Note: this is an op-ed which endeavours to find an underlying story from four different stories in The Times of 28th August 2025. The development described has both an indirect and on occasions direct impact on domestic cat caregiving. Substituting a child for a cat!? Being unable to afford to look after a cat? Housing issues impact cat ownership and so on.
Britain’s young are sending us a message, and it’s not a hopeful one. Fertility rates are at record lows as millennials defer parenthood. Gen Z are more miserable than their parents. Nearly half say their work makes them unhappy. Meanwhile, mental health conditions are being diagnosed so widely that the bill now runs to £16 billion a year.
These are not isolated headlines. They are symptoms of the same malaise: a generation that feels insecure, disconnected, and doubtful about the future.
The Britain that today’s young adults inherit looks very different from the one their parents knew. Stable jobs, affordable housing and the promise of gradual progress gave earlier generations the confidence to marry, raise families, and build communities. Those foundations have crumbled. Precarious work, sky-high property prices and the grind of living costs have pushed life’s traditional milestones further out of reach.
No wonder birth rates are plunging. Parenthood today is not just a financial gamble but an existential question. Why bring children into a world scarred by climate fears, a grinding war in Ukraine, and fresh conflict in the Middle East? For many young adults, tomorrow looks harsher than yesterday.
The mental health figures reflect this insecurity. Some of the diagnoses are doubtless accurate, but many more are simply the medicalisation of ordinary unhappiness. Britain has built a system that hands out labels and prescriptions, while doing little to restore the sense of stability and belonging that would make them less necessary.
Work, too, has lost much of its meaning. The shift to remote and hybrid patterns has brought flexibility, but it has also stripped out something less tangible: the daily human contact that gives work its social glue. Offices once provided friendships, purpose and a sense of identity. For many young people logging in from bedrooms or kitchen tables, that has vanished. The job may pay the bills, but it doesn’t fill the soul.
This is a feedback loop. Insecurity fuels anxiety. Anxiety delays family formation. Fewer families mean weaker communities. Isolation deepens the mental health burden. A society that once assumed each generation would do better than the last now risks going in reverse.
And while this crisis is particularly visible in Britain, it is not uniquely British. Across advanced economies, the same trends are appearing: falling birth rates, rising anxiety, and a younger generation losing faith in the idea of progress.
The warning is clear. A country where its youngest citizens are too anxious to start families, too disconnected to find meaning in work, and too uncertain to imagine a brighter future, is a country drifting backwards. Britain must find ways to rebuild the foundations — in housing, work, and community — or resign itself to becoming a nation in retreat.
To perhaps summarise: the young have a long-term future while the old do not. The old can opt out while the young will have to live through it. They don’t see a bright, stable future in which they and their children have an opportunity to thrive and be content. It is the old people who have created this bleak future. The old have betrayed the young in many ways another of which is to mortgage the future by piling on national debt which will have to be paid for by the taxes of the todays Gen Z’ers and Millennials.
More: Gen Z
P.S. These are the four stories that I have linked: Fertility rate hits record low as millennials defer parenthood and secondly there is overdiagnosis of mental health conditions in young people costing £16b annually, and thirdly Gen Z are nowadays more miserable than their parents (‘Anxious Gen Z reshape illbeing curve’) and a survey found that 40 per cent of Gen Z said that their work circumstances made them unhappy.
