Gen Z Is Delaying Marriage and Kids, and Calling It Self-Care

A new term is making the rounds to describe how young Americans are living: "solomaxxing." It means treating your single years not as a phase but as the whole point, a lifestyle to optimize rather than a bridge to something bigger.

That framing isn't coming from a fringe corner of the internet. According to a global survey cited by Our National Conversation, 42% of adults aged 18 to 34 say relationships interfere with their self-development. Roughly 30% of Gen Z and millennials say they don't intend to have kids at all. Only 45% of Gen Z women aged 18 to 34 say they definitely want children.

Those numbers describe a real shift in how a generation defines a good life. Marriage, kids, and family obligation used to be treated as the reward at the end of the work. Now they're treated by a lot of young people as the burden that gets in the way of the work.

The Fair Case for Gen Z's Skepticism

Gen Z's pessimism isn't coming from nowhere. Our National Conversation frames the generation's gloomy economic outlook as a rational reaction to what it calls a "broken economic promise," with ownership and financial stability feeling out of reach for a lot of young people.

If a young person looks at that landscape and concludes that owning a home, raising kids, and building savings all at once looks like a stretch, that's a reasonable calculation. A person facing that landscape might reasonably decide caution about big commitments is prudent planning, not a moral failure.

Yet a chunk of the generation has responded not by fighting for a better shot at the old goals, but by rebranding giving up on them as enlightenment.

Delayed Gratification Used to Be the Whole Point

Growing up means learning to trade a smaller reward now for a bigger one later. That's the entire concept behind saving instead of spending, studying instead of scrolling, staying in a hard marriage instead of bailing at the first rough patch.

"Buy now, pay later" checkout options are a small, dumb symbol of a much bigger pattern described in the same reporting: with ownership seemingly out of reach, Gen Z has embraced buy-now-pay-later spending, forsaking delayed gratification for immediate comfort. It's a mindset that says the reward later isn't guaranteed, so why not take the smaller one now.

That mindset isn't wrong as a description of economic reality. It's wrong as a strategy for building a life. Ownership, family, and community always required sacrifice before there was any certainty of the payoff. Nobody who got married or bought a house decades ago had a contractual guarantee it would work out either. They did it anyway because the culture around them said the risk was worth taking.

What Changed Isn't Just the Economy, It's the Standard

Our National Conversation's framing gets at something real: the threshold for what counts as a "worthwhile sacrifice" has moved. It's not just that having kids costs more now. It's that, as the outlet puts it, a whole generation has been sold self-fulfillment as true fulfillment, treating self-care as an end instead of a means.

That's a cultural message, not just an economic one. No survey number alone explains why someone with a stable job and a stable partner decides kids are a burden on a "liberating lifestyle" rather than the point of having a stable job and partner in the first place.

Family, marriage, and community were never supposed to be optional add-ons for people who already had everything else figured out. They were the thing that gave the rest of it meaning. A generation that treats commitment as the enemy of self-development is going to end up with plenty of self and not much else.

What's Actually Unresolved

The open question is whether this is a permanent generational shift or a temporary reaction to a brutal stretch of economic pessimism that will correct itself once the outlook improves. The reporting notes that Gen Z and younger millennials report the lowest self-reported well-being in the country, with a lack of purpose or belief that daily efforts matter cited as a driving force — a data point that cuts against the idea that opting out of commitment is making anyone happier.

No source in this discussion offers a policy fix, and the surveys cited don't track whether attitudes shift as this cohort ages into their 30s and 40s. Whether Gen Z's stated preferences today predict their actual choices later is the real test, and it hasn't been run yet.