Sometimes, unemployment precipitates a change in career for practical purposes or even the complete abandonment career goals when the need to earn a paycheck outweighs the need to develop along-term profession. Whereas older workers have already established a career to which they could return, when young people change careers early in life, that choice tends to dictate the course of their professional lives much more profoundly. There are also negative consequences associated with unemployment among young people that pertain to personal health, happiness, and longevity. High rates of unemployment among young people is responsible for their continued dependence on parents and family long after they would otherwise have begun establishing independent lives of their own. In addition to the disruption of life for parents, this contributes to low self-esteem and lower...

Young people who experience unemployment are more likely to experience subsequent periods of unemployment and to suffer from depression, as well as from higher rates of heart disease, shorter life expectancy, and suicide.
From the perspective of society, high unemployment and especially high unemployment among young people reduces the strength of the economic system for the long-term by reducing the number of experienced professionals and also by exacerbating existing problems of unemployment and other aspects of inequality, such as among the working class. Ultimately, the unemployment of young people may be the worst component of the more general problem of unemployment in society more generally precisely because of the many long-lasting ways it affects the individual.