Not new. But new to you.

I was watching a movie last night about twenty-somethings who felt hopeless about the state of the world. They were frustrated with work, uncertain about the future, and questioning whether the institutions around them could actually be trusted.

And I thought to myself, Well, gosh, this is not new at all.

Not long ago, I watched a documentary about a cult that started in the 1970s. The documentary talked about the social conditions that helped the cult grow. People had lost faith in religion. They had lost faith in government. They were questioning the institutions they had grown up trusting and looking for something—or someone—to believe in.

And I thought, Jeesh, maybe this is the right time to start a cult.

I’m kidding.

Mostly.

But what struck me was how familiar all of it sounded.

Go back to the 1990s, when I was in my twenties. We had Slacker, Singles, Reality Bites, and Swingers. Young adults were discontented with their lives. They questioned work, relationships, success, and what adulthood was supposed to look like.

We even had an entire generation stereotyped as “slackers.”

Sound familiar?

Today, twenty-somethings have plenty of legitimate things to worry about. Housing is expensive. Politics are divisive. Technology is changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence is raising questions about what work will look like. Social media gives you a front-row seat to every terrible thing happening anywhere in the world.

Those things are real.

But the feeling that the world is falling apart and nobody knows what they’re doing?

That part isn’t new.

It’s just new to you.

I don’t mean that dismissively. In fact, I think recognizing it can be comforting.

When you’re twenty-five and questioning everything, you don’t have the experience of having been twenty-five before. So naturally, the uncertainty feels enormous. You don’t yet know which problems will pass, which ones you’ll learn to live with, and which ones will eventually seem much smaller than they do today.

But the same thing happens at every stage of life.

I’m experiencing things now that I’ve never experienced, because I’ve never been this age before. There are questions about getting older, family, career, purpose, mortality, and what I want the next chapter of my life to look like.

Those experiences are new to me.

But they’re not new.

Millions of people have stood exactly where I’m standing, just as millions of people have stood where today’s twenty-somethings are standing.

Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

The older I get, the more I understand that.

History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but human beings do. We worry. We lose faith in institutions. We wonder whether the previous generation screwed everything up. We search for meaning. We fall in love. We get our hearts broken. We worry about money. We question our careers. We wonder whether we’re wasting our lives.

Then another generation comes along and discovers all those feelings for the first time.

Maybe there’s some comfort in realizing that our particular crisis isn’t the first crisis.

Other people have been here.

They survived it. They learned from it. Some even found meaning in it.

And someday, if we’re fortunate enough to stick around, we’ll be the older people watching another generation discover its own version of the same questions.

What are you living through for the first time?