From drinking less to marrying later: how Gen Z is redefining what early adulthood looks like.

The weird thing about being an undergraduate student right now is that adulthood feels less like a door you walk through to the next chapter of your life and more like a moving target. One minute you’re worrying about classes, exams and where your next meal is coming from, and the next, someone is asking about your five-year plan. As if it’s still the 80s and you can buy a house with nothing but your dreams and a spare nickel. 

More and more, our generation is stretching out the timeline between growing up and being grown. We’re staying in school longer, entering stable work later, moving out later, getting married later and having kids later. There’s even a large population of university students who wait until they’ve reached their twenties before getting their driver’s licenses. 

Even the habits that have typically been associated with early adulthood in the past are changing. We drink less. We go out differently. We’re less interested in doing things just because that’s what people have always done in their twenties.

Overall, we feel less urgency about becoming adults.   

Some people treat that like a joke or a warning sign, as though younger people have no clue how to get on with life. But that take doesn’t really hold up. It’s easy to say we don’t know how to grow up, but in doing so, it ignores the fact that the version of adulthood we’ve been handed is a lot harder to access now — more expensive, less stable and, honestly, not as appealing as it once seemed.

Housing is the easiest place to see this. A generation ago, moving out was one of the clearest signs that you were on your way. Now, for a lot of young people, moving out is a financial stretch that barely makes sense. Rent can swallow an entire paycheck. Saving for a down payment feels unrealistic. Homeownership is so far out of reach for many students and recent graduates that it stops feeling like a milestone and starts feeling like a myth. 

When the basic foundation of independence is this expensive, everything built on top of it gets delayed, too. Marriage, children, long-term planning — all of it gets pushed further down the road.

Work is part of the same story. The path from university to stable employment is not nearly as direct as it used to be. A degree does not automatically guarantee security, and the jobs that do exist are often temporary, low-paying or difficult to turn into something lasting. In fact, people are even starting to doubt the value of bachelor’s degrees altogether, seeing as it’s nearly impossible to get anywhere without a master’s degree these days. That means a lot of young adults spend years in a kind of holding pattern. 

We are in the workforce, technically, but not always in the way previous generations were at the same age. It is hard to commit to major life decisions when your own schedule, income or location could change in a matter of months.

That uncertainty shapes behaviour in smaller ways too. One of the more noticeable changes is drinking. Gen Z tends to drink less than earlier generations, and social life tends to reflect that. 

Obviously, we’re still young and turnt, but it’s less of a priority for us. Alcohol is less central, less habitual and less tied to the idea of having fun than it used to be. Some people don’t drink at all. Others drink occasionally, but the pressure to make it a major part of being young and having a good time has definitely faded in comparison to previous generations.

The same goes for urgency. There’s less of a rush to hit life milestones as quickly as possible. There’s less shame in taking the long road to get to certain destinations. Earlier generations often seemed to treat adulthood like a checklist: finish school, get a job, move out, get married, buy a house, start a family. 

For Gen Z, that checklist feels less like a schedule and more like a rough outline. Not everyone wants the same things. Not everyone wants them in the same order. And not everyone believes that speed is the same thing as success.

Marriage is a good example. For most, it’s happening later, and in many cases, it’s not being treated as a default step at all. That doesn’t mean people are less interested in commitment. It just means we’re becoming more selective about it. 

Marriage now feels like something to do when the rest of your life is stable enough to support it, not something to rush towards just to check a box off. People are looking at it for what it truly is, a lifelong financial, emotional and physical commitment that will change the trajectory of everyone involved’s life. 

The same logic applies to having children. These aren’t decisions people are making lightly anymore, and they’re increasingly being treated as choices that require timing, money and real intention.

Our generation isn’t delaying adulthood because we’re confused or lazy, but more so because we’re cautious about what adulthood is supposed to mean. The old model assumed that these milestones were natural, obvious and universally desirable. Gen Z is less willing to accept that. We’ve watched too many people look officially “settled” while clearly being stressed, broke or miserable to believe that checking every box automatically equals a good life.

That being said, this doesn’t mean the delay is always empowering. A lot of it is forced. It’s one thing to say you are taking your time. It is another thing to realize that the economy is making your choices for you. That is where a lot of the tension sits. Some of the slower pace is because of a shift in cultural, shared values. Some of it is just reality. Most of it is a swirl of both.

And that is what makes this generation hard to define neatly. Gen Z isn’t moving through adulthood the way older people expect us to, but that doesn’t mean we’re failing to move at all. We’re making different calculations. Different decisions. 

We care less about doing things early just to keep up appearances. We’re more likely to question whether marriage, homeownership and a full-time career in our early twenties should still be treated as the gold standard. We’re also more comfortable saying that the old timeline just doesn’t work for us anymore.

The bigger question is what all of this means. On one hand, it could mean a generation that reaches stability later but with more thought behind the decisions. There may be less rushing into things people aren’t ready for yet. There may be more flexibility, more self-awareness and more willingness to build lives that actually fit the people living them, rather than fitting cultural expectations.

On the other hand, it could also mean a generation that stays in transition longer than it wants to, with uncertainty lingering far past the years when people expected to feel settled.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Gen Z is taking longer, but that doesn’t automatically mean we’re lost or ambitionless. It means the old map no longer matches the terrain. The habits are changing, the timeline is changing and the meaning of adulthood is changing along with them.