bag' of the moment or a thrift store find, Gen Zs and Gen Alphas see their bags as a blank canvas to display their personalities and personal style," said Carol Davidson, an NYC-based image consultant.

"It's adornment, sure, but also a way of sharing oneself with others," she added. "A cluster of charms gives others a snapshot of how someone sees themselves and how they want others to see them."

Retail brands are hopping on the trend, with everyone from KFC to Balenciaga releasing bag charms to get the Gen Z buy-in. Celebrities at Paris Fashion Week had charms swinging from their bags.

Here's a look at the hottest Gen Z trend of late.

A modern take on 'Birkinifying' bags

Davidson said one likely origin of the bag charm trend was the death of Jane Birkin, the late British actor and model who was the muse and namesake of Hermès' most popular luxury bag, the Birkin.

"'Birkinifying' is officially a thing, originating with Jane Birkin herself. She was admired for her unique sense of style and love of fashion, but also for not taking it all too seriously," Davidson told BI.

"She was one of the first — if not the first - to adorn her large, well-worn bags with charms, scarves, and trinkets. Since her death in 2023, we've seen the re-emergence of this '00s trend," she added.

Gregory Scott Angel, an assistant professor of fashion at Parsons School of Design, said the punk style of the 1980s could have been a predecessor to the bag charm trend, a style characterized by a "number of piercings, jewelry, and visible identity."

Angel likened charms to emojis.

"The charms are a big identifier with people's personality. These charms could be associated with comfort, but for the most part, I see them as identifiers, the same way we use emojis to communicate with people," Angel said.

A new way to vibe check

Low Zhi An, a 23-year-old tutor and avid charm collector from Singapore, put it bluntly: "If you have no bag charms, you have no personality."

Low said she probably has over 50 charms in her collection. Although she's spent up to 40 Singaporean Dollars, or about $30, on a single charm, her favorite is one she got for free at Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour concert in Singapore.

"I got this small keychain from this little girl, and I just thought it was really, really cute. It just happened to have my favorite song on it, Gold Rush," Low, 23, said.

Low, who is also a die-hard K-pop fan, said that her most expensive charm was a green star plushie keychain tied to an album from her favorite group, NCT.

The charm has a Near Field Communication tag, which, when brought near a phone, immediately lets the user browse and stream the album online.

She also has several charms with photos of her favorite K-pop celebrities, like Yeonjun from the boy band Tomorrow X Together.

Yeo Wen Qing, a recent communications graduate, said her journey collecting bag charms started young, when she kept the small keychains and knickknacks she got from Kinder Joy sweets or McDonald's meals.

Now, Yeo says she has more than 10 charms, at least one on each bag she owns.

For Yeo, seeing what bag charms a person has is a litmus test of their personality and whether she'll be able to "vibe well with them."

"If I see that person has a bag charm of a Labubu, I will know that person buys into trends, maybe buys a bit too much into trends," she said. Labubu, a furry plushie toy with serrated teeth made by Chinese toymaker PopMart, has taken Asia and, increasingly, the West by storm.

She added that if she sees someone with a charm of an "obscure" cartoon or anime character that she loves, she finds it easier to approach them.

Gwen Lim, a Gen Zer who works in campaign marketing in Singapore, collects bag charms on her travels. She said they serve as souvenirs of her trips and remind her of good times with her friends.

Lim, 23, said charms also serve a very utilitarian function for her.

In Singapore, where a handful of bag brands like Charles & Keith and The Paper Bunny reign supreme and trends spread like wildfire, many people carry similar bags. Hanging charms are her way of differentiating her bag from the masses.

Lim's charms are also little vehicles for her beauty products. She said beauty brands in South Korea often package their products into bag charms.

Even fashion stylists are getting in on the bag charm trend.

Edith Chan, a Madrid-based stylist, said she's gotten her clients, who are mainly entrepreneurial women in their 30s, to get in on the bag charm trend. She said even tying a scarf onto their bag helps them make their bag unique to them.

Major retail brands are hopping on the bag charm bandwagon

Retail brands, from fashion to food from across the board, are making bag charms to get the buy-in of the younger consumer base.

In Singapore, KFC debuted limited-edition bag charms of the beloved Japanese cat character Mofusand wearing hats shaped like egg tarts, chicken drumsticks, and an upside-down fried chicken bucket.

