Ask a recent college graduate how they plan to afford a home someday and many won’t say “save.” Instead, they’ll respond with “invest,” “work a second job,” or “start a side hustle.” Why? Many young adults no longer see a path to affording what 82 percent of Americans consider to be a core part of the American Dream: owning a home.

Over the past decade, the share of people under 25 with investment accounts has increased sixfold — but much of this activity doesn’t resemble what we usually think of as traditional investing. Two in 10 Gen Z investors invest only in crypto. Half of Gen Z and nearly half of millennial investors trade stocks weekly or even daily, chasing short-term market moves rather than making long-term investments. At the same time, the explosion of gamified brokerages, sports betting apps, and prediction markets has made speculating and gambling possible on nearly any phone.

What’s emerged is an economic trend far more serious than participating in a game of poker, buying an occasional lottery ticket, or betting on the Super Bowl with your colleagues. Driven by the fear that traditional paths to success and security are rapidly disappearing, young adults are resorting to high-risk, high-reward strategies with their savings.

Imagine you’re a young adult fresh out of college. Your degree, paid for in part by student loans, seems increasingly useless in an ever-shifting job market that is hiring fewer people and more robots. Most of your evenings are spent feeding résumés into online portals, half of which vanish without even the courtesy of an automated rejection. The other half of potential employers politely inform you that they want at least a master’s degree for an entry-level role.

Say you beat the odds and miraculously secure a solid first job in Boston, at $80,000 a year. Accounting for taxes, you’ll take home around $59,000 a year, or roughly $4,900 a month. What at first seems like a healthy foundation for a financially stable life quickly meets a daunting ledger of expenses. The average rent for a studio in Boston runs roughly $2,800 a month, devouring almost 60 percent of your monthly paycheck. Even after packing your apartment full of roommates, you can only get rent down to about a third of every paycheck. After rent, groceries, transportation, car payments, and student loans, you just don’t have anything left to save.

And now, in the middle of roommate squabbles and broken dishwashers, you’re somehow expected to start thinking about eventually moving out into your own place, and even making a down payment on a home. The typical Boston home costs more than $1,000,000, requiring a six-figure down payment just to get in the door. Anyone who fires back with the optimistic “Just commute into the city!” isn’t aware of the data: The median home price across Massachusetts looms around $600,000. For most young adults, the math simply doesn’t add up anywhere in the state.

But there’s something deeper here than numbers. Even if you do manage to save, inflation erodes the value of cash. A dollar set aside in 2020 buys only about 80 cents’ worth of goods today, meaning it takes $1.25 now to buy what was worth $1 then.

When the future looks this bleak, young adults begin to feel that they’re falling behind, even when they’re doing everything “right.” If the traditional path of getting a degree, landing a job, and saving carefully can’t come even remotely close to producing a down payment on a home, then taking bigger financial risks starts to feel less and less reckless and more and more like the only option. If your paycheck can’t keep up with monthly expenses, much less catch up to housing prices, it’s easy to stop believing that patience will ever pay off.

In effect, the lottery economy is no longer confined to the poorest households. When low-income people feel economically stuck, they’re more likely to turn to buying lottery tickets, creating a regressive tax on desperation. This logic now fuels how young adults approach their finances. The idea of a single big win — a parlay, a meme coin pump, or a lucky options contract — promises the kind of financial success that saving can no longer guarantee.

This impulsive behavior is encouraged by financial infrastructure designed to maximize engagement. Today’s low- or no-fee investing and gambling apps are incentivized to push users to place more bets, open more trades, and risk larger amounts.

This extreme level of risk-taking isn’t as irrational it may seem. If young people retained any faith in traditional saving strategies, most wouldn’t bother to try day trading or chase crypto moonshots. But they believe there is no other option. The few winners of this game will never again have to worry about future mortgage payments; for the vast majority, the financial consequences will be devastating.

Until the basic math of adulthood starts to make sense again, more young Americans will feel pushed toward high-risk speculation — not because they want to “get rich quick” but because they fear they’ll never be able to experience their parents’ American Dream.