Gen Z Questions SSRIs, Older Americans Return to Work, Late Bloomers Rise

Ultimize. According to the New York Post and reporter Ricky Schlott, Ella Emhoff, the 26-year-old stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, recently went on TikTok and revealed she'd been on antidepressants for almost 15 years. She started at age 11, 5th grade, after listening to a Wall Street Journal podcast reporting that long-term SSRI use was never actually studied, she said, "I naively never thought about it." Well, she's not alone. A 2025 survey at BMJ Mental Health found that 16.5% of Americans ages 18 to 24, more than 5 million young people, are currently on antidepressants. The American Academy of Pediatrics found prescriptions for 12 to 25-year-olds surged by two-thirds between 2016 and 2022. That's two-thirds in six years. Now, I'm not here to tell anyone to stop taking their medication. If antidepressants are working for you, stay on them. What I'm here to say is that a generation of young Americans was betrayed, not by parents who often tried their best, but by a medical establishment that chose the fastest, easiest, and most profitable answer to a mental health crisis. Write the prescription, move to the next patient, bill the insurance company, repeat. Before we handed prescriptions to 11-year-olds, did we try anything else first? Well, the Cochrane Collaboration looked at this, and I'm going to share with you in a moment what they said. Back in just one moment. You know, there's one thing I always find interesting. People will listen to a podcast like this get ideas, maybe even feel a little motivated, and then just move on with their day. Nothing actually changes. And I get it. Information alone doesn't do it. Repetition does. That's actually why we built Ultimize. So if you're getting any value from this, just go to ultimize.com. That's spelled U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E dot com. There's a free course waiting for you there. You can start with communication skills. You can start with building better habits, but the whole idea is simple: don't just hear something once, actually build it into your life. Again, it's free. Go to ultimize.com. The Cochrane Collaboration analyzed 73 randomized control trials involving nearly 5,000 people with depression. Their conclusion: exercise was as effective as antidepressant medication. Exercise, you know, running, basketball, riding a bike. No prescription, no pharmacy, no withdrawal symptoms. The side effects, according to the lead researcher, are occasional muscle soreness. You might get a sore knee. That's the downside. When a 13-year-old shows up in a doctor's office feeling sad and hopeless, and we have a Cochrane-level evidence that aerobic exercises matches medication, why is the first conversation about a pill? Why isn't it about getting the kid outside and moving? Because exercise doesn't fit in a 15-minute appointment. The pill does. And that's the betrayal. The 2024 umbrella review in the BMJ across 32 meta-analyses found convincing evidence that ultra-processed food consumption is also directly linked to anxiety. A systematic review of more than 2,600,000 people found that for every 10% increase in junk food consumption, depression risk rose by 11%. 11%! That is just from the junk food. That is an amazingly high percent. We have children subsisting on Pop-Tarts, chicken nuggets, and Mountain Dew, and we are baffled why they show up depressed. Is anyone asking what these kids ate today? Is anyone explaining that the brain needs real nutrients to produce serotonin? Apparently not. It's easier to prescribe the things that replaces the serotonin than to fix what was destroying it. And then there's sleep. Teenagers need about 9 hours of sleep a night. Nearly 70% of high school students aren't getting it. A study of more than 3,000 adolescents found that getting 6 hours or less was associated with a 40% higher likelihood of depression symptoms a full year later. The sleep deprivation came first, the depression followed. They need 9 hours, they're getting 6, and we're giving them a pill? According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Teenagers who spend more than 3 hours a day on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety. The average American teenager spends 3.5 hours a day on it. 3.5 hours! One study found teenagers using screens 7 or more hours daily were nearly 3 times as likely to be on psychiatric medication compared to kids using screens 1 hour a day. Nearly 3 times as likely to be on medication. A randomized controlled trial found limiting social media to 30 minutes a day for 3 weeks produced measurable, measurable improvements in depression severity. 