Over to haute couture, in November, Balenciaga introduced a "Charms Bar" in some of its stores worldwide, which allows customers to personalize their bags. One of the charms it sells is the $895 "Le City Micro Bag Charm," a tiny replica of its $2,900 Le City Medium bag.

Angel, the professor from Parsons, said charms are "free marketing" for big brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier.

"In a competitive market, it helps luxury brands solidify brand loyalty with their existing base while providing an accessible entry for aspirational consumers," Davidson, the image consultant, said.

Chan, the stylist, said the charms are a big way brands are drawing in younger customers.

"These brands always go to the young people," she said. "It's one way to nurture this generation to make them brand loyal."

• Inflation, higher interest rates, layoffs, and other challenges have hit Gen Z's finances.
• Dave Ramsey gave five reasons for young people to feel hopeful on the "Modern Wisdom" podcast.
• The radio personality pointed to economic change, earnings growth, and wealth compounding over time.

Gen Zers have had their finances walloped by a pandemic, historic inflation, soaring interest rates, and widespread layoffs in recent years — and could face more pain if President Donald Trump's trade war drives up prices and drags the economy into recession.

Yet most young people will be fine in the long run if they work hard and manage their money wisely, Dave Ramsey told the "Modern Wisdom" podcast in an episode released on Thursday.

The host of "The Ramsey Show" said America's youth should feel optimistic about their financial futures for these five reasons:

1. Now isn't forever

Ramsay said that if someone had taken a snapshot of him when he filed for bankruptcy at age 28 with two kids, his financial situation would have seemed hopeless. But that would miss how he eventually turned his life around and built a successful career as a radio personality.

"Life is a film strip," the personal finance guru said. "It's a series of snapshots strung together."

Ramsey underscored that factors such as house prices, interest rates, and the speed of wage growth change over time.

"So, bottom line is if you're in your 20s, and houses are too expensive because interest rates are 6%, and your wages haven't kept up with what the boomer curve was — which are all accurate mathematical statements — you'll be OK," he said. "When you're 30, it's going to be different."

2. Earnings go up

The vast majority of young people will earn higher incomes in the future as they gain experience and climb their career ladders, Ramsey said. That can help them to pay off their debts, afford homes, and build the lives they want.

Ramsey asked rhetorically whether "at the apex of my life, when I'm at my maximum earning potential, am I making less than I did when I was 22 years old and I just got out of school?"

"No," he continued, adding that the number of people for whom that's true is "almost zero — you can't find them."

3. The power of compounding

Diligently saving and investing for decades is a powerful way to build long-term wealth and escape money troubles, Ramsey said.

For example, investing 15% of a household income of $70,000 a year, or about $10,500 a year, into a 401(k) for 40 years would yield $2.1 million, assuming an average annual return of 7%.

Ramsey emphasized that kind of calculation is likely conservative as it assumes "a guy never got a raise" over the entire time period.

4. Personal agency

Even if national wage growth is lagging inflation, individuals can buck that trend through hard work, Ramsey said.

People can "personally outpace the fact that wages haven't kept up," he said. "So go do that — that's your thing."

On a related note, Ramsey recalled his children once complaining to him that something wasn't fair.

"I'm like, fair is where the Tilt-a-Whirl and the cotton candy is, kid," he said. "You want some fair, go get some."

Ramsey hailed his Gen Z employees for their hustle: "They'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol."

On the other hand, he recalled that when an employee who "had more degrees than a thermometer" once asked him for a raise, Ramsey replied that his company cared about effort and results, not qualifications.

5. American dream

Gen Zers shouldn't feel resigned to financial struggle given the wealth of opportunity in the US, Ramsey said, echoing the likes of Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban.

The "little man, the guy starting from nothing," benefits from the country's freedoms and the ease of access to its markets and information, he said.

If someone is motivated and has "two brain cells to rub together, you probably have a better chance of becoming wealthy in America today, starting from nothing, than in any place at any time in history."

Rose-colored glasses

Ramsey's comments are likely to strike some as overly optimistic and dismissive of deep-seated challenges such as wage stagnation, onerous amounts of student, a housing affordability crisis, and unequal opportunity across regions and demographics, not to mention the disruption that AI threatens to cause to many occupations.

Yet it's probably sound advice for most young people to maximize their chances of financial success whatever the world throws at them, and remember the forces of earnings power and wealth compounding work in their favor.

