On TikTok and Instagram, three words sum up a whole generation: "Not me buying a little treat for coping, again!" The irony is hard to miss. Young people post about their "coping mechanisms" with a blend of self-deprecation and quiet despair. Memes instead of therapy. Online shopping instead of self-care. What looks like a digital joke reveals, on closer inspection, a serious reality: a generation trying to make sense of its own psychological overload by borrowing clinical vocabulary. The trend toward "therapy-speak" can grate. But when tens of thousands of young people have to describe their daily lives this way, it should give us pause.
A Generation Under Pressure
The numbers are unambiguous. 51 percent of young people and young adults suffer from regular stress, according to the "Jugend in Deutschland 2024" trend study. Inflation worries 65 percent of them, fear of war weighs on 60 percent, and affordable housing concerns 54 percent. The COPSY study conducted by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, which has tracked the mental health of children and young people since 2020, adds further troubling findings: 21 percent of young people report a reduced quality of life. That is five percentage points more than before the pandemic.
Society's response? Often enough, a mixture of dismissal and impatience. Too sensitive, too demanding, not resilient enough, the accusations run. The old narrative of the "mollycoddled youth" is ritually invoked, especially in debates about working hours. Yet the statistics tell the opposite story: labour-force participation among 20- to 24-year-olds is currently at its highest level in years.
"Anyone who takes the situation seriously must also ask who is actually responsible for the resilience of young people."
The label "Generation Crisis" is no longer a buzzword. It is a sober description. The Covid pandemic, the climate crisis, wars, soaring living costs. As a vulnerable group without genuine political representation, young people are hit hardest by these overlapping emergencies. And they feel powerless.
What Resilience Actually Means
Resilience, the word is everywhere right now. It sounds like the answer to everything, a shield against the world's demands. Yet what few people know is this: resilience is not a magic word. The term is often equated with toughness, or even invulnerability, a state that neither individuals nor societies can ever truly reach. Resilience is far more than that. And, at the same time, far less.
From 1955 onward, the American psychologist Emmy Werner produced landmark findings through her long-term study on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Over four decades she followed more than 700 children as they grew up, many of them under adverse conditions: poverty, unstable family environments, parents with mental illness. One third of those children nevertheless developed into psychologically healthy adults. Werner's conclusion: resilience can be learned.
Research backs this up. Dr. Isabella Helmreich of the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research in Mainz explains: "Resilience does have a genetic component, but a large part of it can also be learned." Studies suggest that resilience is only 30 to 50 percent genetically determined. The rest develops through the interplay between a person and their environment.
The simplest image for resilience is a coiled spring that returns to its original shape after being compressed. Reality is more complex. Resilience goes far beyond mere "coping" skills. It encompasses strategies for managing difficulty, adaptability, and the capacity for transformation. Expecting young people to develop these abilities intuitively, while they face climate change, authoritarian regimes, and the threat of war, is unrealistic. And unfair.
A Task for Everyone
Responsibility for resilience must not be offloaded entirely onto individuals. This is especially true for a young generation that is frequently marginalised in multiple ways. To do so would be to ignore the political failures that contributed to this situation in the first place. It would also misread the nature of personal resilience: building it is not a sprint, but a marathon.
Schools have a key role to play. They reach almost every young person. But a school subject called "Resilience" would not, on its own, be enough. Education journalist Bent Freiwald puts it well: the real task is to "organise life in society in such a way that the majority of children are not already struggling with mental health problems."
The resilience of young people is a challenge for society as a whole, and therefore a political mandate. It can only succeed through the combined effort of schools, out-of-school education, civil society, families, and social networks. Politicians must create the right conditions and prioritise the needs of young people. Not only because physical and mental health is a fundamental right. The resilience of young people is also decisive for the survival of a democracy already under pressure.
Democracy Needs Resilient Citizens
A resilient democracy needs a functioning civil society: people who hold a basic trust in democratic institutions while also questioning their processes critically, who can tolerate tension and take part in public debate as active citizens. Losing young people for this task, even partially, is catastrophic. Yet those who are psychologically overburdened are rarely in a position to take it on.
The COPSY study shows: children with strong social and family resources have better mental health and are less affected by anxiety and depressive symptoms. By contrast, children from families with low levels of education, growing up in cramped housing with parents who are themselves under psychological strain, are particularly at risk. One third of children and young people are regularly exposed to distressing content on social media, including unfiltered news about global crises.
What Young People Are Already Doing
And the young people themselves? Caught in the currents of multiple crises, they have managed to recognise their situation, put it into words, and carve out spaces, at least in the digital world, that reflect their own needs. Something many generations before them did not manage. Behind demands for a four-day working week there is rarely laziness; there is, more often, a desire for an everyday life that leaves room for mental health.
That is, in its own way, quite resilient. It deserves respect, not dismissal.
Meta-analyses show that higher resilience correlates with better mental health. The relationship is supported by evidence of moderate effect size, though it is shaped by additional factors. As people age, the link between resilience and negative indicators such as anxiety and depression tends to weaken. In women, resilience has a stronger effect on mental health than in men.
Practical Steps, Not Magic Formulas
The American Psychological Association developed its "Road to Resilience" model to demonstrate exactly this: resilience can be trained, step by step. Self-care, social bonds, realistic goals, accepting change as part of life. None of these are revolutionary insights, but they are effective steps, provided the right environment makes them possible.
The young generation has long understood that it needs support. It has said so, often using the tools of its time: in memes, in posts, in ironic comments about its own "coping" strategies. Perhaps the older generation should finally listen. Not with accusations of oversensitivity, but with a willingness to take responsibility. Resilience is not a superpower. It is a task we have to tackle together. Only then will the "Generation Crisis" have a chance to become a generation of strength.