30 minutes, 3 weeks, no prescription required. Are doctors looking at the phone before reaching for the prescription pad? Are they actually looking to see what the screen time says? Because if not, we are managing the symptom while the disease runs completely unchecked. A 27-year-old named Nick told the New York Post that after years on SSRIs and coming off them, his favorite thing in life now feels like watching a brick wall. He wasn't suicidal when he started. He wasn't in crisis. He admitted, I think I definitely should have done therapy first and foremost. Well, maybe he was right and the system failed him, not because anyone was evil, but because the system was designed to be fast and profitable. A 15-minute appointment with a prescription at the end is both of those things. Or maybe it's a 5-minute appointment sometimes. What it is, is never been enough though. We owe the next generation sleep, real food, movement, human connection, and doctors who look at the phone in their pocket of their patients before they reach for the prescription pad. We tried the shortcut, it didn't work. It's time to do the hard thing. I'm TJ Walker, this is Filtered. Thanks for joining me. More to come, stay tuned. Realistically, you're probably not going to remember most of what you hear today, not because it's not useful, just because that's how the brain works. Unless something shows up again and again and again, it disappears. So instead of hoping you'll remember this later, just give yourself a system that keeps it in front of you. That is why I have built Ultimize. If you are getting any value from this program, go to ultimize.com. That is U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E.com and grab the free course. There is one on communication skills, habit building. It is designed to reinforce the right ideas that actually stick. It is free. It takes just a minute. Ultimize.com. According to the New York Times and reporter Curtis Lee, Pat Archer is 73 years old. She spent two decades as an accountant, retired in 2020, confident that her $2,200 a month in Social Security and a small pension would cover her bills. Well, sadly, it didn't. Groceries, gas, medications— everything went up and stayed up. Now she works part-time at an assisted living facility outside Boston. Keeping notes on residents' hairdresser appointments. Some of the residents are younger than she is. A 78-year-old in Tennessee, according to this report, was caught on a doorbell camera delivering for DoorDash because he couldn't make ends meet. An Arkansas grandmother known as DoorDash Grandma has been driving gigs and apps— on apps since 2022 to support her 10 grandchildren. According to the AARP, 48% of Americans over 50 who returned to work after retiring did so for one reason and one reason only: they needed the money. Economists call this unretirement. Teresa Gillardy at the New School has a blunter term. She says these people were, quote, fired from retirement. Fired from retirement. That's not getting laid off. That's getting laid off from your own life. I have real sympathy for anyone in this situation. And I have real anger at an economy that has made survival so expensive that a 73-year-old who worked hard her whole life can't afford groceries without punching back in. But I also want to say something uncomfortable. The entire concept of retirement, the way Americans have defined it, is one of the most dangerous ideas in our culture. And it was built on a lie. When Social Security was created in 1935, retirement age was 65. Life expectancy back then, completely different. More in just a moment. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. The retirement age was 65, but life expectancy at birth in 1930 was 58 for men and 62 for women. So yeah, the retirement age was set above average life expectancy. The system was designed for a country where you'd work your whole life, briefly collect your check, and have the good manners to die. Well, today Americans live into their late 70s and 80s, sometimes 90s. We have 30-year retirements and we're still running on software from 1935. If we apply the same logic today, nobody would collect until about age 80. Now, I'm not advocating that, so calm down. But the idea that 65 is the finish line was designed for a world where most people were already dead. We updated the life expectancy, we kept the mythology. Nobody should spend the last 30 years of their life doing nothing useful. I'm sorry, before you come at me, I'm not talking about coal miners at age 85, working 100 hours a week. Now here's what I'm talking about. How about working 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year, something you enjoy that someone pays you for. Now do the math. That's 800 hours. There are 8,760 hours in a year. 800 hours is just 9% of the total year. You keep 91% of your life. 12 weeks completely off, more vacation than your grandchildren probably want to spend around you. In exchange for 9%, you get income, purpose, and clinical evidence shows you dramatically cut your Alzheimer's risk. A study of over 429,000 workers found each additional year of working past retirement age cut dementia risk by 3.2%. Every additional year. Use it or lose it. It's not a motivational poster. It's neuroscience. Let's look at someone like Paul McCartney. He's 82 years old and worth $1.2 billion