Article
In recent years, a worrying trend has emerged: young people’s confidence in the future is faltering. According to Sitra’s latest foresight review “What if young people lose faith in the future?”, this is not just a personal challenge for today’s youth – it is a societal issue with far-reaching consequences.
Specialist, Foresight and Training
Published
18.3.2026
Optimism about the future has traditionally been seen as a natural part of youth. Today, that assumption no longer holds. Surveys such as the Youth Barometer and Sitra’s own Future Barometer reveal a sharp decline in the number of young people in Finland who feel positive about the future. In fact, according to the latest Youth Barometer, the share of young people who view their future optimistically has dropped by nearly 20 percentage points compared to previous measurements.
Young people’s darkening outlook for the future is neither a new nor solely a Finnish phenomenon; it appears to reflect a broader sense of the young losing faith in the future in many developed Western countries.
“What if young people lose faith in the future?” foresight review by Sitra (available only in Finnish) explores that question as a critical societal challenge in the Finnish context. It examines the forces shaping young people’s confidence in what lies ahead, the potential consequences if that confidence is not gained back and, why this matters for the whole society. Furthermore, it offers concrete ideas for how we can strengthen belief in a future worth striving for.
Faith in the future affects critical life choices – education, career paths, family formation. These decisions shape not only individual lives but also Finland’s long-term development, productivity and resilience.
As Veera Heinonen, director of Foresight and Education at Sitra, notes: “If the young lose faith in the future, it is as consequential as businesses losing confidence in the future. Their willingness and ability to invest, take risks, grow and create jobs weakens, which affects society negatively. Like businesses, young people could leave Finland if they feel the future does not offer them opportunities.”
The erosion of future confidence among youth can have far-reaching consequences. It may slow economic growth and innovation as young people’s belief in the value of education and willingness to invest in their own future declines. Demographic trends could shift, with lower birth rates and delayed family formation becoming more common.
Education and competence are also at stake: the choices made today will shape the nation’s knowledge base for decades to come. Social trust and democracy may weaken if civic engagement and belief in collective progress diminish. Even national security could be affected if the willingness to defend the country erodes over time. In short, this is a fate-defining question for Finnish society.
The review highlights several factors driving this trend – globally and in Finland. Global megatrends are reshaping the world young people are growing in, and these forces strongly affect how they perceive their own personal prospects.
Looking at the phenomena from the Finnish perspective, at the heart of these developments lies a growing tension around intergenerational fairness. At the moment, we are facing many intergenerational challenges that have far-reaching impacts on the lives of young people. However, in an aging society, young people’s opportunities to influence decision-making are limited.
Economic growth is harder to achieve, public debt is mounting and an aging population adds pressure to the welfare systems – all of which increase financial uncertainty for the young. As the ability of the welfare state to guarantee equal opportunities weakens, young people’s views of reality and the future begin to diverge. Algorithms amplify this fragmentation, creating echo chambers that deepen the divides even further.
Environmental crises add another layer of complexity. The gap between words and actions in climate policy frustrates the young and erodes their sense of security about the future. These dynamics interact in ways that create significant tensions across society and between the younger and older generations, who are now making – or not making – decisions.
Underlying all these changes is one overarching trend: a pervasive zeitgeist that the future is inevitable and offers no real alternatives. This sense of inevitability challenges the very foundation of hope and agency making it harder for young people to believe that they could shape the future.
Discussions about young people’s confidence in the future have typically focused on youth as a life stage. Consequently, the phenomenon has often been treated as a narrow strand in youth or education policy.
“We argue that the weakening of young people’s confidence in the future is also a kind of generational experience that connects the young,” says Otto Tähkäpää, foresight specialist and one of the authors of the review. “At its core lies a tension between the future that appears desirable to young people and the future that seems likely – from this tension arises a sense of intergenerational injustice.”
Young people’s hopes for the future remain fairly traditional and reflect the expectations society places on them. However, things such as stable employment, pensions, home ownership or even a liveable planet no longer seem as self-evident to today’s youth as they did to previous generations.This is why the erosion of young people’s confidence in the future cannot be understood –or solved – by focusing solely on the youth.
“We adults need to build a future that the young can believe in. We have failed in that. We should not try to change the young, but rather reshape society so that they can trust in a good life even in the 2080s,” Tähkäpää emphasises.
The foresight review stresses that the collapse of young people’s confidence in the future is avoidable and, stopping it is essential. This requires swift, determined action and long-term measures across all sectors of society, not merely in youth and education policy.
The review includes proposals to strengthen young people’s confidence in the future. These solutions start with ensuring the basics: reducing child poverty, improving mental health services for the young and creating employment opportunities. Equally important is increasing young people’s agency in shaping the future. And, in the longer term, developing intergenerational fairness in decision-making.
A better future for the young can only be built together with the young – not by guessing what kinds of futures the young might hope for.