The Toll Working Multiple Jobs Takes on Young People

“Rat race,” “chaos,” “stressful”: these are just a few ways young people are describing days stuffed with side projects, shift schedules, and Google Calendars color-coded by job.

Illustration Credit: Zach Hackman

At one of her three jobs, Makayla, a 22-year-old in Texas, pushes 80-pound crates on a dolly. The seasonal retail position demands a lot of walking and lifting, with customers pulling candles off shelves faster than she can unload them. Makayla (who is going by her first name to protect her privacy) is often sore to the point of pain when she arrives at her other job, where she’s a clerk for a judge, supporting the court’s day-to-day operations.

Though Makayla lives with her parents (who she’s also helped financially in the past, she said), she pays for college tuition, living expenses, and transportation. She’s also saving to pay for law school herself. In addition to working retail and her job with the court, Makayla said she was lucky to find a paid internship related to her major, computer science, where she can build her own schedule. But between the cost of college and the rising cost of living, it feels like it’s not enough.

“It [is] a rat race, but I don’t know who’s chasing me,” Makayla explained. “It’s like I’m chasing myself.”

“Stressful” was one way young workers described days stuffed with side projects, shift schedules, and Google Calendars color-coded by job. “Tiring,” “chaos,” and “shitty” were among others. Makayla is among a growing number of young people with more than one source of income to make ends meet. According to a 2025 Harvard Youth Poll, 43% of young people surveyed say they’re struggling to get by with limited financial security.

This lack of a financial safety net is no accident. This generation’s economic squeeze is the predictable outcome of decades of monopolization and private-equity consolidation while employee wages stagnate and costs of living soar. According to recent data from the Federal Reserve, in the third quarter of 2025, the top 1% of households owned 31.7% of all U.S. wealth. This is the highest recorded disparity since the Federal Reserve began tracking household wealth in 1989.

For a generation that’s never known work without a side of total upheaval—from the pandemic reshaping jobs and internships, to companies offering, then revoking remote work, to now attacks on university funding, the federal workforce, and more—stability feels impossible to come by. With exhaustingly high costs of living and even more political, societal, and economic uncertainty looming, second jobs and side gigs are a crucial part of creating a safety net for young people who don’t have a societal one to catch them.

Why the job market feels impossible for young people right now

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you it’s a bad time to be job searching. After repeated cycles of corruption and privatization—turning housing, utilities, healthcare, and even crisis itself into profit centers—corporations have systematically hollowed out the middle class and extracted value upward. Even if pundits say that “the economy is growing,” all the profits are being pulled out by shareholders at the top. This leaves little for employees to receive basic societal benefits, including fair wages, health and retirement insurance, as well as any sort of path to upward mobility enjoyed by previous generations.

These larger forces are what drive sluggish hiring and endless layoffs, which leads to fewer people leaving or changing positions. There are fewer entry-level jobs with higher requirements — on top of panic that companies are gutting entry-level jobs to replace them with AI. To boot is also the affordability crisis in which the costs of necessities, from healthcare to groceries, have spiked. This sprawling list of factors are part of why so many workers are hanging on to multiple streams of income.

Cloud Benn, a 22-year-old in New Orleans, for instance, works as an English teacher, a gift shop worker in a cultural arts museum, and a writing tutor. Even when they were 18, Benn said working only one job has never felt viable. “Especially me being a minority. I’m Black, and I live in a city that is low-income. I [was] part of what was considered middle-class. I’m part of [the] low-class now with my family,” Benn explained. “Everything has gone up in price, and just to live, just to get your basic necessities, has gone up.”

Rates of people working multiple jobs have been on the rise, including for workers ages 25 to 54, according to Elise Gould, Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute. But since less work experiencein a sluggish labor market could mean fewer opportunities to break into the workforce, it feels like a particularly disastrous time to start working life. Landing that one “first job” and working up from there feels like a myth, given the endless economic chaos of the last few years.

During the start of the pandemic, young workers were disproportionately hurt by unemployment and job loss. As employers began hiring again, they had to work harder to attract and retain workers. Gould notes that, in that moment, workers had more leverage. But now, the hiring rate is depressed again, which could hurt young people more than others.

Graduating into a weaker economy can set you back, Gould explained, depending on how long this weakness lasts. Joining the workforce during an economic downturn can negatively impact health, income, and career advancement. While Gould noted this wouldn’t necessarily set you back for your lifetime in terms of career, it could be harder. One notable example, of course, is elder millennials, who graduated into the Great Recession.

Young people are seeing this instability, “among their peers, among their families, among people who often have a lot more experience than they do,” explained Noel Tieszen, a policy strategist focused on youth economic justice at National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy. This is especially seen with young Black workers, LGBTQ+ young people, and those whose families come from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. These communities are disproportionately impacted by unemployment or underemployment.