a year. He just finished a world tour playing 3-hour concerts to sold-out stadiums. At 82, he did this. Now, I can barely stand for 3 hours at a cocktail party sometimes, and I'm 63. I'm almost 20 years younger than he is. McCartney's not working for the money. He found the thing and he never stopped doing it. Jerry Seinfeld, another great example. He's worth close to $1 billion and is on tour right now in 2026. He could retire tomorrow and live inside his Porsche collection, which is worth about $100 million and takes up an entire Manhattan brownstone because apparently car storage becomes its own real estate category. But he keeps performing because he found the thing. Thing. When you find the thing you're genuinely good at, the thing that gives your life structure and meaning, you don't retire from it. You just keep going on your own terms until you physically can't. Now, here's the advice nobody gives you at the retirement party for the gold watch and the sheet cake. The happiest older people I know are not the ones who retired at 62 and did nothing. They're the ones who figured out in their 50s, ideally by then, how to turn something they were good at into something someone would pay for. Maybe it's just a few hours a day, but doing it on their own terms. The retired teacher doing tutoring in the morning, the accountant doing taxes for small businesses every spring, the grandma doing college counseling over Zoom. They're not desperate, they're not grinding. They're not hustling constantly, just something small and sustainable that keeps money flowing, keeps the brain engaged, and keeps them connected to a world that still values what they know. They never got fired from retirement because they never fully retired in the first place. James Jones, another one mentioned in the article, 72, a cancer survivor. Prostate, then lung, gets up before sunrise to cook Salisbury steak for a meal delivery program in Oklahoma. He's earning $10 an hour. He told the Times, "I do like my job because I get my steps in. There are some health benefits to working at this age." James Jones figured out something the entire retirement industrial complex failed to communicate: work, the right kind at the right place, isn't punishment before retirement. For many people, it's part of what makes life feeling worth living. Pat Archer made that bet that 65 was the finish line. She was confident, she planned, and now she's 73, tracking other people's bridge games because groceries got expensive and the dream of doing nothing turned out to be more complicated than the brochure suggested. She deserves better from a culture that handed her a gold watch and never once said, "What are you going to do for the next 30 years?" I'm TJ Walker. More news to come. Realistically, you're probably not going to remember most of what you hear today, not because it's not useful, just because that's how the brain works. Unless something shows up again and again and again, it disappears. So instead of hoping you'll remember this later, just give yourself a system that keeps it in front of you. That's why I built Ultimize. If you're getting any value from this program, go to ultimize.com, that's U-L-T-A-M-I-Z-E dot com, and grab the free course. There's one on communication skills, habit building. It's designed to reinforce the right ideas that actually stick. It's free, takes just a minute, ultimize.com. David Brooks wrote a piece in The Atlantic called "You Might Be a Late Bloomer," and it pushes back on one of the most damaging lies our culture tells us about success and age. The lie is this: if you haven't made it by age 30, eh, you probably never will. We're obsessed with young success. Forbes publishes a 30 Under 30 list every year. Silicon Valley treats founders over 40 like they should be applying for AARP membership. Mark Zuckerberg once said, in what is genuinely one of the dumbest sentences ever uttered by a billionaire, "Young people are just smarter." Hmm. This from a man whose own platform is now considered uncool by actual young people. But that's a different conversation. The point is, we've built an entire mythology around the teenage genius in a hoodie who drops out of Harvard at age 18 and changes the world by 25. And that mythology does real damage to the other 90%+ of people, the ones who are 35, 45, or 55, still trying to figure it all out, who have quietly absorbed the message that the window is closed and the message— and they missed it. That's the problem. The message is wrong, and the data proves it. According to research cited in The Atlantic, A 45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old. The average successful entrepreneur is not 18, but 45. A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to build a successful company as one who's 30. Nobody puts that on a magazine cover. Bernie Marcus got fired from his job at a home improvement chain at age 49. He and his partner sat in a Los Angeles coffee shop for a year and hatched a new idea. They called it The Home Depot. By 1990, it