fresh start effect<\/strong>: we use dates such as Monday, a birthday, New Year or the return from the holidays as milestones that allow us to separate a former self \u2014 imperfect, tired, with half the to-do list still unfinished \u2014 from a new self who will finally get things right. It works as a mental boundary: everything before that date is filed away under \u201canother chapter\u201d, while everything after it begins on a blank page, free from the weight of previous failures. Almost any date will do, in fact, provided it feels like the end of something: a birthday, a Monday, the first day in a new job, the return from holiday. They proved it with data, not intuition: Google searches for the word \u201cdiet\u201d rise immediately after those dates, gym visits do too, and more people commit to pursuing a new goal in the days after a Monday, a birthday or 1 January than at any other point in the year. The effect is real and measurable. But above all, it is psychological. The date changes nothing by itself. It merely gives us permission to try again.<\/p>\nSeptember comes with a catch. There are only a few months between September and December in which to keep granting ourselves that permission, so the next rescue date soon appears: the New Year, the new academic year, the next cycle. We live from milestone to milestone \u2014 summer, the return to work, the financial year-end, January \u2014 because as long as another one lies ahead, we can keep postponing the real question.<\/p>\n
And the real questions remain. This is, by some distance, the most highly educated generation in Spain\u2019s history: in 1980, only 16% of people aged 25 to 34 had completed higher education; today, more than half have. And yet, according to the first Composite Youth Indicator, produced by the PwC Foundation and C\u00edrculo de Empresarios using data from Spain\u2019s National Statistics Institute, the Bank of Spain and Eurostat, this generation is worse off than its parents were at the same age. It starts with work: almost one in four people under 25 is unemployed, nearly ten percentage points above the European average, and among those who do work, more than a third are in jobs below their level of qualification. It is not that they failed to prepare. They prepared more than anyone before them. The market simply has not noticed.<\/p>\n
Then comes housing, where the distance between generations is most visible and where the same indicator records the sharpest deterioration of all. In the 1980s, a household earning the average salary could buy a flat in under a decade; today, while remaining within recommended borrowing limits, it takes an average of more than 45 years\u2019 worth of an entire salary. The average age for buying a first home is now over 41, and only one in six people under 30 lives away from their parents, the lowest figure since 2006. Pay for young people has risen by 30% over the past decade; rents have risen by 82% over the same period. And when the pressure becomes too much, there is little room to ask for help: the waiting time for a first appointment with a psychologist in the public health system is more than six months, twice the European average.<\/p>\n
All of this almost inevitably postpones what comes next. In 2024, 318,005 children were born in Spain, the lowest figure in two decades: the average number of children per woman fell to 1.10, a historic low, while the average age at which women have their first child is now over 32. The desire is not the problem. There is nowhere to fit a family, and neither the time nor the salary to sustain one. Those who do manage to start one often find themselves supporting the generation above and the one below at the same time: more than half of those caring for a dependent relative in Spain also have children in their care, they spend an average of twenty hours a week providing that care, and three in four have had to cut back on their own rest to keep it going. The sandwich generation, they call it: supporting both sides, resting on neither.<\/p>\n
And despite being surrounded by so many people to care for and answer to, one in five people in Spain suffers from unwanted loneliness. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, the figure is 34.6%, almost twice the average, and two in three have felt this way for more than two years. These are questions no date can solve by itself, however symbolic it may be.<\/p>\n
The political ecosystem has little time for summer truces either. The Government plans to submit a new State Budget to Congress in September, once again with the outcome uncertain, and the Prime Minister himself has left the door open to a general election from January 2027 onwards if it fails to pass. Something similar is happening in Brussels, with a few nuances: Brussels has an August too, and the Parliament and the Commission stop like everyone else. But the next Multiannual Financial Framework \u2014 the budget for the entire European Union from 2028 to 2034 \u2014 has been under negotiation for months, accompanied by the same pledge repeated every cycle: to conclude it as soon as possible, which in practice almost never means before September. We leave without knowing what will still be broken or put back together when we return, which issues will rise again in September and which will be buried beneath something more urgent. None of those dates waits for us to decide that we are ready.<\/p>\n
But that ecosystem is not the only thing that matters. Politics passes too. Headlines age quickly. Names are replaced. Meanwhile, the real questions remain: how we live, how we work and what responsibility each of us assumes from the place \u2014 large or small \u2014 that we occupy.<\/p>\n
This is where the trap of the fresh start effect <\/strong>reappears, on a scale far more uncomfortable than the personal one. It is already difficult to believe that a Monday or 1 January will genuinely fix anything. It is harder still to believe that September will solve any of this. Housing, birth rates, care, loneliness, the State Budget and the Multiannual Financial Framework do not obey calendars. They are structural. And structural problems do not wait: they accumulate, year after year, while we continue shifting their weight onto dates that promise a clean break and never quite deliver one.<\/p>\nAnd still, we keep placing dates over all of it. We keep telling ourselves that we will look at it more calmly in September, that next year will be different, that once this or that is over, there will finally be room. This is not na\u00efvet\u00e9, or not only that. Milkman and her colleagues called it, quite literally, \u201caspirational motivation\u201d: we need these artificial boundaries to keep believing that we still decide who we are going to become, even when the underlying problem \u2014 the rent, the waiting list, the care that fits into no calendar \u2014 remains exactly where it was the day before the chosen date.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the only real difference lies in no longer expecting the date to do the work for us: in facing what remains unresolved, even when there is no deadline for resolving it, and in holding the question rather than postponing it once again.<\/p>\n
The fresh start effect<\/strong> comes with a catch, as we said: it changes nothing by itself, it only grants permission. Fine. We will take the permission. Have a good summer. September will still be here when we return, with the same State Budget, the same underlying questions \u2014 generational ones included \u2014 and probably the same BOE waiting to be read. We will carry on as ever: reading the environment, listening and supporting those who need to understand the world in which they operate more clearly, without waiting for a particular date to do it better. See you on the other side.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By Alejandro Rivera, Public Affairs Consultant<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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