The Brussels Bubble is a conveyor belt of potential, crushed into uniformity

Brussels is a city of ambition. Every year, thousands of young people arrive with big dreams and the hope of helping shape Europe. Job ads promise engagement, impact, and innovation. But what the majority of us fresh arrivals found instead was a grind of back-to-back meetings, endless forms, and reports no one will read. The excitement that drew us here is often nowhere to be found or buried under a mountain of admin and coordination.

Even the lucky among us can’t help noticing it. Watching peers struggle with short-term contracts, dead-end internships, endless bureaucracy, and financial precarity, it’s impossible not to mourn what is quietly being lost: the energy, the ideas, the ambition that brought us here in the first place. The same ideas that helped build the space we hope to be in. 

There’s a kind of kinship in this exhaustion. Most of us came here not only with ambition, but also with passions: the musician, writer, painter who no longer have time to play and had to conform to the uniformity of the bubble. We are a generation of dreamers, slowly watching those dreams wither under the weight of survival.

Recent data underlines the stakes. A Generation Europe survey of youth workers found that 30 percent report their jobs harm their wellbeing and one in five describe their mental health as “bad or very bad.” At the same time, a report in The Brussels Times noted that among Belgians in their twenties, long-term sick leave due to depression or burnout jumped by 21.6 percent in just one year. These figures paint a picture of a city where young professionals are exhausted by precarity, overwork, and the constant pressure to keep up.

Politics needs creativity

It’s not just about passion projects. Creativity matters for politics itself. The EU prides itself on innovation, yet its capital quietly starves imagination and creativity. Policy circles reward procedure over substance and visibility over value.

Too often, communication happens in an echo chamber: we speak to each other, using the same jargon, the same acronyms and hearing the same ideas repeated. There is little space for new voices, not even mentioning that the bubble is overwhelmingly white and male. The danger isn’t just that young people abandon their passions, it’s that policymaking itself becomes unimaginative, reproducing the same stale ideas on autopilot framed as revolutionary.

I’m aware I’m one of the lucky ones. Whilst my job gives me room to think and create, many of my peers do not have this space, and it’s their lost energy and ideas that make the Brussels bubble so quietly destructive, almost like a conveyor belt of potential crushed into uniformity.

Some will say this is just how work is. That Gen Z or millennials (or zillenials) like me are spoiled, unwilling to do the hard work. But that misses the point. We already work hard, unbelievably hard, and often for too little. We juggle short-term contracts, freelance side hustles, and endless admin just to keep going. We are called lazy by the same people who shoot down every idea that doesn’t align with theirs, without even listening.

Losing ideas

Lazy? We can barely afford our groceries. Buying olive oil can deplete our weekly budget. Most of us share flats well into our thirties. Some of us calculate whether a train ticket or a flight home is worth the dent in our finances. How can we unwind when the world is expected of us, yet we’re not even given a fair share of it? And we’re not imagining this pressure: the European Economic and Social Committee recently found that nearly 45% of employed adults across the EU face risks to their mental wellbeing at work, with work overload and time pressure the leading culprits.

The irony is sharp. Brussels markets itself as the home of visionary policy, yet it breeds a culture where vision is impossible. The EU says it wants to win the global race on innovation, but the very people tasked with thinking about that innovation are too drained, too precarious, too unheard to imagine alternatives.

And this has consequences beyond individual wellbeing. Democracy depends on imagination: the ability to picture a future that looks different from the present. If the people closest to Europe’s decision-making are too exhausted, unheard, or dismissed to imagine anything else, Europe risks stagnating.

This doesn’t mean every civil servant should publish a novel or every lobbyist should have a side-hustle as a painter. But it does mean the Brussels bubble needs to take seriously the way they structure work. A culture that squeezes out creativity doesn’t just lose art but it also loses ideas. And ideas are the one thing Brussels cannot afford to keep losing.

When I talk with friends here, there’s a quiet mourning for the versions of ourselves we’ve had to leave behind. We came here with dreams of building Europe. But somewhere between the contracts, the admin, and the exhaustion, Europe may be killing our own dreams.

Every month, hundreds of thousands of people read the journalism and opinion published by EUobserver. With your support, millions of others will as well.

If you're not already, become a supporting member today. Use the code TRYIT to get the first month for just €4 (instead of €11), valid until August 31.