Young people also play multiple roles within their social circles: They are often parents, caregivers, or contributing to their communities or households. When so much time is taken up with multiple jobs, “that’s less time for family. It’s less time for exploring skills and talents,” said Tieszen. “They’re just trying to get by day-to-day, surviving, not thriving.”

It’s not just an affordability issue

In some fields, like the arts, it’s long been an accepted norm that pursuing certain lines of work might happen alongside a day job or extra gigs, an expectation of low wages or limited opportunities that many young artists are pushing back on. But there’s a huge variance in what multiple jobs can look like: While some young workers might have a side hustle outside their day job, others might work multiple jobs if they aren’t getting enough hours at one.

Reporting outlines that, now, working various jobs is appearing across industries. For example, a 2023 survey found workers in the computer and technology space were more likely to have other forms of income; 2025 data found that one in six teachers work a second job; other 2025 estimates note workers in fields like educational and health services and transportation and utilities are more likely to hold a main job with a second job.

But there are also larger shifts within the workforce that are reshaping young people’s relationship to it. Expectations that one will work their way up in a company are almost nonexistent, and stigma around job-hopping has largely been shattered. One 2025 survey noted that over half of Gen Z-ers surveyed think traditional employment will eventually be obsolete.

Thomas Showalter, an independent consultant who specializes in the transition to adulthood, education, job training, and labor, pointed out that for his generation—he’s an elder millennial—the Great Recession was an “acute shock to the system” in terms of labor market prospects. Meaning, some millennials grew up with a sense that there was a social contract, only to find it didn’t add up in early adulthood. “For Gen Z, and probably for [Gen] Alpha too, I think it’s more of a chronic condition,” he explained. “What I observed over the years with younger people is [that] there was never a social contract; I’m just assuming that I’m going to have to hustle all the time.”

This has led many young workers to try to create stability for themselves, since living off one source of income doesn’t always feel possible. Christopher Hendrix, a 25-year-old in Southern California, has a full-time job at a nonprofit, does community organizing work focused on youth homelessness, and is pursuing his master’s degree in social work. In his social circle, he said people are always thinking about what opportunity could be next, and that Gen Z can’t necessarily depend on one job to get them where they want to go. Hendrix grew up low-income and got used to working multiple jobs to support himself. “I can pay my bills. I’m stable, but I still have this itching thought that, no, you got to keep working, because one day it can be taken away from you,” he said.

For some, working multiple jobs can also be a means of pursuing work they’re interested in.

Izabella Escurra, a 23-year-old in New Jersey, works full-time in college admissions and in her off hours has a side hustle as a freelance publicist. “I feel like a lot of Gen Z people are using side hustles to make their own businesses or to take the entrepreneurial mindset,” she said.

She thinks ballooning standards for entry-level jobs are a factor, too. “One to two internships, that’s really not the baseline for a lot of entry-level jobs anymore,” she said. “I think they’re seeing from their older siblings or older relatives that the job market isn’t what it used to be.”

There’s a mental toll to the hustle, too

As workers endlessly hustle, what looms is the toll it takes to work this much—and the potential ramifications it has on the rest of one’s working life.

Burnout, which Gen Z is already experiencing higher rates of, can have a significant impact. “The structural conditions driving young workers toward multiple jobs—wage stagnation, job insecurity, rising costs of living—are themselves chronic stressors that compound the day-to-day demands of managing multiple positions,” said M. Gloria González Morales, an associate professor and director of The Worker Wellbeing Lab at Claremont Graduate University. There is also evidence that work experiences during formative career periods influence someone’s attitude toward work later.

“No one talks about emotionally, how irritable it makes you,” said Makayla. “When you work so much and you’re tired, a lot of times you’re not present for the things you do.”

But there are solutions. Morales pointed to the importance of social support, including from supervisors and coworkers. Workplaces can provide resources, including autonomy, skill development opportunities, and addressing health and safety and work-life balance, she added.

“Policy approaches that improve wages, provide scheduling predictability, and strengthen worker protections could reduce the structural conditions that push young workers toward multiple job arrangements,” Morales said.

Tieszen emphasized the need to ensure young workers are educated about their rights, noting growing interest among young people in unions. But she also noted it demands going beyond jobs: “It’s about making sure that the other systems and structures in society are functioning,” Tieszen said. Funding for healthcare, childcare, and transportation is critical. “The fear of losing a job and having hours cut is real, and it’s grounded in reality,” she said. If other systems are in place, that relieves stress.

Benn said that figuring out how to even survive right now takes a toll, and also believes there needs to be more support and more opportunities for people to talk about what they’re experiencing.

“There are people out there that are like, ‘Oh, young people don’t want to do anything,’” Benn said. “No, we are busting our ass. We’re tired, and we just want to lay down.”