First jobs for college grads are becoming more elusive. Open roles for entry-level software engineers have dropped. Generative AI is writing more code, and Big Tech companies are boasting about how AI is making their workers more efficient. The number of entry-level management consulting and finance jobs began declining last year, and several big firms considered offering lower salaries — reasoning that AI would take on some of the workload.

Gen AI isn't Gen Z's only problem. Today's erratic economy has employees deeply worried about their jobs. That can mean fewer positions with new vacancies. Employers have been wary about bringing on fresh-faced hires in need of training.

All of these roiling changes have left many Zoomers extremely nervous. In a new survey of college seniors from the career site Handshake, 62% of those who said they were familiar with AI tools expressed at least some concern about how those tools would affect their job prospects, up from 44% in 2023. Computer science students seemed the most worried about their overall prospects; 28% said they were "very pessimistic" about starting their careers in the current economy, up from 18% a year ago. As of March, soon-to-be grads had submitted 21% more job applications on Handshake than seniors did the year before — all while job postings on the site declined by 15%. And according to Indeed, internship postings across all sectors, which peaked in 2022, have fallen to below 2019 levels.

If AI replaces entry-level work, new grads will have to learn the skills they need to work some other way — and lots of those practical, workplace skills aren't taught in the college classroom. A collapse of the career ladder and increasing automation could create more inequalities in skills, pay, and job satisfaction, says Matt Beane, a professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There are already cracks beginning to form in some white collar industry pipelines. "It's too late for us to completely and perfectly avoid this problem," Beane says. "Some damage has been done."

Gen Zers are already deeply uncertain about the value of a college degree, with about half saying they felt higher education is a "waste of money" in a March survey from Indeed. In March, nearly 6% of college graduates 27 or younger were unemployed, compared with 2.6% of all workers with college degrees, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Four percent of all workers were unemployed, and nearly 7% of young people without college degrees didn't have jobs.

A Brookings Institution analysis of OpenAI data concluded that some entry-level jobs, like preparing legal documents and reviewing legal data, were at high risk of automation. About half of the tasks for a marketing research analyst were similarly thought to be at risk, compared with 9% of the work for a marketing manager. There were similar findings for sales representatives versus sales managers. AI tools may unevenly affect different industries: An Anthropic analysis of its tool Claude.ai found that 37% of queries were related to computer and mathematical work, like developing and maintaining websites or debugging computer systems, while other categories like education, business and finance, sciences, and administrative were less common.

Bosses might have their eye on the benefits of putting gen AI and agents into the workforce, but it's not a silver bullet for efficiency. Three in four workers surveyed last year by the freelancing platform UpWork said AI tools had made them less productive and put more work on their plate. "It seems like there's savings and productivity gains on the surface, but then when you really dig in, there's potentially longer review periods or more going back to double-check or correct mistakes that don't seem obvious," says Tim Herbert, the chief research officer at CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry.

"New grads are entering an environment where they are going to have to wait for the downstream implications to emerge" from the AI revolution, says Frank Fusco, the CEO of Silicon Society, a company focused on educating workers through job shadowing. He believes some roles will be destroyed or consolidated but new ones will emerge from AI — ones we can't yet envision or predict. Ultimately, companies will realize they can't render people obsolete. But for Gen Z, "the timing is very unfortunate," he says. "We are at the very start of that curve if we zoom out."

Meanwhile, companies are also more cautious about hiring workers as they face economic uncertainty and the prospect of a recession. "We're in a period where we're frozen," says Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed. Workers and bosses are moving cautiously to see the fallout of President Donald Trump's tariffs. "We're all a little bit of a deer in the headlights, unsure of what's going on." But, she says, that can't last very long — companies eventually have to make moves, whether by laying people off, or as people quit and move jobs.

The tech industry in particular has faced uncertainty for the past two years, with the number of job postings falling from about 625,000 in January 2023 to 467,000 this past March, according to a data analysis performed by CompTIA. Entry-level jobs in early 2023 made up 24% of those roles, down to 21% now. Those looking for workers with seven or more years of experience have increased by 3% in that same time. These shifts come in part after tech companies rapidly hired during the pandemic and then laid thousands off in 2023. But it's a tough reality for those starting their careers in an industry that was known for high salaries and trendy perks.

