What young Europeans want for 2040: stories of hope, concern and agency

What does a good future look like when young Europeans describe it themselves? Across 670 stories written by 12-25-year-olds a clear message emerges: young people are hopeful about the futures they can build, while remaining deeply concerned about the pressures shaping their lives.  

The Voices of Young People report explores contributions to the Our Futures open platform. More than 4,000 people across the EU have shared short stories imagining everyday life in Europe in 2040. Rather than selecting answers from a predefined list, contributors wrote in their own words – and then reflected on the themes, emotions and sense of agency within those stories.   

Among these contributions are 205 stories from young people aged 12–17 and 465 from people aged 18–25. Together, they offer a rare source of youth-authored evidence about Europe’s possible futures. This report lets young Europeans describe the future in their own words, then interpret their own stories: what themes they touch, how they feel about them, and whether they believe they have any power to shape them. 

Listening beyond the survey 

Foresight processes often seek to understand what young people think about the future. Less often do they create the conditions for young people to articulate and interpret their own visions of it. 

Our Futures takes a different route. Participants were invited to write a short story set in 2040, then identify the themes it addresses, how it makes them feel and whether they believe they can influence the future it describes. This approach combines the scale of a participatory platform with the richness of narrative evidence. 

The result is not a representative opinion poll, nor a prediction of what Europe will look like in 2040. It is a collection of possible futures: hopes, fears, trade-offs and ideas expressed in young people’s own terms, across the EU’s 24 official languages. 

This matters for policymaking. Surveys can show the relative weight of preselected priorities. Stories can reveal how people connect issues in their everyday lives: how climate action relates to fairness, how technology affects education and work, or how concerns about housing, security and wellbeing shape their sense of the future. 

Hope and worry coexist 

The themes that come up most across both age groups are nature/climate, fairness/social justice, health/wellbeing, technology/science and living together/community — though the order shifts with age. The youngest storytellers (12–17) write relatively more about fairness, technology and education; as storytellers get older, security, food and agriculture, democracy and governance, and work and occupation all gain ground. 14% of 18–25-year-olds' stories touch on work alone. 

Despite the challenges they describe, more than 70% of stories in every age group are associated with hope. Around 70% are linked exclusively to positive emotions. 

Yet hope does not mean the absence of concern. The share of stories associated with worry or sadness rises slightly among older contributors. This suggests a changing relationship with the future: as young people approach independent adult life, questions of employment, housing, affordability and security become more immediate. 

One contributor from Spain described this transition in direct terms: 

“It’s no secret that the younger generation has been dealt a tough hand. Throughout Europe, there is an overall lack of junior positions and opportunities for young people, yet a never-ending list of unpaid positions, difficulty to find affordable housing and being unable to leave their parents’ homes until their late twenties.” 
Spain, woman 18–25 

Concerns evolve with life stages 

Among the 12–17 age group, over 20% of stories are associated with worry. Their concerns cluster around the environment, social equality, technology, governance and migration. These concerns are often mirrored by hopeful stories that imagine the same challenges being addressed: a cleaner environment, fairer societies, responsible technology and peaceful communities. 

Among 18–25-year-olds, almost 25% of stories are associated with worry. Climate change and inequality remain central, but the list broadens. Contributors increasingly write about access to housing, jobs and the cost of living, as well as war, geopolitical instability and mental health. 

These stories illustrate how long-term challenges and immediate transitions overlap. For many young adults, the future is not an abstract horizon. It is connected to questions of whether they can afford a home, find meaningful work, feel safe, move freely and build an independent life. 

Care for each other comes first 

When contributors consider economic prosperity, care for the environment and care for each other, their stories consistently give particular weight to the latter. 

Their visions are strikingly collective. They foreground equality and non-discrimination, solidarity, peace and public services that work for everyone. Education, healthcare and public transport appear not simply as services, but as elements of a society that enables people to live well together. 

As one young contributor from Austria put it: 

“I hope that peace will finally come between peoples and areas and that people will learn to value each other and see their diversity as an opportunity. I hope we all take a little more care of each other in 2040.” 
Austria, woman, 18–25 years old

This emphasis is relevant beyond youth policy. It points to a recurring value within the stories: the future is imagined not only through technological progress or economic performance, but through the quality of relationships, institutions and shared public life. 

From imagining to designing 

The youngest storytellers describe values and hopes but rarely how to realise them. Young adults go further, sketching concrete, implementable ideas: universal basic income, a four-day working week, carbon sequestration and vertical forests, hydrogen-powered public transport, AI-personalised education, EU federalisation. Compared with the 12–17 group, the 18–25s are not only imagining the future - they are starting to design it. 

Almost all storytellers agree this future won't happen spontaneously — it needs people to act. About a third see politicians, businesses/scientists and citizens as equally responsible; the youngest place more trust in citizen action, young adults slightly more in politicians and government leaders. 

One 18–25-year-old imagined a day in 2040 in which climate action, public investment and accessible mobility have transformed daily life: 

“On my way to work, I ride an autonomous hydrogen bus that moves silently through the streets without traffic jams. By 2035, strict measures to limit emissions have been introduced across the EU, and cities have been transformed into self-sustaining ecosystems thanks to massive investment in renewables. I have a day off today and I'm going on a short trip — I'll get to Berlin in 30 minutes by hyperloop. Travelling between European capitals is now cheap, ecological and accessible to everyone.” 

(from an 18–25-year-old's future story) 

Which policy process this report feeds 

The EU's current Youth Strategy runs 2019–2027. The Commission is now preparing its successor: a public consultation on the EU Youth Strategy post-2027 ran until 16 July 2026, gathering input from young people, youth workers, researchers and organisations to shape EU youth policy from 2028 onward, alongside a parallel EU Youth Dialogue process revising the Youth Goals. 

The Voice of Young People is designed to feed directly into that process. Where the formal consultation channels mostly collect structured feedback and position papers, this report contributes something different: a large, structured body of narrative evidence: i.e. 670 young people's own stories, self-analysed for theme, feeling and sense of agency as a complementary evidence base for whatever shape the new strategy ends up taking. 

It also supports the broader mandate to give young people a seat at the table when policies are designed (see also the Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness [link]) — as emerging from the report, with young people choosing “care for each other” as number one value.  

Why collect stories at all? The logic of collective visioning 

Standard surveys ask citizens to react to pre-set options. Our Futures instead asks them to imagine, i.e. to write a short story about life in 2040, then interpret their own story: what themes it touches, how it makes them feel, whether they believe they have any power to shape it. This narrative inquiry approach lets researchers analyse thousands of self-authored stories at scale while preserving the texture and emotional honesty a multiple-choice survey would flatten out. 

The logic behind this is what the report's authors call collective visioning: a union of nearly 450 million people cannot design its future by expert modelling alone, nor by asking citizens to simply approve or reject predetermined scenarios. Citizens need space to articulate, in their own words and across all 24 official languages, what a desirable (or feared!) future looks like from where they stand. Aggregated across thousands of contributions, these visions reveal shared patterns: recurring fears, hopes and disagreements that conventional surveys could not capture. 

The takeaway for policymakers 

Asked about their own imagined future, young people are hopeful. Asked about the future in general, the same young people say they are concerned — about climate, inequality, war, economic precarity and democratic backsliding. Hope and worry sit side by side, and neither cancels the other out. Crucially, most storytellers in every age group also believe they personally can do something to shape the future they describe. 

That combination - real concern paired with a real sense of agency - is the clearest signal in the report. Young Europeans are not waiting to be reassured; they want a visible, credible role in building the future they've already started to imagine. The stories are there. The question is how systematically Europe chooses to listen.