This 27-Year-Old Is Trying To Recover From "Financial Anxiety" — Here's How It Affects Her Daily Life

Welcome back to Gen Z Journals, where we highlight the day-to-day lives of individual Gen Z'ers from all walks of life. From weekly expenses to recent challenges, here's where we glimpse into the lives of one of the most pivotal generations of the moment.

This week: Meet Hayley (she/her), a 27-year-old from northern Colorado. The remainder of this post will be from her POV.

Though it’s not the long-term goal, the current job market forced me to take the first job that was offered to me after my recent move to Colorado, which is working the front desk at an animal clinic. I started at $17/hour, and after a two-month-long battle, I finally was able to get a raise to make $18/hour. I usually only get scheduled for about 33 hours a week, as that is all they can usually afford to schedule me. So I don’t even get a full 40 hours a week. Fun!

I’ve been working at the animal clinic for a year now, which has felt like an eternity due to pinching pennies. Earning $17/hour doesn’t stretch as far as it did in the last state I lived in since Colorado is a high-tax state. Between looking for a different or second job in an already-sabotaged job market, perpetually stressing about choosing between paying my bills or eating well, and the resulting lack of money to spend on myself or to explore my new surroundings, I’ve felt like a shell of myself living in low-power mode for the past year.

Growing up as a "poverty child," I’m familiar with how to stretch my dollar and financially plan ahead (which is different than budgeting!). I’ve never had a desire to budget. Though I do think it’s a very useful and important skill to have, I spend enough of my mental energy on money already, so I don’t want to spend more of it by becoming hyper-aware in an extremely concrete way of just how much money I don’t have.

I generally operate off my monthly expenses:

And that’s not even including any sort of "fun" money. I usually set aside $50 per paycheck for my spending money, though it gets spent much faster than I’d like. Thankfully, I’ve been able to get just a liiittle bit ahead, so I’m not spending my last dollars on something frivolous. I usually pull from whatever I happen to have leftover from my bills for whatever spending I do — including eating out (in fact, it’s mostly just eating out since I don’t really get to spend on material things lately). But of course, that leads to feeling guilty for spending any money on myself instead of saving it in an increasingly futile-feeling attempt to get ahead.

On days I work:

On days I don't work, it’s just vibes, man. It’s never really a thing of note, though, as the financial anxiety I’ve experienced over the last two years has hampered my sense of self and destroyed all fulfillment I get from hobbies. I’m trying to get back to things that used to bring me joy, but since my financial concerns aren’t resolved yet, it’s hard to have the sense of safety required to feel comfortable spending time with myself. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is so real, and I curse capitalism for not providing the basic necessities to everyone so we can actually have a semblance of a sense of self.

I aim for eight hours of sleep a night, though I usually do best with about nine. That doesn’t happen if I work the next day, though, as I’m always reluctant to have to go to bed. Where I sleep, though, is a different matter. I slept in my partner’s room for the majority of this past winter (the seasonal depression on top of the depression from my relentless financial anxiety made this past winter hellish). Now that I have a decent mattress, I’m trying to get better about sleeping in my room. Ideally, I’d sleep in my room during the week and sleep in my partner's bed during the weekend.

I'm grateful to have my own space now, as it acts as a way to put more intention into my day-to-day. Time spent alone in my room is an intentional for me to do what I enjoy. Time spent with my partner is intentional time spent together. Everything in my day-to-day routine is much sweeter because I'm always excited to either spend time with myself to try to rebuild my sense of self after weathering (hopefully the worst of) the storm of the past year, or spend time with my partner either watching our current show, watching a movie, or whatever other activities we tend to do together.

I have been living with my partner of two years. We were friends for five whole years before he realized how cool I was and fell for me. I am a master of patiently playing the long game; however, that was after eight long years of being agonizingly single. I always felt that I would feel more capable of handling the ins and outs of the day-to-day if I had a romantic partner, but in those eight years, no one ever met my standards. They’re not necessarily high — I know what I want/need and could tell quickly if someone would meet that criteria. This, in turn, caused a lot of internal conflict and drove me further into my loneliness. I have plenty of amazing friends who kept me company, but I knew then, just as I know now, that it’s not the same.

In recent years, I’ve seen the general feelings towards the traditional connotation of “settling down” have loosened, thanks to millennials and Gen Z’ers alike. It’s far more accepted now that everybody is going to want something different out of life and there’s a lot more respect for people that exercise that freedom for themselves. That being said, I fall into the “choosing not to have kids” category for many, many reasons. I still want a house, for sure, and along with plenty of other people my age, I’m just waiting for the housing market to finally crash so I can actually afford one.

Two years into college, I changed majors from music to film. After that, I didn’t get to work in the film industry until four years later. Even then, I could only manage to find work in the COVID-19 safety department, where we were treated like dirt under the bottom of the barrel. After working on two reality TV shows, I was blessed enough to get to work on a scripted limited series. Over the next eight months, I became intimately familiar with how many hours film crew workers have to work for no good reason. In my four years of reading, researching, and learning about film as a medium, no one ever mentioned how film works as an industry.

