How Do You Plan for a Future You’re Afraid Of? Enter: The New Thirty-Something Existential Crisis

I’ve been feeling very existential lately. Caught in loops, obsessing over my life and what the future may or may not look like. Constantly dwelling on how to reconcile my personal aspirations—and equally my personal failings—with the climate crisis, politics and the general sense of volatility that seems to be coming at us from all angles

I’m in my thirties, which means good luck and health willing, I have lived approximately 37% of my total life, assuming I reach 83 (the average life expectancy for British women). Yet if you overheard my friends’ conversations, you’d be forgiven for thinking we were in our final years; such is our sense of resignation.

Last month, a colleague and I lamented how we felt like we had “nothing” to look forward to as we scanned the news and drank coffee. We both recognised that this wasn’t true, listing examples of joy-filled plans to remind ourselves, but that’s how we felt at 8.25 am on a Tuesday, faced with the headlines.

No matter how often we’re told that our 30s and 40s hold unknown promise and self-understanding, the start of “real” adulthood is a tricky adjustment: out of the frying pan of our 20s, into the panic of our early 30s. But this panic isn’t simply that we’re running out of time to build the lives we thought we’d have. It’s that we’re being asked to commit to futures we’ve spent years learning to fear.

Women like me are reaching the point where we’re expected to make some of the biggest investments in our futures: decisions about children, housing, relationships and careers, after spending much of our adult lives absorbing reasons to question what that future will look like.

We’ve experienced repeated periods of uncertainty, from the financial crisis and austerity to Brexit, Covid and worsening climate anxiety. Meanwhile, social media delivers a relentless stream of global crises, alongside growing concerns about AI’s potential impact on our working lives. For women, this is compounded by the daily reminders of misogyny, from the rise of the manosphere to cases of femicide.

We can feel impossibly behind before adult life has really begun.

The world has always been uncertain, but we’ve never had such immediate access to its crises. I feel like I’m holding my potential life in my hands like a baby bird, trying to keep my fingers loose enough not to squash it.

I’m not alone. A 2025 NBC News poll found that 66% of young American women aged 18–29 felt anxious or worried about the future most or almost all of the time. Researchers have also identified a gender gap in economic optimism, with men reporting greater optimism than women.

Today is a particularly contradictory time for us: we have more agency over our lives than many of the women before us, yet the world is one we struggle to visualise ourselves in. We’re encouraged to treat our futures as individual pursuits we have control over, while having spent years learning to expect the unexpected.

For the first two years of my 30s, I’ve grappled with feeling at a precipice; moving forward while dragging my feet and looking anxiously over my shoulder.

I can’t seem to save any money, a side effect of having a career I like and living in an unaffordable city (thanks, London), yet I’m expected to be at an age where I can future-proof. The motivation to sacrifice in the present is quickly offset by a muddied vision of the next few decades.

This anxiety has had material consequences. For several years while self-employed, I didn’t pay into a pension. Part of what fuelled that avoidance was how difficult I found it to believe I’d ever get to enjoy one.

And it’s not just pensions. Average UK property values rose from roughly £194,000 to over £272,000 in a decade, leaving younger generations trying to establish themselves in a housing market very different from the one their parents entered.

With the cost of living making saving and investing feel increasingly difficult, why sacrifice today for a tomorrow you have so little faith in? And yet, what happens if you don’t?

It’s a strange position to be in: expected to make responsible, long-term financial decisions while struggling to believe the structures we’re relying on will still exist in the same form when we need them.

Then there’s the question of whether or not to have children. Even for women who are certain they don’t want them, it can be difficult to escape the doubt society seeds in us, playing on fears of loneliness and purpose.

But the question isn’t simply whether we can build the lives we want in time—balancing all the variables of patriarchal life that make motherhood an absurd juggling act—it’s what kind of world those lives will exist in.

I want children, and yet some days the idea terrifies me so much that I work myself into a panic attack. Research has linked climate anxiety with pregnancy avoidance, while other studies suggest women experience greater climate anxiety than men.

Other days, it feels like life is racing past me; like I’m trying to run for a train I know has left the station.

Perhaps this is where today’s 30-something crisis diverges from the familiar Panic Years narrative. The pressure to make the “right” decisions hasn’t disappeared, but our faith that those decisions will lead to a secure, predictable future feels increasingly fragile.

I’ve waded fully into doomerism at times—a term that describes a fatalistic worldview, particularly the belief that global crises are irreversible—keeping my head just above water as I stretch myself onto tiptoes, smushing hope down beneath me.

Many of these anxieties are rational. The threats we’re worried about are real, and dismissing them as irrational pessimism doesn’t help. But when my individual choices feel so insignificant compared with the forces shaping the world, it’s easy to become paralysed by inaction.

Doomerism, while understandable, isn’t an answer

In End Times Fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write about the choice between surrendering to an apocalyptic vision of the future and collectively building a different one. “We didn’t choose to be born into a fight quite so fateful,” they write, “but we have reached a choice point.”

I’ve returned to that idea several times lately. What resonates with me is the distinction between recognising the threats ahead and surrendering to the belief that nothing we do can make a difference.

On an individual level, I’ve realised that this means continuing to make decisions about my own life. Action, choices and forward motion are necessary for building a future, both collectively and personally. That doesn’t erase the realities we’re facing or mean convincing myself that everything will be fine.

But it does mean accepting that certainty isn’t a prerequisite for building a life. If it were, our lives would be incredibly small.

This year, I made a few big choices: I had endometrial surgery, got married and took on new, long-term creative projects. In order to make them, I had to start actually believing tomorrow could come.

Through therapy, reading, limiting my screen time (I know, but really, it helps) and deep thinking, I’ve trained myself into an optimism that hasn’t come naturally. Slowly, my existentialism has felt less crushing.

I still don’t know what the future holds. But I’m beginning to understand that I can’t wait until I’m certain about it before deciding what I want my life to look like.