Youth anxiety in an age of uncertainty: future insecurity, career stress, and the mechanisms of identity exploration during major life transitions

This study examines how young adults in China experience well-being under conditions of social uncertainty, focusing on the joint associations among future anxiety, career stress, identity exploration, rural normative pressure, and subjective well-being. Informed by cultural-psychological perspectives, the proposed model integrates multiple indirect associations and contextual moderation within a single structural framework. Using survey data from 260 undergraduate students, structural equation modeling and regression-based analyses showed that future anxiety was positively associated with career stress (β = 0.637, p <.001) and identity exploration (β = 0.346, p <.001), and negatively associated with well-being (β = -0.383, p <.001). career stress was positively associated with identity exploration (β = 0.316, p <.001) and negatively associated with well-being (β = -0.300, p <.001), whereas identity exploration was positively associated with well-being in the multivariate model (β = 0.265, p <.001). Bootstrap analyses further indicated a significant negative indirect association between future anxiety and well-being through career stress (β = -0.190, p <.001), a significant positive indirect association through identity exploration (β = 0.091, p <.001), and a significant sequential indirect association through career stress and identity exploration (β = 0.053, p <.001), although the total indirect effect was not significant. Rural normative pressure significantly but modestly moderated the association between career stress and identity exploration (β = 0.105, p = .040), such that this positive relationship became stronger at higher levels of normative pressure. Overall, the findings suggest that future-oriented uncertainty, career-related pressure, and identity-related reflection are closely intertwined in young people's lives, and that sociocultural norms shape how pressure is translated into developmental self-reflection. The results underscore the importance of educational and social interventions that support not only stress reduction, but also identity-related meaning-making and context-sensitive developmental adaptation in uncertain social environments.