When I was a teenager, I dreamed of a better life. I grew up in an apartment where mice darted through waist-high piles of trash, thanks to my mom’s hoarding. For a year I was in foster care, and other times I was homeless, spending some summer nights in the back of my battered ’92 Corolla. Despite all this, I saw a path out and up: I would ace the SAT, pick the right major at a good college, then graduate into a lucrative career. It was far from a sure bet, but I wagered that this plan could change my destiny — and it did. I got a computer science degree from Harvard, then an engineering job at Google.

I wrote a memoir about my upward trajectory, and in the years since it was published I’ve been invited to speak at colleges around the country. At first, I saw myself as a slightly older role model to students. But while speaking to rising graduates this year, I felt more like the narrator of a historical novel. I started to wonder: Is my perspective relevant at all?

When I graduated from college in 2015, my classmates and I were steeped in millennial values. Advisers urged us to follow our dreams, to do what we loved, and, for women, to lean in. A poster on my dorm room wall featured a quote from Sheryl Sandberg, the personification of 2010s corporate feminism: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I proudly met the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes. Work offered us not just a salary, but a purpose. It was salvation and selfhood and transcendence all at once.

Identifying with your work is no longer the vibe. I started at Google gung ho and left so jaded by sexual harassment that I promised myself I’d never love a job again. The fall of Ms. Holmes and other executives accused of fraud created a societywide disenchantment with supposedly genius company founders. Then came Covid-19, which forced a reappraisal of how much space the office should occupy in our lives. A half-decade later, state minimum wage laws top out under $18 an hour while the stock market mints new millionaires in the U.S. at the rate of 1,200 a day.

Gen Z-ers are often accused of shrugging off work — in fact, they say so themselves — and who can blame them? They’ve watched millennial workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions crumble. Now, they’re entering what’s widely called the worst job market in years. Almost half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The cost of living has soared; buying a house feels impossible. Who knows where we’ll live anyway once the Earth is uninhabitable. One viral meme captured the prevailing sentiment that “basically nobody under 40 right now expects good things to happen ever again.”

I wanted to understand how the outlook of young people has changed, so I reached out to colleges I’ve visited to talk to graduating students about their hopes and fears for their looming adulthood. I found that like job seekers of all ages, they feel terrified and discouraged. But one thing stood out: Many students told me that ambition as I knew it no longer makes sense.