Gen-Z may be the most chronicled generation in history. Yes, we hear a lot about the rapacious boomers and their wealth hoarding; the weak-willed, sentimental and woke millennial is a popular topic too; even the relatively harmless Gen-X gets it in the neck sometimes. But Gen-Z (I am precisely four months too old to rank among them) is discussed in the anglosphere with the fervour and intent of an addict.
A short rundown of Gen-Z in the global imagination: they are depressed and anxious; they have no economic prospects; home ownership is a pipe dream; they don’t know how to read; the lost boys seek out Andrew Tate and other cast members of the manosphere; the girls are radical lefties; their social lives are confined entirely to their screens; they can’t make eye contact. Is there any hope for them? With a blurb like this, surely not.
And don’t just take it from me. Politico asks how “phones warped Gen-Z”. The Guardian casually refers to “generation anxiety” and its “mental health crisis”. Gen-Z are “more anxious than any other generation” says the former bastion of millennial cool, Vice. “I’m Gen-Z and this is why we’re all so anxious and depressed” one laments in the iPaper. “The loneliest generation” Axios writes, challenging the rest of the media for most histrionic superlative. I cannot help but wonder whether any of this is particularly helpful, or true.
But first, fine: of course there are material circumstances that make Gen-Z’s lives difficult. I pity them for coming of age during the worst heights of woke liberal piety (by my estimate, 2015-2021). I feel even worse for the youngest in the cohort whose education was severely disrupted by the pandemic. Both of these things are psychologically warping and I suspect will have lasting and hard-to-quantify after effects. The housing crisis and hostile rental market is not to be scoffed at either (though Gen-Z do not have a right to claim they are the worst afflicted members of society in this sphere). And I do not think the concern about phone and screen addiction is moral panic: a reckoning is coming here, and soon, I hope.
It’s no wonder people my age are miserable. Everyone keeps telling them they’re totally screwed
I’m no Greta Thunberg fan, but dismissing the Madleen as a ‘publicity stunt’ is brain-dead
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Ingredients for happier marriage between the United Kingdom and Ireland are there
But there is a lot going for them too. They can get jobs – not true of my parents’ generation when they left college in the 1980s, where the unemployment rate sometimes reached 18 per cent. Or how about the middle-aged millennials who entered the job market in 2008, 2009, 2010, with an unemployment rate hovering around 14 per cent? Pity that depressed and anxious generation, no? On top of all jobs, Gen-Z are also unfortunately forced to suffer the best living standards the West has ever enjoyed.
Rhetoric does not just describe material reality, it guides and moulds it too
— Finn McRedmond
Nevertheless, the point is not to chastise Gen-Z out of a self-pitying malaise. Half of adolescence is about self-pitying malaise (most grow out of it, and you cannot help the ones that refuse to). But to ask: are we making their problems worse? I suspect if we keep pointing to the 28-and-unders among us and telling them how depressed and anxious they are, they will start to believe it, and it might all become a little bit self-sustaining, and self-fulfilling. I think if someone told me my life was totally screwed by huge cosmic and societal forces out of my control, I may become a little despondent too; and if I didn’t feel despondent, might I worry that something was wrong with me?
[ Maybe what the world needs right now is another Anthony BourdainOpens in new window ]
A note on self-fulfilling prophecies, while we are here. I remember during the acme of #MeToo in 2018 calling out men and teenage boys for their so-called “toxic masculinity” became a favourite past-time of the well-meaning liberal. I know one teacher who – at the behest of the administration board – had to hold an assembly to lecture his students about all the foibles and problems inherent to their manhood. We all know by now – and plenty of us knew then – that all of this was a horrible mistake. It was instrumental in fostering the conditions necessary for the likes of Andrew Tate to thrive; it generated a nihilism among young men for the manosphere to exploit and created the very toxicity it was afraid of.
I think we are making the same mistakes now. An obsession with identifying “trends” and “generational cohorts” (a very modern pursuit, by the way) has led us into forcing the idea that Gen-Z is homogenous, miserable, and easily-identifiable by arbitrary boundaries (as though people born between 1996 and 2011 is a meaningful category). Rhetoric does not just describe material reality, it guides and moulds it too. If you want to tell Gen-Z time and again that they’re depressed, don’t be surprised if you make it true.
I have said this before but I think it is important: pessimism is deterministic. The good news is that this is also true of optimism. But for now, I watch the adults among us talk about the endless hardship facing Gen-Z, almost as if they are willing it.
