My husband and I have been on what I can only describe as a wedding circuit this year. The invitations keep coming, the suits keep getting pulled out of the closet, and we keep showing up at venues we never imagined a wedding could happen in. And I have to tell you — I haven’t had this much fun at weddings in decades.

Because these kids? They’re not doing it the way we did it. And it’s glorious.

We’ve been to a wedding where the bride and groom walked into the ballroom and, instead of doing the slow processional toward the head table, immediately started dancing. With each other. With their guests. They never stopped. There was no awkward table-by-table greeting tour where you watch the bride try to eat cold chicken between hugs. They just — danced. All night. With everyone. It was the most fun I’ve had at a reception in years, and I left thinking: why didn’t we ever do it this way?

We’ve been to a wedding where the couple wrote their own vows and both wept while reading them. Not a polite-tear-in-the-corner-of-the-eye situation. I mean full, openhearted, my-mascara-is-gone weeping. And then everyone in the room was weeping too, because how could you not? They were telling each other things in front of us that were so specific and so true that it felt like we were being trusted with something sacred.

We’ve been to weddings on beaches, in backyards, in outdoor venues in Chicago of all places (a city that is, let us be honest, weather-hostile for outdoor anything). We’ve eaten food I never would have called “wedding food.” We’ve danced to playlists that would have given my mother an aneurysm. We’ve been to weddings where the couple had already had a child together, and the marriage was just — the part that came when they were ready. Not the gateway. Not the requirement. Just the next thing.

And I keep watching all of this and thinking: the kids are alright.

What I’m Seeing Isn’t Just Weddings

The same thing I’m noticing at the receptions is what I’m hearing from younger people about their careers and their lives in general. They’re setting boundaries on how many hours they’ll work. They’re unwilling to stay at companies whose values don’t match their own. They’re not making work their entire identity. They’re spending money on experiences instead of stuff. And they’re doing it pretty unapologetically, which, frankly, took my generation about forty years longer to figure out.

The research backs up what I’m watching. Deloitte’s 2025 survey of more than 23,000 Gen Z and millennial workers across 44 countries found that only 6% of younger workers say their primary career goal is to reach a traditional leadership position. They’re not less ambitious — they’re differently ambitious. They want growth, meaning, mentorship, and financial security, but they’ve stopped buying the story that climbing one specific ladder is the only definition of a successful life.

A SurveyMonkey study of 3,573 U.S. full-time workers found that 32% of Gen Z workers rank work-life balance as the most important factor in a job — above career growth (22%) and compensation (20%). And GWI’s 2025 spending research confirms what every twenty-something I know has been telling me: they’d rather spend on travel, festivals, food, and dining than on bigger houses and shinier cars.

Now, A Necessary Honest Moment

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to write a post that’s pure cheerleading. That would be its own kind of dishonesty, and the younger folks I know would smell it from a mile away. They’re very good at smelling that.

So here’s the more complicated truth: a lot of what looks like enlightenment is also adaptation. This generation has watched some hard things. They came of age during a global pandemic. Nearly half (48%) don’t feel financially secure, and more than half are living paycheck to paycheck. They saw their parents pour their hearts into companies that laid them off in 2008 without a second thought. They looked at the housing market and the price of a college degree and a lot of them, very rationally, decided that the deal we were sold doesn’t exist for them anymore.

So when they say “work isn’t my whole life,” part of that is values. And part of that is the entirely sane response of a generation that watched the previous one give everything and not get what was promised in return. Both things are true. And I think the second thing is what gives the first thing its teeth.

It’s the same with weddings, honestly. The unique venues and personal vows and “we’re skipping the parts that don’t mean anything to us” approach — yes, it’s a more intentional generation. It’s also a generation that’s looked at average wedding costs that climbed to roughly $36,000 in 2025 and said: I am not spending three years of rent on someone else’s idea of what my wedding should look like. So they’re making smaller, weirder, more personal choices. And the result is gorgeous.

What I Think We’re Actually Watching

Here’s where I land, after a year of weddings and a couple decades of teaching adults how to live their lives more on purpose: this generation has, for whatever combination of reasons, gotten very good at asking is this actually mine? About the wedding. About the job. About the timeline. About the milestones we were all told we had to hit in a specific order or be considered failures.

They’re asking it about the bouquet toss and the table-by-table greeting tour and the cake smash. They’re asking it about the eighty-hour work week and the company that talks about its values on the homepage but doesn’t live them. They’re asking it about whether marriage has to come before children or whether the order is theirs to choose. They’re asking it about whether you have to own a four-bedroom house in the suburbs to count as a grown-up.

And the answer they keep landing on — sometimes from values, sometimes from economic necessity, usually from both — is: maybe not. Maybe a lot of what we did was because someone told us we had to, and we believed them, and we never stopped to ask why.

I find that incredibly hopeful. Not in a naive way — I know they’re also struggling with loneliness and anxiety and a job market that is, to put it mildly, hostile. I’m not saying they have it all figured out. Nobody has it all figured out. We certainly didn’t.

But I look at the couple dancing into their reception with their friends instead of doing the receiving line. I look at the groom reading vows with tears streaming down his face. I look at the bride and groom who already have a kid and are getting married because they want to, not because the calendar said they had to. I look at the twenty-something who told her boss she’s not answering Slack after 6 p.m. and held the line. And I think: they’re carving out lives that are actually theirs.

That’s the thing we keep missing when we call it lazy or entitled or weird. It’s not lazy. It’s discerning. It’s the exact same word I’d use to defend my own generation against the “Ok Boomer” crowd. Funny how that works.

So Here’s My Take

The kids are alright. Maybe more than alright. They’re building something new, and it doesn’t look like what we built, and that’s the whole point. Every generation gets to decide what to keep, what to leave behind, and what to invent from scratch. We did it. Our parents did it. Theirs did before them.

Our job, I think, is to stop treating their choices like a referendum on ours. They’re not saying we did it wrong. They’re saying they’re going to do it their way. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the freedom we hoped they’d have.

So I’ll keep showing up at the weddings. I’ll keep dancing when they want to dance instead of greeting. I’ll keep crying when they cry through their vows. And I’ll keep watching this generation carve out something that’s genuinely their own — and rooting for them all the way.

Send your snarky comments my way. I can handle those too.