You wake up tired. You go through the day tired. You come home tired. You scroll your phone for an hour because your brain is too worn out to do anything meaningful but also too wired to sleep. And somewhere between your third cup of chai and your unanswered emails, a quiet thought crosses your mind: Is this really it? Is this what we were working so hard for?
If you are between the ages of 18 and 35 and living in India right now, there is a good chance you know exactly what this feels like. Not because you are weak. Not because your generation is fragile. But because something about the world young Indians have inherited is genuinely, measurably, relentlessly exhausting and almost nobody in power is talking about it honestly.
The numbers that should alarm everyone
Let us start with a fact that deserves far more attention than it has received.
According to the Global Mind Health 2025 Report by Sapien Labs, a study that surveyed over one million people across 84 countries, Indian young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 ranked 60th out of 84 nations in mental wellbeing. Their average Mind Health Quotient score was just 33, placing them firmly in the “Distressed or Struggling” category.
Now here is the part that makes this number even more striking: Indians aged 55 and above scored an average of 96 on the same scale nearly three times higher, ranking 49th globally. The gap between how India’s older generation feels and how its younger generation feels is not a minor generational difference. It is a chasm.
The Indian Psychiatric Society has noted that nearly 60 per cent of all mental health cases in the country are now reported among people aged 35 and below. UNICEF data shows that approximately 7.3 per cent of young Indians aged 18 to 29 are struggling with diagnosable mental health conditions.
These are not small numbers. This is a generation in quiet crisis.
The exhaustion starts early very early
Before you even enter the workforce, India finds ways to wear you down.
The pressure begins in school sometimes as early as Class 6 when children are nudged, pushed, and sometimes shoved toward competitive exam preparation. By the time a student is 17, they may have already spent years defining their entire self-worth by a rank or a percentile. A 2025 NIMHANS study found that 41 per cent of Indian college students reported feeling “seriously lonely” at some point during their degree, a figure that rises to a staggering 67 per cent for outstation students in their first year.
Over 60 per cent of students preparing for competitive exams sleep fewer than six hours per night during their preparation periods. And sleep deprivation, research consistently shows, reduces memory consolidation by up to 40 per cent meaning the very students pushing themselves hardest are often retaining the least.
The system asks young Indians to sacrifice their health, their social lives, and their sleep and then quietly judges them for struggling.
You graduate, the exhaustion does not.
Many young people believe, deeply and sincerely, that the exhaustion is temporary. That once the exams are done, once they land the job, once they move to the city and start earning things will feel lighter.
They rarely do.
The city brings its own kind of weight. Rents that consume a third of your salary. Commutes that eat two hours of your day. A job that may be stable but rarely feels meaningful. A social life that looks vibrant on Instagram and feels hollow in real life. And the constant, grinding awareness that no matter how much you earn, it never quite feels like enough.
The Sapien Labs study found that while 78 per cent of older Indians report feeling close to their families, only 64 per cent of young adults say the same. Urbanisation has quietly eroded the family structures and community networks that once provided a natural buffer against stress. The young professional living alone in Bengaluru or Mumbai or Gurgaon has traded those networks for independence and often pays a psychological price they did not expect.
Nobody is sleeping literally
If there is one number that captures the scale of this exhaustion better than any other, it is this: 92 per cent of Indian workers have called in sick at work at least partly due to sleep deprivation, according to recent workplace data.
The Wakefit Sleep Scorecard 2025 found that 55 per cent of Indians are sleeping past midnight up from 46 per cent in 2022. Nearly 59 per cent report daytime sleepiness that affects their work performance. And despite all of this, India has fewer than 500 trained sleep specialists for a population of 1.4 billion people.
Sleep deprivation is not a personal failing. It is what happens when a generation is asked to work harder, stay online longer, keep up with more, and rest less and is then told that hustling is a virtue and tiredness is weakness.
The comparison machine that never turns off
There is one force that the generation before us did not have to contend with in the same way: the phone in your pocket that shows you at every hour of every day how well everyone else appears to be doing.
Someone from your school batch just got promoted. Someone from college just bought a flat. Someone you barely know just returned from a holiday in Europe. Your feed is a continuous highlight reel of other people’s best moments, and your brain exhausted, sleep-deprived, and already stretched thin compares your behind-the-scenes life to everyone else’s polished performance.
Digital overload, the Sapien Labs study directly links, correlates with impaired emotional regulation, sleep deprivation, and heightened anxiety. The phone that was supposed to connect us has, in many ways, added a new layer to an already heavy load.
Why the older generation does not quite understand
Here is something worth saying plainly: this is not a complaint about hard work. India’s young people are not lazy. They work extraordinarily hard, often harder than any generation before them. They are competing in a job market that is tighter, in cities that are more expensive, with expectations that are higher, and with social support structures that are thinner.
The generation that tells young people to “stop being so sensitive” grew up in a different world, one where a stable government job was achievable, where housing was affordable on a single income, where community and family were geographically close. That world no longer fully exists. The advice built for that world does not always translate.
This is not about being weak. This is about being human.
Exhaustion is not a character flaw. It is a response to conditions. And the conditions that young Indians are navigating right now academic pressure, financial insecurity, urban isolation, digital overload, sleep deprivation, and a cultural expectation to smile through all of it are genuinely difficult.
The first step is simply to name it. To stop calling it laziness or oversensitivity or a lack of gratitude. To recognise that a generation ranking 60th out of 84 countries in mental wellbeing is not a generation that needs to be told to toughen up. It is a generation that needs to be heard, supported, and taken seriously.
Nobody told us growing up would feel this exhausting. But now that we know — perhaps it is time we start talking about it like it actually matters.
Because it does.
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