It's a hard pivot for tech, an industry that has long been accused of favoring young talent to move fast and break things over older, experienced workers. "While they love young people, I think they love robots more," says Maureen Wiley Clough, the host of "It Gets Late Early," a podcast about ageism in the tech industry. In a 2023 survey from Intelligent.com, a higher education research resource, nearly 40% of bosses across industries said they thought recent grads were not prepared for the workforce. In a 2024 survey of 800 HR leaders sponsored by Hult International Business School, 37% of HR leaders said they would rather have a robot or AI do a job than hire a recent graduate to take it on; another 30% said they would prefer to just let the job sit open.

But it's not Gen Zers' fault that they don't fully get workplace etiquette and norms yet. Young workers graduating in the past five years have sometimes started their college courses or careers remotely. That can mean missed opportunities to find close mentors and learn the culture and norms of an office. Zoomers largely seem more likely to want to work hybrid schedules over remote when compared with older workers, and they're looking for in-person connection. "Those things have just left the equation," Wiley Clough says. "It's kind of like, well, good luck, sink or swim."

Some junior workers are teaching themselves to use AI, finding it helpful when looking for a job. Meelah Harkness graduated from Loyola University Chicago last May after studying communications and started applying for jobs. She filled out applications on LinkedIn for roles that already had more than 100 applicants, and upgraded her account to premium so she could send messages to people she didn't know.

Amid her frenzy of applications, Harkness spent a few weeks studying for a certificate in AI in advertising and public relations. She was wary of the rapidly developing tech, and wondered whether her newly minted marketing skills would be easily replaced by generative AI. Taking the course actually made her feel more confident. "A robot can't sell to a human the way a human can sell to a human," she says. About four months into her search, she landed a job as a marketing coordinator at Bartesian, the maker of a cocktail mixing machine, using some of what she learned in that AI course to generate mockup images in a sample work test.

Christine Cruzvergara, the chief education officer at Handshake, is more optimistic that young workers won't be pushed out easily. She says that while the tight job market and developments in AI are changing the world young people are graduating into, entry-level jobs are still out there and vital to companies. "You have to be able to actually grow your talent pipeline, and to be able to advance people into your midlevel or later on senior-level roles," Cruzvergara says. "To do that, you are likely to have to hire from entry-level, to have more flexibility and ability to shape that in the ways that you want." If automation truly took over entry-level work across an entire industry or among white-collar workers, Cruzvergara says, "there would be a recalibration of what is considered an entry-level job."

The top college grads should look for work at firms where they'll get hands-on training, says Beane, who wrote the book "The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines." It will become a flex to work for companies that see the value and invest in educating young workers. And companies looking to hire will have to take on "promising but undertrained" applicants, he says. Without an entry-level role, it will fall more to midlevel and senior-level workers to train these workers like apprentices — or young people will be pushed to teach themselves. "The onus of the responsibility falls on both the employer and the employee to upskill in this new digital age," says Danielle Farage, a speaker and Gen Z work expert, who is also a Gen Zer. "There's no way you can keep up unless you make it part of your role to continuously be learning and upskilling."

Students are already taking notes. Julia Fedorin, a student at the University of Waterloo, decided to scrap the traditional job application process. She made a video and posted it to X last week, asking Shopify to hire her as a marketing intern — even though the role didn't exist. Her video was viewed more than 1 million times and also caught the eye of Shopify, which has already offered her an internship for the fall. "I think AI should 100% be a tool that you use," she tells me. But it can't write experience. "Now more than ever, we value authenticity," Fedorin says. "I think there's only so much that AI can show."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

• Gen Z is entering the workforce and bringing their fashion style to the office.
• Slim pants, loud patterns, and some flats are considered millennial styles, according to Gen Z.
• Solid colors, wide-leg trousers, and structured silhouettes seem more modern to members of Gen Z.

Long gone are the days of wearing business casual clothing to the club… but should you even be wearing some of those same pieces to the office?

At least, that's what some members of Gen Z are wondering.

Neon colors, skinny jeans, and dramatic accessories plagued the 2000s and early 2010s, but while these styles have been phased out of our social wardrobes, some might still linger in your office clothes.

We asked Gen Zers working in corporate settings which long-standing office styles they are skipping, including ones they associate with millennial work wardrobes.

If you're looking to modernize your office wardrobe and adopt Gen Z's style, here are 10 items you should leave behind.

Floral blouses

One item you probably won't find in a young professional's closet is a loose, floral-printed blouse, Anna Cornelius, a content creator and full-time analyst working for a software development firm told Business Insider.

