The Inheritance

New Hampshire is the second-oldest state in the country. Median age 43.4. Behind only Maine. More than a third of Granite Staters are over fifty-five. The state’s own demographic office projects a 129 percent increase in residents over sixty-five and a 243 percent increase in residents over eighty-five by 2040. Deaths have outnumbered births here every year since 2016. The state would already be shrinking if not for in-migration — and roughly 77 percent of the people moving in are under forty-five, the youngest of them late millennials and the leading edge of Generation Z.

Which is to say: this state is being kept alive by the same generation that, on every available economic and psychological metric, is being asked to absorb the largest structural shock of any cohort in modern American history. Last month Granite State Report ran the survival forecast for the millennials — the generation now aged 30 to 44, currently carrying the country’s peak earnings, peak debt, and peak caregiving load. This is the forecast for the cohort coming up behind them.

Generation Z — born 1997 to 2012, currently aged 14 to 29 — is the first generation in U.S. history to grow up entirely inside the smartphone economy, the first to enter the labor force during the front edge of large-language-model automation, and the first to inherit a climate that is no longer theoretical. Their lives have already been measured, sampled, and graphed by every major federal statistical agency, Federal Reserve regional bank, and global consulting firm that exists. We are not guessing what their futures look like. We are reading the data.

What follows is not a forecast for the country in the abstract. It is a forecast for the actual cohort whose mental health, wages, housing prospects, and labor-market entry conditions are already on record, and whose later life will be shaped by the demographic and fiscal math of a state and a country that has been promising more than it can deliver for forty years.

The Mental Health Baseline They’re Starting From

The first thing the data says, and says cleanly, is that this generation is starting from a worse mental-health baseline than any cohort ever measured. Forty-six percent of Gen Z Americans have already received a formal mental-health diagnosis — most commonly anxiety, depression, or ADHD — and another 37 percent believe they have an undiagnosed condition. Harmony Healthcare IT’s 2025 State of Gen Z Mental Health report puts the combined diagnosed-or-suspected number at more than eight in ten young Americans.

This is not the well-rehearsed claim that “young people are more open about mental health now.” That’s true, and it explains some of the diagnostic increase. It does not explain the rest. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, with more than 23,000 respondents across 44 countries, found that 40 percent of Gen Z report feeling stressed or anxious most or all of the time, against 34 percent of millennials. Forty-seven percent rate their mental well-being as fair or poor. Among 18-to-25-year-olds, the CDC’s NSDUH found that 15.9 percent had a major depressive episode in 2024 — nearly double the overall adult rate.

The most relevant longitudinal finding is on screen exposure. A 2022 JAMA-published meta-analysis found depression risk increases by roughly 13 percent for each additional hour of daily social-media use. Gen Z averages about 2.5 hours per day on social media alone. Teenagers with four or more hours of daily screen time are more than twice as likely to report symptoms of anxiety or depression as those with less. These are not soft cultural observations. These are dose-response curves.

The implication for the next fifty years is the part almost no one will say in print. Cohorts that enter adulthood in worse mental health than the cohorts ahead of them do not silently catch up. They carry the gap forward. The Gen Z mental-health gap will show up in their forties as differential disability claims, differential workforce-participation rates, differential cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and differential suicide mortality. These are not predictions. They are the well-documented downstream consequences of every prior cohort that started adult life with elevated psychiatric load. Gen Z’s load is larger.

The Labor Market They Are Actually Walking Into

Forget the boilerplate. The labor market Gen Z is entering is not the one their parents entered, and it is not the one millennials entered. The structural conditions have changed, and they have changed against this cohort specifically.

The unemployment rate among recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 sits at 5.6 percent — near levels not seen since 2013, excluding the pandemic, according to the New York Fed. The share of unemployed Americans who are new workforce entrants hit a 37-year high in mid-2025 — 13.3 percent in July, settling to 10.6 percent by February 2026. That second number is still higher than at any point during the Great Recession. Roughly 58 percent of recent Gen Z graduates are still looking for full-time work, against 25 percent of comparable earlier cohorts.

Entry-level job postings have fallen by 29 percentage points since January 2024, according to Randstad’s analysis of 126 million global job postings. The Dallas Federal Reserve’s 2026 working paper — authored by assistant VP J. Scott Davis — found that the unemployment-rate gap between entry-level workers and experienced workers has widened sharply post-pandemic, and that the gap is being driven by AI exposure in tasks historically used to train new hires.

This is the part the older generations have not yet absorbed. In every prior technology cycle in American economic history, the workers most exposed to the new technology were also the workers best positioned to learn it. AI has inverted that. The Dallas Fed paper is precise: the dividing line is not technologists versus non-technologists. It is entry-level versus experienced. The tool that is supposed to amplify the worker is being routed almost entirely to the experienced worker — who uses it to do, faster, the work that previously required hiring two or three juniors to learn how to do.