was the largest home improvement chain in America. When Marcus died in 2024, his net worth was around $10 billion. Hey, that's not bad. He was nearly 50 when he started over. You don't hear that story nearly often enough. Brooks distinguished between early bloomers, prodigies who execute a big idea fast, and what he calls the masters, people who aren't impressive, or at least that impressive when they're young, people who wonder, who fail, who keep accumulating experience until late in the game, or at least relatively late in the game, everything clicks. Mama Fuku Ando was 48 when he invented instant ramen, tinkering behind his house in Japan. Today it's consumed 100 billion times a year worldwide. Vera Wang was a figure skater and magazine editor before designing her first wedding dress at age 40. Linda Weinman founded Lynda.com at age 40. LinkedIn bought it for $1.5 billion a number of years later. These are not flukes. Late bloomers often build more durable things than prodigies because they've had more time to fail, learn, and develop what Brooks calls diverse, diverse curiosity, the ability to pull from wide experience that early specialists simply don't have. Now, I want to get personal, if that's okay with you. From the age of 25 to 39, I personally failed at virtually everything I tried— television shows, radio shows, consulting ventures, website businesses, more than 100 projects that either never launched or launched and failed and failed miserably and disappeared. My net worth at the age of 39 was zero. The only reason I never went bankrupt is I had nothing worth protecting. Then I turned 40, not magically, but years of accumulated failure and learning finally came together. I started building online courses in communication, doing training services, public speaking. Today I've got 12 million student enrollments and I'm arguably the most followed online communications trainer in the world. Now, none of that was possible at age 25. I needed the failure. I needed the internet, which I didn't have. I needed the wandering. I needed 15 years of trying things that didn't work to develop the judgment to build the things that came. Brooks calls that the Matthews Effect. Knowledge begets knowledge. The more you fail, the better you understand what success actually requires. But here's the trap. The biggest enemy of the late bloomer isn't age. People think it is, it's not. The biggest enemy is inertia. It's so easy to do your one job, come home, and spend every remaining hour on autopilot. Netflix, sports, scrolling. Nothing wrong with any of those in doses. The problem is that for millions of people, it's now 100% of their non-working time, which means you're not learning anything new. You're not building anything, not getting better at anything. If you're not learning, you're stagnating. And if you're stagnating, your chances of being more successful 5 years from now are essentially zero. Here's what I'd suggest. Cut 1 hour of Netflix, learn something, build something, create something someone would pay for. It could be an app, Could be a website, could be a lemonade stand. I don't care. We live in an economy that rewards creators above everything else. You're not too old, but you do have to show up. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, there are no second acts in American lives. Brooks' entire article is a rebuttal to that sentence. Cézanne was considered a failed painter well into middle age. His best friend wrote a novel with a character based on him, a failed artist who commits suicide. Cézanne read it, stopped speaking to the friend, went back to his studio, and spent the next decade painting the same mountain over and over until he produced work that both Picasso and Matisse called the foundation of modern art. He did his greatest work after people had written him off. You might be a late bloomer. If you spent years trying things that didn't work, wandering, failing, accumulating experience without clear direction, that's not evidence that you don't have it. It might be evidence that you're building towards something that actually takes time to get right. But you have to protect that hour or two or three every day from the algorithm that wants to keep you comfortably, passively entertained until you run out of time. Don't give it that hour. That hour is yours. So please, if you are no longer 18 or 20 or less than 30 and think you can't be successful or even wildly successful on your own terms, don't buy into that myth. But it's not going to come just from doing the same old thing you've been doing every day the last 5 years. If you're unhappy with what you're doing, Carve time out. Everybody has some free time. It may be that bus ride to the factory where you work a 12-hour shift. Use that bus ride time instead of watching silly videos, watch it where you're learning something or spend that time writing or creative. You're not too old. It's not too late. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Have a great weekend. See you on Monday. Okay.