I was sitting in a boardroom recently with a group of executives who were laughing about their new hires—specifically, the 'softness' of twenty-somethings who supposedly can’t handle a forty-hour week without a mental health day. It is a tired, hackneyed trope, and it misses the far more dangerous reality I see from the floor of the modern economy. We are currently witnessing the institutional abandonment of an entire demographic.

For decades, our social contract has been binary: you are either a child protected by the state and parents, or an adult contributing to the pot. But the bridge between those two points has collapsed. We are seeing a generation trapped in a prolonged limbo, a developmental no-man’s-land between eighteen and twenty-five where the traditional markers of maturity—financial independence, a home of one’s own, a stable career path—have become luxury goods rather than standard milestones.

When nearly half of twenty-five-year-olds are still sleeping in their childhood bedrooms, it isn't a failure of character; it is a failure of architecture. The state treats anyone over eighteen as a fully-formed economic unit, yet the market refuses to pay them a wage that allows for the independence that defines adulthood. We have created a 'boomerang' society where the only safety net is the 'Bank of Mum and Dad,' a policy that inherently bakes in inequality for anyone whose parents aren’t flush with cash.

There is a growing, overdue conversation in the halls of power about whether the state needs to intervene in this specific life stage. My argument is that we have no choice. If we continue to treat the years between eighteen and twenty-five as a period of 'finding oneself' rather than a critical period of infrastructure-building, we are inviting a long-term productivity crisis.

We need to stop mocking the term 'adulting' and start looking at why the verb exists in the first place. It exists because the transition to adulthood is no longer a natural slide; it is a climb up a glass cliff. From the factory floor to the startup incubator, the message to young people is that they are on their own until they 'make it.' But without state-backed paths into housing and specialized vocational support that acknowledges their unique precarity, they won't make it. We are stalling the engines of our own future by refusing to recognize that the gap between adolescence and maturity requires a new kind of social scaffolding. It’s time to stop waiting for them to grow up and start building the environment that actually allows them to do so.