Back in 2001, the then-new tech billionaire, fresh off Amazon’s 1997 IPO, took to the stage at the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio to lay out a take on what actually causes stress. And in his eyes, it has nothing to do with workload, grueling hours, or needing a holiday. 

“You can be working incredibly hard and loving it,” Bezos said. “And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed.”

The culprit, Bezos argued, isn’t your workload. It’s inaction.

“People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion,” he added. “Stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring.”

Feeling stressed? Here’s Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old fix

The fix, Bezos says, is simple—and it doesn’t require even solving the dilemma that’s making you lose sleep. You just need to do something, anything, to chip away at it.

“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over, so if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me,” Bezos explains. “What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it.”

“As soon as I identify it and make the first phone call, or send off the first email—whatever it is that we’re going to do to start to address that situation—even if it’s not solved, the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it,” he added.

In other words, the relief doesn’t come from resolution. It comes from motion.

And he made his point with a concrete (and eerily prescient) example: two people can both be out of work, but the one grinding through job applications and interviews will feel far less stressed than the one sitting at home spiraling. Same situation. Completely different headspace.

“If you’re out of work, but you’re going through a disciplined approach—a series of job interviews and working to remedy that situation—you’re going to be a lot less stressed than if you’re just worrying about it and doing nothing,” Bezos said.

Fortune contacted Bezos for comment.

The Amazon and Blue Origin founder’s advice feels more relevant now than ever, as young people stare down an uncertain economy, a wave of AI-driven redundancies, and the worst job market we’ve seen in 37 years.

“Bezos is right, and I think it lands even harder in 2026 than it did when he first said it,” Lewis Maleh tells Fortune. As CEO of the executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis, he sees it play out constantly. “Most of the stress I see in candidates isn’t about uncertainty or workload. It’s about the gap between what they know they should be doing and what they’re actually doing. Inaction is the real tax.”

For the millions of unemployed young people—or NEETs—Maleh shares some tangible steps they can take to regain some sense of control.

“If you’re waiting to hear back after an interview, the worst thing you can do is sit with your phone,” he says. “Reconnect with five people in your network who already know your work. Write something publicly that puts your thinking into the world. Take a course. Pick up a freelance project. Most of the relief comes from the action itself, because action restores agency, and agency is what kills stress.”

If you’ve got a job, but you’re feeling stuck and stressed as a result, Maleh says “apply less, network more.” 

“Most senior hires are made long before a role is ever posted,” he explains, adding its why instead of shooting out hundreds (or even thousands) of applications into the job ad abyss, workers can take charge by deciding who they want to work with and “work backwards from there.” Pluck up that conversation with an old colleague, train up for the next role you want, and post all about it. 

“Make yourself easy to refer,” he adds. “Become the obvious answer to a question people are already asking.”

Ultimately, whether you’re pining for a new job, promotion, or change of direction in your career, the responsibility for making it happen sits with you. And as Bezos put it 25 years ago, taking ownership for your own success is a lot less stressful than waiting for someone else to fix it—and even less stressful than doing nothing at all.

“Be the CEO of your career,” he adds. “No one else is going to run it for you. Not your employer, not the market, not a recruiter, and certainly not LinkedIn’s algorithm. The moment people stop outsourcing responsibility for their own trajectory is usually the moment the stress starts to lift.”