Gen Z is the most eager generation to retire early. Good luck with that

Baby boomers may not be retiring, but younger workers can’t wait. Survey after survey finds that Gen Z is the most ambitious generation when it comes to early retirement, with some reports suggesting as much as 70% of the workforce’s youngest cohort would like to permanently clock out years—or even decades—early.

But financial experts say Gen Zers who want to exit the workforce early are, to put it mildly, facing an uphill battle. While workers of all ages struggle to save enough for retirement, it may prove even more difficult for younger Americans. The costs of everything from housing to education to child care are significantly higher than for baby boomers and Gen Xers—and likely to keep growing—and there remains the possibility Social Security’s full retirement age is pushed back to make up for current pitfalls.

Much of Gen Z is already struggling economically, carrying more debt than millennials did at the same age and having higher delinquency rates, factors that make an early retirement even harder to attain. But young workers do have some things on their side, including earning more than previous generations and starting to save for retirement earlier, on average. They have far better access to low-cost financial products and high-quality investment information than generations before them. And they have the most of the most important asset: time.

The desire to leave the workforce early makes sense to Emily Irwin, head of advice relations for Wells Fargo. Americans’ perspectives on work and life have been shifting over the past few decades, and Gen Z is “reimagining what their life cycle will look like,” Irwin tells Fortune. “There’s been a prioritization of, ‘Hey, we want to work differently, live differently, and we want to achieve a different type of American dream.’”

That doesn’t necessarily mean clocking out of the workforce entirely. Americans’ ideas of what constitutes retirement is also shifting, and Irwin suspects many Gen Zers just want more freedom—to travel, to be present for their children, to pursue passion projects before their sixties or seventies. If that’s the case, she says it is entirely possible to work toward, well, not working in a traditional corporate environment. For those looking to…