Gen Z Isn’t Screwed
Today’s young people are facing challenges, but they haven’t been dealt a uniquely bad hand.
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The cultural consensus is that Gen Z is miserable. Today’s young people are lost and stagnant—and for good reason, too. You see, Gen Zers have been dealt a singularly bad hand by fate. While their forebears had it easy, they must struggle amid, as writer Emi Nietfeld put it in a recent New York Times essay, “the worst job market in years” and a planet that will soon become “uninhabitable.”
The young adults Ms. Nietfeld interviewed echoed this sense of defeat. “The economy and society that we live in isn’t structured right now for me to have good answers,” one 24-year-old college graduate said. “I think looking only ahead to the future is actually detrimental to you.” Another recent grad expressed skepticism that delaying gratification was worth it: “If I have to go through pain, I’d rather it be on my own terms than the terms you made.”
Ms. Nietfeld is disappointed by young adults’ pessimism, but not dismissive of it. “It’s true that in times of uncertainty, despair is a rational response,” she writes. “But when young people stop believing that long-term effort will improve their lives, something larger is lost.”
The core assumption beneath this generational sense of pessimism isn’t supported by evidence. Today’s young people face challenges. I grant Ms. Nietfeld’s points about the housing crisis and the difficulty many college graduates have getting entry-level, white-collar work. But these aren’t unprecedented challenges. If Gen Zers are indeed uniquely hopeless about the future, it isn’t because they’re facing uniquely bad circumstances.
Every generation, no matter how cosseted by material abundance and relative peace, can stake a claim to unparalleled suffering. Millennials had the Great Recession. Boomers had stagflation and Vietnam. Everyone forgets about Gen X. In 15 years, I expect to be reading articles about the strange new habits of those in Gen Alpha, and the unrivaled crises they’re facing due to the mismanagement of their forefathers. On some counts, Gen Z is in fact doing much better than its predecessors. Today’s young adults are far out-earning their 1990s counterparts. They’re also more likely to have a bachelor’s degree.
Why, then, do so many young people seem so hopeless about the future? Though it sounds counterintuitive, hopelessness can be self-protective. If you convince yourself that you have no agency—that the meritocracy is a myth, that the world is broken and hurtling toward disaster—then you relieve yourself of any obligation to improve your situation. For many young adults floating in postgrad malaise, pessimism is self-protection. It’s a shield against disappointment and an excuse to avoid doing any task that seems too hard. Instead of telling these self-pitying layabouts to get a grip, the media takes their dejection at face value.
It shouldn’t surprise us that so many young people opt for the soothing yet hopeless path. The cultural messages most left-leaning, upper-middle-class young people receive are unimaginably bleak. We live under actual fascism. The world is burning. Billionaires have ruined our chances at economic success. Believing that everything is doomed has become a signal of intellectual superiority. Only the blithely privileged could believe that things are all right.
Democratic socialism appeals to the highly educated yet downwardly mobile because it affirms their sense that they’re living in a broken, late-capitalist wasteland. As a solution, it offers to create a parent-like state providing everyone with the necessities of a comfortable life while expecting nothing in return. Worry not, billionaires will pick up the tab.
Today’s struggling young people will likely turn out fine. They’ll flounder for a few years, but eventually mature into productive adults. It’s easy to confuse the challenges of youth for a permanent, generational malaise. Still, I’m sick of watching people wallow in their own powerlessness because they’re too afraid of the responsibilities of agency. Blaming other people is always easy, but never as fruitful as deciding to steer your own ship. The biggest challenge facing Gen Z might not be the economy or climate change, but our own lack of will.
Ms. Camp is senior newsletter editor at Free Expression.