I was devastated when I went home at the end of the first week of filming with the windows down at 3 a.m. and the music blaring so I wouldn’t fall asleep behind the wheel after working 75 hours that week. And some departments work even more than that. Regularly. It’s been three years this week since that first week of filming. The limited series has come and gone, passed from the general public’s minds. But my heart is still in pieces, knowing nothing has changed. How am I supposed to work in the medium I’ve loved my entire life when it’s not sustainable and not what I want for my quality of life? Should I even still pursue my dreams?

In a word: recovery. I’m still not making enough money to be comfortable, and I won’t have enough savings to feel a sense of peace for quite some time. I’m trying to navigate how to rediscover myself while still not feeling safe to do so. Anyone who’s had to find themselves after a personal disaster knows how hard it is, but it’s even worse when your physical needs aren’t being met. It’s like starting to peek your head out over the edge of the trenches, knowing there’s likely someone on the other side watching and waiting to see a helmet. But you have to take the chance.

This year, I’d like to take a small step toward opening my small business. I have an idea that I have a lot of faith in, but it requires me to learn an entirely new skill that feels very daunting and intimidating to start. Plus, waiting on the other side of learning that skill is all the rest of the chaotic logistics on how to even start a small business. One step at a time, I guess, but fingers crossed!

Social media has turned the political landscape into a digital bloodbath. Politics has always given me anxiety, but now social media has made me feel like I’ll be crucified for even staying silent. But the reality of the matter is that I have too much going on in my personal life to have the energy to spare to engage in such time and energy-consuming issues. I genuinely don’t know how Gen Z does it — are y'all okay? I know where I stand on some issues, but I don’t have the time to gather information to figure out how I feel about other issues. But that doesn’t make any issue not important or less important than another.

I feel like I shouldn’t be afraid to be berated with comments about how I’m a horrible person or be afraid that I’m going to get doxxed or be afraid that I’m going to be physically hunted and harmed for saying this in an article that’s going to be published on the internet forever. This is my self-preservation, and everyone should respect it. Living life on this planet is hard enough.

The closeness of my relationship with my family depends on which person you’re talking about. My immediate family has all scattered to the wind, spanning three different states. As far as emotional proximity goes, all three of my family members fall on different places on the spectrum. I have a ton of people I consider friends, but I only have one (besides my partner) who I talk to regularly. We live in different states, though, so we never get to hang out in person. Everyone my age is generally too exhausted to really engage in any sort of extracurricular socialization besides whatever hobbies they participate in to keep themselves sane. Though I respect their need for space and energy conservation, I do miss the days when the sentiment that I could pick up the phone and call someone out of the blue to catch up and shoot the breeze wasn’t so vehemently rejected (remember, I’m 27).

As for making new friends, I find it nearly impossible post-school. Most of the people on my "friends list" are people I met in college. Thankfully, in my area, there’s a very lively social culture with a vast array of hobbies and activities to engage in — but that makes it all the more painful that the past year I’ve spent here I’ve been too broke to have the money to go out and do those things and potentially make local friends.

As someone who’s in that weird micro-generation of people born 1997–2000ish, I can identify with aspects of both generations. I grew up with two older sisters, so socially and culturally, I feel like I am more of a millennial. Something I feel isn’t understood enough about Gen Z is the relentless, persistent pressure. I weep at the thought of the amount of pressure Gen Z faces because of the breakneck speed of the evolution of technology and, thus, social media. And I don’t even really know just how bad it is — I graduated high school before the Instagram logo changed.

I was a teenager at a time when the Internet was still fun and hadn’t lost its innocence. (Vine was the best era on the internet, and I will die on this hill.) So the thought that Gen Z had to/has to deal with normal teenager problems, with the added MASSIVE factor of the constant pressure brought about by today’s social media environment, breaks my heart. Gen Z is dealing with enough (I never even touched on politics, the state of the global environment, the American economy, and all the other complex issues!). We deserve better.

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Thanks to some capital T Trauma I had when I was entirely way too young, I’ve spent my life feeling both ahead and behind at the same time. I was forced to mature very quickly and reconcile with adult concepts (which most adults don’t handle well) at a young age. So, emotionally, I was always miles ahead of everyone else in school. And that amount and kind of trauma, at a physically developmental age, had left me feeling, even now, that irreparable damage was done.

On the flip side of that, because I became intimately familiar with how fleeting life is and what it means to be a human on the planet Earth with only one life to live (that we know of), I never attached myself too closely to social media. I’ve pretty much always seen it as a sham and kept my distance. I’m on it, sure, and I’ve had my periods of spending too much time scrolling, but I’ve always known not to use it to gauge how the world is truly operating. Thanks to my trauma, I know just how much of a performance someone can put on for the world and how nasty they can be behind closed doors. I will likely be in therapy for the rest of my life because my current life never stops happening, and that has to be dealt with before I can work on the past.

If you relate to this story, let me know why in the comments below! If you have a Gen Z Journal of your own to share, you can fill out this short form with just the basics. We'll be in touch to discuss it further if your story is a fit.

Note: This submission has been edited for length and/or clarity.