If you want to know what the future of the workforce will look like, look no further than Boston, where 20-to-34-year-old millennials already make up nearly half of Boston’s resident labor force.

Statistics show that by 2025, millennial workers will make up 75 percent of the U.S. workforce, and their preferences will shape the future of the modern workplace.

But in Boston, that reality is already upon us, and the Boston Globe and Boston.com have created a new series called Generation Boston to shine a spotlight on exactly who these millennial workers and residents are, what their lifestyles are like, exactly what they need and want from one of America's oldest cities, and how their preferences are already shaping it. (Follow companion dialogue on social media under the hasthag #GenBoston.)

In the piece, “Boston’s young adults plentiful, influential — and often burdened,” staff writer Catherine Cloutier takes a look at how Boston surpassed famously young cities like Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C., to have the largest proportion of millennials of any major U.S. city, and what effect that is having on the changing face of Boston. More than one third of Boston’s residents are now between the ages of 21 and 34 (with even higher percentages in Cambridge and Somerville), and they’re “exercising their influence” as an “economic engine . . . shaping neighborhoods . . . attracting companies through entrepreneurship and innovation, and advocating for an arts and late-night entertainment scene.”

But as 31-year-old Kristin Mattera, one of the millennials profiled in depth by the Globe for Generation Boston, articulates: her “Boston-area lifestyle [is] ‘stunted adulthood’” thanks to crippling student debt, a slowly recovering job market, and mounting expenses. “In the city,” Mattera says, “everything happens later.”

Boston’s millennial population increased by 11 percent from 2000 to 2010, compared to New York’s 3.9 percent increase and San Francisco’s 3.3 percent decline, according to the U.S. Census, which means that “with a greater proportion of residents facing these problems than any other U.S. city, Boston feels an exponential weight of these burdens.”

April Lane is a freelance writer.