The Atlanta Fed has now revived Kenneth Arrow’s 1962 “learning by doing” paper to formalize the warning: a generation that does not get the on-ramp tasks does not become the next cohort of experienced workers. The pipeline does not refill on its own. MIT’s Andrew McAfee has been making the same argument to corporate audiences: companies are sawing off the branch they sit on.

What this means for Gen Z, in concrete fifty-year terms, is that the cohort’s lifetime earnings curve will not look like its parents’ curve. Workers who enter the labor force during weak markets carry a measurable wage penalty for ten to fifteen years — the so-called scarring effect, well documented since the Lisa Kahn studies in the early 2000s. The Gen Z scarring will be larger because the displacement is concentrated at the entry tier where wage trajectories are set. The upper third of the cohort — credentialed, networked, geographically mobile — will recover and do fine. The middle third will plateau. The lower third will spend their thirties and forties patching together gig income, skilled-trade work, platform work, and intermittent W-2 employment, the way much of the millennial cohort did after 2008, only more so.

Housing: The American Dream, Liquidated

Three percent of U.S. homeowners are Gen Z. Just three. Total Gen Z homeownership stands at roughly 26 percent of the cohort — against 79.6 percent for boomers, according to 2026 generational housing data. That gap is not closing on the current trajectory. It is widening.

The reasons are structural and they are stacked. From 2020 to 2024, typical U.S. rents rose nearly 29 percent. Median household income did not. Nearly half of all renter households now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, the federal threshold for being “cost-burdened.” The median single-family home price in New Hampshire reached a record $535,000 in 2025, after a 122 percent increase over the prior decade. The state has met only about 80 percent of its 2020–2025 housing-production goal, with the goal aimed at balancing the housing market by 2040.

Gen Z’s expectation of what a down payment costs has adjusted accordingly: a Realtor.com survey from October 2025 found that the average Gen Z adult expects to need $54,546 for a down payment, and 82 percent say buying is harder for their generation than for any earlier one. Sixty-seven percent still call homeownership an important lifetime goal. Whether it will be achievable for two-thirds of them is, on the current math, an open question — and the honest answer in the data is no.

The follow-on effect is that the wealth-building mechanism that powered every previous postwar generation — leveraged appreciation of a primary residence — will be available to a much smaller share of Gen Z than of any cohort since the Silent Generation. The wealth gap between Gen Z homeowners and Gen Z renters at age 50 will be larger, in real dollars, than the comparable gap for the boomers ever was. This is the part the political class has not yet priced into anything.

The Climate Coefficient

Generation Z will live, on the current trajectory, through approximately three to seven times the number of climate extremes — heatwaves, droughts, tropical cyclones, wildfires — that the boomers experienced in their own lifetimes. Climate Central’s intergenerational analysis, building on the 2021 Thiery et al. study published in Science, finds that 613 million children born between 2003 and 2020 — the precise span of Gen Z — could avoid extreme heatwave exposure if global warming is held to 1.5°C. Current policy is not on that path.

Under the most plausible mid-emissions scenarios (SSP3-7.0), U.S. warming reaches 3°C to 5°C above the 1991–2020 baseline by 2100. New England warms among the fastest. By the time the youngest Gen Zers are in their late seventies, New Hampshire summers will plausibly look like Virginia’s summers do now, the lakes will be ice-free for longer stretches each winter, and the state’s signature ski and foliage economies will be operating on margins their grandparents would not recognize.

The actuarial effect is real and quantifiable. The World Health Organization projects roughly 250,000 additional deaths per year worldwide between 2030 and 2050 from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress alone. That figure does not include downstream effects on disrupted health services, conflict, forced migration, or air quality. Gen Z is the cohort that will be in their thirties and forties when those numbers come due, and in their sixties and seventies when the second-order migration and food-system effects compound.

What This Looks Like in New Hampshire, Specifically

The state’s demographic shape works against this cohort in a specific way that needs to be said plainly. New Hampshire is aging out of being a state that can deliver on its own promises. The math is on record.

By 2030, the number of adults over 65 in New Hampshire is projected to outnumber children. The state has had more deaths than births every year since 2016. Roughly 77 percent of in-migrants from 2019 to 2023 were under forty-five — meaning younger workers are still arriving, but not fast enough to offset the aging-out. Hillsborough County was the only county in the state to log a net domestic out-migration from April 2020 to July 2023, and it was also the only county with more births than deaths, almost entirely on the strength of international migration.

