Are young people under pressure to do it all?

Students start building their profiles while still in school today. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockPhoto Open any college student’s LinkedIn profile today, and you will find something that would have seemed extraordinary a decade ago. Internships completed before the final year. Side projects with real traction. Volunteer work, creator pages, skill certifications, and, somewhere underneath, a human being who is still figuring out who they are.The resume now starts in school. By the time a student reaches college, they have already been evaluated across dimensions that did not exist for the generation before them. For many students today, marks alone no longer feel sufficient. Now you need a passion project, which needs an audience. The pressure to do it all is real. But the more interesting story is what this generation is actually doing with it.Building optionsWhat surprises most people is how much clarity sits underneath all the activity. This is not a generation flailing around. Most young people today have a strong sense of who they want to become, and they treat the trying-out as a way to test and sharpen that vision, not escape it. Research from Randstad India found that 43% of Gen Z want a full-time role paired with a side hustle. That is a generation deliberately building options for itself, on its own terms.There is also a distinction between genuine interest and fear of falling behind. Both exist, and this generation is increasingly aware of the difference. When a young person finds something they love today, they go deeper than previous generations could because they have the tools, the communities, and the confidence too.The fear of falling behind is real too, and a social media feed full of everyone else's highlight reel makes it easy to feel like you are the only one not moving forward. But the encouraging shift is that young people are starting to name this pressure and push back.Cost of visibilityWhat makes this pressure different is not just the volume of expectations but how visible it is. Today, young people are exposed to a constant stream of achievements, milestones, and success stories from people they may never even meet. The benchmark is no longer the people around them. It can feel like everyone.The deeper cost is harder to measure. When every opportunity feels important and every achievement feels visible, it becomes harder to separate what you genuinely enjoy from what you feel expected to pursue. Young people can find themselves constantly optimising not because they lack direction but because there is always another skill to learn, another opportunity to chase, or another benchmark to meet. Over time, it can become harder to distinguish genuine interest from external validation. They can end up with an impressive profile and very little sense of self. An impressive resume and an unclear identity are not a contradiction.The response to the pressure is often adding more structure: more counselling, more workshops, more guided support. These matter. But the more important shift is subtler. The moment everything a student tries gets graded, ranked, or added to a profile, exploration stops being play. What young people actually need are spaces where they can try something, be average at it, and still feel it was worth their time. Where the attempt is celebrated and not just the outcome, so students stop fearing anything they might not win at.The fix is not to lower ambition. It is to create environments where they can figure out what actually matters to them before performing a version of their life for everyone else’s benefit. That is not a small ask. But it is the right one.The writer is CEO, Under25. Published - September 28, 2026 08:00 am IST