Gen Z's aversion to loud or colorful patterns, combined with their preference for structured materials and silhouettes, contrasts with loose and pattern-heavy blouses.

"I think older generations may opt for a little bit more flowy pieces," said Cornelius, who shares fashion and work advice with her nearly 50,000 followers on TikTok. "Not that it doesn't look good, but I think it's a generational tell from older generations."

In the formula of pairing something loose with something tighter, Gen Z will instead typically opt to pair a wide-legged trouser with a tighter top, like a bodysuit, Cornelius said.

Pencil skirts

While a popular option for office bottoms, pencil skirts aren't as welcome by young professionals as they once were.

"Pencil skirts, in the more traditional sense, are really, really millennial," said Anastasia Gerrans, a content creator focusing on work-friendly outfits.

Instead, members of Gen Z might opt for a more structured version, such as skirts that have an "almost pantsuit-inspired silhouette," including a closure and split, Gerrans said.

That "feels very current and very elevated, but still work appropriate," she said.

Fitted pants, especially capris

It's no secret that Gen Z hates skinny jeans, but other sorts of fitted pants, such as capris, also draw their ire.

Instead, Gen Z office-goers opt for looser, wide-leg trousers that allow them to be a bit more comfortable while remaining in style.

"Millennial dressing can sometimes be more like a tailored pant that's more tapered towards the ankle and then a blouse and a blazer, but a Gen Z might go for a wider leg pant and then a more oversized blazer or a more relaxed fitting top," Gerrans said.

Denim

Denim can be a fun way to make your office look more casual, but implemented in the wrong way, it can age you more up than down, according to Cornelius.

"Sometimes in business casual, you'll see a denim jacket," she said. "I don't see that as much with Gen Z."

If you're wearing denim to the office on Friday — or Monday, we don't judge — try sticking to a tried-and-true dark wash, structured jeans, or an oversized denim jacket, style experts told Vogue.

A fitted light-wash denim jacket or a 2010s-inspired denim vest might not be the fashion statement it once was.

Loud patterns

Patterns were once a way to make a statement in your wardrobe, but Cornelius said Gen Z's preference for floral patterns is "the lack thereof," with younger generations opting for color blocking rather than patterned pieces.

A way to modernize your outfits is to choose solid, neutral colors or more minimal patterns instead of loud, colorful patterns.

Flats, clogs, or mules

While Gen Z has fallen back in love with ballet flats, other flat-shoe styles, such as mules and clogs, have not fared the same fate.

"I like to wear heels, but many of my colleagues who are Gen Z wear a fashion sneaker, whereas older generations might wear a flat or a clog," Cornelius said.

Sneakers with slim pants

Gen Z may love a fashion sneaker for the office, but the key is in the details, and how you wear it.

Wearing a sneaker with slim-leg trousers might come across as more outdated than hip, Cornelius said.

"I feel like sneakers paired with trousers or something aren't as common or aren't as Gen Z, unless you're wearing wide leg pants and then you have a sneaker underneath that's kind of covered, then it feels more our generation," Gerrans said.

Loose dresses

With Gen Z's affinity for structure in their workwear, it's no surprise that flowy pieces like loose dresses or blouses haven't made the generational jump.

Although these loose items are comfortable, they don't align with the style values of Gen Z, where looking sleek and structured is always a priority in the workplace, according to Cornelius.

Garments that don't accentuate shape combined with floral patterns are an immediate tell of what generation someone's a part of, Cornelius said.

Part of this might also be the access and rewear value of these more unique and visually striking pieces, which, for young professionals, is still out of reach.

"Every book that I've read on starting off in your career says you don't need to draw attention to yourself in superficial ways — you need to focus on your work, you need to present yourself in a certain way and present yourself professionally," Cornelius said. "Dressing in neutrals and building a capsule wardrobe helps [with that]."

Fitted blazers

The era of wearing thin, fitted blazers to the club is long over. Blazers are now more oversized and structured, with Gen Z even prompting a return of the shoulder pad in fashion.

"A lot of Gen Z loves to layer a blazer, but if then you wear a blazer after work to drinks, that might sometimes feel millennial, unless the blazer is more oversized," Gerrans said.

If you're trying to blend in with your younger colleagues, try wearing a structured, oversized blazer combined with a matching trouser.