Back in September 2025, we were discussing potential topics for the next Rift (Starling’s annual pro bono project in collaboration with quant agency Tapestry and creative agency Pablo).

Our previous study had explored the rift between young men and women, a deeply concerning topic which at the time seemed absent from the headlines. Our focus was to understand why this severe political and ideological break had come about and to identify potential spaces for innovation to heal the rift. After our launch, Adolescence hit screens and this previously neglected topic reached mainstream debate. The response was incredible. From UN Women to The Guardian, from Movember to major youth brands, people wanted to talk.

This time, however, the signals we were picking up felt even more existential. The rupture was no longer just between young people and each other, but between young people and the future itself. What happens when the idea of the future, particularly a progressive one, feels hollowed out?

Young people today are navigating a convergence of destabilising forces. Artificial intelligence is reshaping education and work at speed, driving cognitive offloading and anxieties about relevance. Social media’s addictive architectures expose them, relentlessly, to global crises they cannot control. Degrees no longer guarantee opportunity. Hard work no longer guarantees security. Salaries stagnate while housing costs soar. The labour market has become ‘tinderised’ and automated, with young people reporting feeling dehumanised by AI-led recruitment processes before their careers have even begun.

This uncertainty doesn’t stop with young people. Parents, carers and teachers, acutely aware that today’s trajectories look nothing like their own, feel paralysed by not knowing how to guide them. 

But what we uncovered goes beyond paralysis and uncertainty. Our research points to something more structural and more dangerous: a culture of futurelessness. A collective failure to produce credible, positive and inspiring stories about what lies ahead.

We identified what we call a ‘cliff edge of optimism’. Around the age of 16, belief in the future drops sharply – 16-24 year-olds are five times more likely to say they are scared about the future than those aged 12–15. These should be the years of experimentation, risk-taking and expansive possibility. Instead, they are increasingly experienced as ‘lost years’.

Over half of 12–24-year-olds told us it would have been easier to be born into an earlier generation. This sentiment helps explain why populist political movements gain traction by promising a return to an idealised past. When the future feels foreclosed, nostalgia becomes a refuge.

Culturally, young people are surrounded by a backward gaze. Nostalgia-driven content dominates feeds and screens. Culture endlessly remixes the past rather than investing in new visions. Technological tools like AI, trained on historical data, structurally reinforce retrospection. The cultural ecosystem struggles to help young people imagine what could come next.

This matters because society has always relied on youth to generate counterculture, innovation and new perspectives. When that imaginative capacity is starved, culture stops moving forwards and we all lose out. 

Faced with this vacuum, young people are not giving up but they are turning inward. We observed the ‘privatisation of hope’: young people remain optimistic about their personal futures, yet pessimistic about collective, national or global ones. Trust in institutions is low; belief in shared progress, and the cultural ideas which propel them there, is weaker still. Instead, hope is channelled into self-improvement and individual resilience. Over half of 12-24 year-olds say they are working hard to be successful; nearly half are focused on becoming better people or learning new skills.

There is something admirable here: a resilience forged under pressure. But there is also a risk. When the future is imagined as zero-sum, success is at someone else’s failure. An alternative economy emerges in which identity, creativity and even leisure are relentlessly monetised as protection against precarity. As Naomi Klein observed, neoliberal insecurity has made the commodification of the self feel like the only route to stability for young people.

Naming this condition matters. Futurelessness is not a natural state; it is produced. By diagnosing its symptoms – the cliff edge of optimism, the lost years, the privatisation of hope – we create the possibility of intervention.

Crucially, young people are not asking to be left alone. Seven in 10 say they feel misunderstood by older generations, and nearly three-quarters believe those generations could do more to support them. There is a hunger for guidance.

Brands, institutions and insight leaders must reckon with their role in this failure of imagination. Many marketing models are trapped in the present tense, constrained by short-termism. Brands are narrowly defined as a collection of assets to be deployed for attention, rather than resources for building meaning or prototyping new futures.

Insight should resist the relentless cycle of chasing trends rather than looking to the past to understand cultural currents which resist the tide. AI is deployed to organise what’s out there rather than to open up new horizons. Specifically, its deviation to the mean is a challenge to the insight industry’s ability to act as a partner to innovation, where deviance from the mean is the real trigger for breakthrough ideas. 

Our research points to three areas of innovation that can help us fall back in love with the future: rebuilding collective narratives of progress; creating cultural spaces that reward experimentation over nostalgia; and restoring intergenerational responsibility for imagining what comes next.

The future does not disappear on its own. It fades when we stop telling convincing stories about why it is worth believing in. Reclaiming it is not naïve optimism; it is a necessary act of cultural repair.

Annie Auerbach and Adam Chmielowski are co-founders of cultural insight studio Starling