For much of the last two decades, young Americans were told that freedom meant keeping your options open, in nearly every area of life.

Careers could be switched at will, relationships kept provisional, and beliefs held lightly. Nothing needed to be chosen permanently, because permanence itself was suspect. To commit was worst of all, because it foreclosed possibility altogether. In this climate, the very idea of limits has been miscast, with boundaries framed by modern culture as external impositions — rules or expectations said to threaten self-expression.

But this promise of freedom has had its consequences.

Unlimited choice has not produced confident, flourishing adults. Instead, it has produced a persistent sense that life is always happening somewhere else.

This is something everyday life now confirms: The more options people have, the harder it becomes to make choices, and the less satisfied they are once they do. When nothing is exclusive, nothing carries weight.

Gen Z did not invent this problem, but they inherited it in an intensified form. Raised online, they encountered infinite choice early in the form of endless content, identities and pathways presented without hierarchy.

And yet, the logic of limits is not lost on everyone. Young adults I know from college and elsewhere are quietly rejecting the “infinite options” life, choosing commitments over possibilities and finding something more solid on the other side: earlier marriages, smaller circles, a faith that is stable rather than spectacular. What looks from the outside like retreat is, for many, a recovery of freedom.

Freedom in Friendship

It is in this quest for stability in simpler lives that one old children’s book begins to look unexpectedly prophetic, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry introduces the idea of “taming” as the process by which relationship creates meaning. The fox, which serves as the protagonist’s mentor, explains to the Little Prince that to tame is “to establish ties,” adding that doing so makes one thing different from all others. Before taming, the fox is just one fox among many. Afterward, however, he is a special individual. So, too, with the main character’s rose. The Little Prince’s rose matters not because she is flawless — she is vain, fragile, demanding — but because she has been chosen, tended and loved by him.

“One sees clearly only with the heart,” the fox tells the Little Prince. “Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

What the story describes is as practical as it is poetic: To tame something is to risk caring about it, to allow oneself to be affected, disappointed, even wounded. Meaning emerges from that risk — from choosing to let one thing matter more than all the others and then returning to it through repetition and responsibility. Love, in this sense, depends on limits. Without them, true affection never quite takes shape.

Secular society teaches the opposite lesson: It urges young people to keep their options open, to resist exclusivity, to avoid dependence.

Relationships, for example, are evaluated not by fidelity but by flexibility, by how easily they can be discarded if they begin to demand too much. Faith, too, is treated cautiously: practiced when convenient, softened when costly, abandoned when it conflicts with desire. Over time, even identity becomes provisional, reshaped in the name of self-invention and detached from its God-given anchors.

The result is not liberation, but fragility. When nothing is chosen definitively, nothing can claim us. When every attachment is conditional, we remain fundamentally alone.

What many Gen Zers are discovering — often through trial and error — is that limits do not shrink the self, they shape it. A marriage narrows one’s romantic options, but in doing so, it creates the possibility of intimacy. A vocation excludes alternative paths but gives coherence to effort. A home ties one to a specific place but allows roots to grow.

Abby Gilreath, 23, who was received into the Catholic Church in 2025 during her senior year of college and is now preparing for marriage this spring, described the decision as one that has given her greater clarity and purpose.

“Getting married young has already been such a blessing,” she told the Register of her impending nuptials, though it has required letting go of certain expectations.

Plans she once assumed — medical school, career trajectories — have given way to something quieter but more demanding: a shared life ordered toward mutual sacrifice and virtue. “We both want to see each other get to heaven,” said Gilreath, who lives in Cypress, Texas. “And the earlier in your life you begin that process with someone who cares for your soul, the more deeply you’re formed by it.”

Modest as these choices may seem, they mark a profound shift in moral imagination: a recognition that to be “tamed” — like the fox in The Little Prince — is not to be diminished, but to be drawn beyond the self, to love and to be loved in return.

Flocking to the Classics

That same instinct helps explain why so many young adults are turning to classic literature.

Luke Waters, 21, from Williamsburg, Virginia, and founder of the Christian brotherhood Legion XII, described the appeal this way: “I’m drawn to classical literature because it gives us memory in an age of amnesia and puts us in conversation with the permanent questions — what is good, what is true, what a man is for.”

The Great Books, the Hillsdale College junior said, “keep alive the memory of human greatness, forming our loves through stories of virtue, tragedy and grace. They remind young men that they are heirs to a civilization built by courage, faith and sacrifice — and that they are responsible for carrying it forward.”

From a pastoral vantage point, Father of Mercy Ben Cameron sees the same search for solidity at work.

Drawing on C.S. Lewis’ famous introduction to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, the mission preacher and retreat master noted that Lewis warned against reading only books from one’s own time, since doing so causes readers to “unconsciously absorb the biases” of their age.

Reading older works, Father Cameron said, restores perspective by exposing those blind spots and situating the reader within a more universal conversation: “Classical literature or history, for example, gives us a different lens to see things with a better perspective.”

Gen Z has watched older generations chase limitless possibility only to end up unmoored. They have seen careers dissolve into burnout, or family formation endlessly deferred, and relationships curated for independence collapse under loneliness. They are choosing differently — not out of fear, but out of moral clarity.

The fox’s final lesson to the Little Prince is beautifully uncompromising: “You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You’re responsible for your rose …” In modern discourse, responsibility is wrongly framed as a burden when it is, in fact, the condition of joy. It binds us to others across time and gives love its weight and form.

The infinite-options life promises freedom without cost, but freedom without cost turns out to be freedom without meaning. The human heart does not thrive on endless possibility; it thrives on chosen obligation.

Gen Z is learning, often quietly, that the way forward is not more doors, but one door entered fully. Not infinite roses, but one rose, watered and cared for daily. Limits, far from being the enemy of freedom, may be its last refuge.

Isabella Doer writes from Virginia.