Does Anyone Dream Anymore
September 29th, 2025
Photo: Erin Lee
Writer: Sophie Singh
Editor: Stella Cooper
I think I had bigger dreams when I was 11 than I have ever had in my entire adult life. Thinking of career choices was once a fun pastime. Maybe an architect? An actress? An author? The future at that time seemed hopeful and promising, and nothing felt particularly serious. There was no looming sense of doom or nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I wasn’t doing enough to solidify a better life for myself.
Not that I think I have the right to speak for an entire generation, but it’s quite obvious that much of Gen Z has similarly lost hope. Can you really blame us, though? There has hardly been a day in the last decade when the breaking news tab was not filled with story after story. I think we have been so overwhelmed by the current world that we’ve desensitized ourselves to just about everything, no matter how absurd—or even amazing—it is. There is this “I don’t care” attitude that is becoming increasingly prevalent.
When we don’t care, we don’t hope. When we don’t care, we become unkind. When we don’t care, we don’t dream. The self-fulfilling prophecy is real. In one of my cognitive psychology classes, we learned about a study in which people approaching older age were asked how they felt about it. Through a follow-up later on, it was discovered that those who had negative attitudes towards aging actually aged worse. They had chronic diseases at a higher frequency, and some had reached the end of their lives faster than those who had more positive attitudes.
Relevance, your honor? Well, I say all this to highlight the fact that I feel as if we are thinking ourselves into a negative future. Let me be perfectly honest: I do the same. Though I would like to think of myself as a generally pragmatic person, I know that lately, I have been leaning towards a “pessimism first” ideology. It’s hard to maintain a whimsical, hopeful approach to life when I still have so much work to do before it feels like I can even start living.
I want to be clear that I am aware that many of our attitudes towards the current world deal with things that are largely out of our control. I am not delusional or too ignorant to understand that achieving our dreams comes at a cost that is increasingly hard to afford. And, unfortunately, I am not an economist—I hope you can understand that I can’t solve world issues in a 600-word commentary article.
Amongst the current rubble, we need dreamers—now more than ever. The anxieties and chaos of the current times will pass, as they always have. This will not be the first or last time in our lifetimes that the world will feel like this, but it’s important to continuously strive towards a more positive existence. If we put in the work to be better—more optimistic—we can become what our younger selves always dreamed we could be.