The implication for the Gen Zers who stay here, or who arrive here in their late twenties because they cannot afford Boston, is straightforward. The schools they will send their children to are operating on declining enrollments and rising per-pupil costs. The hospitals they will use are losing experienced staff faster than they can train new ones. The senior-care infrastructure their own parents will need is funded by property tax bases that cannot grow fast enough to meet the demand. The state’s signature absence of a broad-based tax means that every cost of this demographic transition gets pushed down to the town level, where Gen Z renters — who do not directly pay property tax, but absorb it through rent — will quietly subsidize their parents’ Medicaid spend without ever seeing the math.

The Lifespan, the Family, the Retirement That Won’t Exist on the Old Terms

Gen Z will live longer than any previous cohort and will retire later than any previous cohort. Average U.S. life expectancy at birth for the youngest Gen Zers, born in 2012, is roughly 78 to 80 years — with the upper-income decile expected to clear 90, and the lower-income decile barely matching their parents. The gap between those two numbers will widen across the cohort’s lifetime, not narrow. That is the single most reliable finding in the longevity literature.

Retirement, in the form their grandparents knew it — a defined-benefit pension, Social Security replacing 40 percent of pre-retirement income, Medicare covering the major costs of late-life illness — will not be available on the same terms. The Social Security trustees project the trust fund will be unable to pay full scheduled benefits beginning in 2033 to 2035, depending on assumptions. Gen Z will be 21 to 38 years old when that triggers. Either Congress raises the payroll tax cap, raises the retirement age, or trims benefits — most likely some combination of all three. The cohort that absorbs the trim will be Gen Z.

Family formation has already shifted. Gen Z women are marrying later than millennial women did, and millennial women already married later than Gen X women. Median age at first birth in the U.S. has risen above 28 for the first time in the country’s history. Total fertility rate is now well below replacement at roughly 1.6 per woman. Gen Z’s family structures will skew smaller, later-formed, more often single-parent or chosen-family, and more likely to involve adult children living with parents into their late twenties and early thirties — already the modal experience for the cohort.

What Actually Happens to Them

The short version of the forecast, in language a fifteen-year-old can read: most of you will be okay. Not on the terms anyone promised you. Not on the terms the marketing department of the American Dream would prefer. But most of you will be okay.

The upper tier of the cohort — credentialed, networked, geographically mobile, plugged into AI tooling as a multiplier rather than a competitor — will out-earn every prior cohort at the same age, and will accumulate more wealth in their forties and fifties than millennials are accumulating in theirs right now. The compounding will favor them. They will also live the longest, in the best health, and will be the only Gen Zers for whom traditional retirement is even a plausible concept.

The middle tier will be the one to watch. Renters into their forties, mid-career professionals whose entry-level jobs were absorbed by automation, parents of one or two children, holding two or three income streams stacked together, carrying student debt into their fifties under the current repayment regime. Their lives will be functional, not catastrophic, but the slack their parents had — the ability to weather a layoff, a medical event, a divorce — will be much narrower. Most of them will work into their late sixties and early seventies. Many of them will be caring for boomer parents and Gen Alpha children simultaneously by their late thirties — the “sandwich” position that millennials are entering right now will be the standard Gen Z mid-life experience.

The lower tier is where the warning sirens are. Gen Zers who entered the labor force during the 2025–2028 AI displacement window without college credentials, without geographic mobility, and without family wealth to absorb the early scarring will, by mid-career, look statistically like a cohort that never recovered. Skilled-trades work — plumbing, electrical, HVAC, line work — will be one of the few honest exits for that tier, and the trades themselves will boom for exactly this reason. Larry Fink at BlackRock has said as much in his 2026 commentary, and the math agrees with him.

The Honest Conclusion

Generation Z is not a doomed cohort. It is a structurally squeezed cohort. The pressure points are specific: entry-level labor displacement during the AI transition, housing affordability against a wage curve that has not kept up, a mental-health baseline worse than any prior measured cohort, and an aging country whose fiscal commitments to its retirees will be paid disproportionately out of Gen Z’s working years.

None of that is hopeless. The cohort itself is among the most-credentialed, most-diverse, most-aware-of-its-own-mental-health, and most-willing-to-organize generation the country has ever produced. The decisions that will determine whether Gen Z’s lives look like the upper tier’s, the middle tier’s, or the lower tier’s are being made in legislative sessions and corporate hiring decisions right now, this year, while the math still permits choices.

For the version of this cohort living in New Hampshire — the state already running the experiment of late-stage American aging twenty years ahead of the rest of the country — the question is whether Concord builds the housing, retains the workforce, funds the schools and the mental-health infrastructure, and stops pretending the absence of a broad-based tax is the same thing as fiscal responsibility. The Gen Zers who are in this state at age fifteen today will be in their late forties in 2060. What this state builds for them, or fails to build, is what they will retire into.

The forecast is harsh. It is not catastrophic. But it is what the data actually says, not what anyone older than them would prefer the data say. And the difference between the cohort thriving and the cohort being run over is the willingness, by the people currently making the decisions, to look at the math straight.