Mind the Gap: Reinvention may be the answer to Gen Z’s quarter-life crises

CURATED READS FOR GEN Z—AND THEIR Z-CURIOUS COLLEAGUES

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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities

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An image linking to the web page “Meet the newest member of the consumer C-suite: The chief transformation officer” on McKinsey.com.

Welcome back! This week, we’re talking about the process of reinvention—no matter your age.

For Gen Z, the quarter-life crisis—that existential dread that comes in your 20s as you try to figure out who you really are—can be a debilitating struggle. Later, this kind of early angst can seem trivial: How can a 20-something, with an expanse of possibilities and relatively few responsibilities, feel so much anguish so early in their life?

For plenty of high-achieving people, navigating the ambiguity of adulthood—and in doing so, confronting the question of, what am I really doing with my life?—can bring on that sullenness. If you’ve set out on a career path, there’s a real chance that it may not be fulfilling you in the ways you had hoped.

How early is too early to reinvent yourself? The subject of reinvention may seem like something reserved for midcareer pop stars, but it can be one way to ease the distress that naturally comes with adulthood and the related difficulty in uncovering one’s purpose.

Gen Zers might actually be incrementally reinventing themselves without realizing it: while employee churn rose overall during the so-called Great Resignation, Gen Zers are known to job hop, switching roles at more than double the rate in 2022 than they did in 2019, according to a LinkedIn Workforce Confidence survey . That compares with 24 percent more job hopping for millennials and 4 percent less for boomers in the same time span, the survey found.

But pursuing intentional reinvention is about more than job hopping. What if you took a page from a company’s transformation playbook? It may sound odd, but applying the principles of corporate reinvention, as outlined by McKinsey senior partner Sandra Sancier-Sultan , to your own life actually translates pretty easily:

• Separate the ‘what’ from the ‘how’: Define who you want to be and what you want to accomplish without fixating on the steps required to get there.

• Involve your teams in the ‘how’: You might not have a “team” yet, but you can ask for advice on how to get started from trusted mentors and coworkers.

• Tackle the skills gap: If you have an idea for what you’d like to accomplish, figure out which skills you’ll need to learn to make that idea a reality.

Here’s another way to think about it. In Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work by Joanne Lipman, reinvention is characterized by “the four Ss: search, struggle, stop, solution.” Search is about exploring your interests, which may end up becoming the center of your reinvention later; you begin to struggle when you’ve started to disconnect from your previous identity but don’t yet know what your future looks like; the stop comes when something disrupts your previous life—in our example, it may mean leaving one job for another, which makes way for the solution, aka, your reinvention.

A couple notes about this tidy framework: reinvention can feel messy, ambiguous, tedious, and, often, out of reach. That doesn’t mean you’re not well on your way there. In the search for reinvention, Lipman warns that people often give up on their newly charted course too soon.

This metamorphosis can be daunting to think about. Whether you want to think of yourself as the chief transformation officer of your own life, the good news is that it’s never too late—or too soon—to get closer to who you want to be.
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