Gen Z: The Builders

History repeats itself, is the saying. No matter the time we always seem to forget that there is reference for what is happening in the world today if we look back, even just a couple of generations. There are so many events in the world that this could be applied to and I intend to cover all the ones I find interesting, like tariffs, populism, divisiveness, and so much more. But today I want to focus on something that has been controversial since the beginning of time, the young people of course, or Zoomers, as they are known today.

Let’s begin with a little disclaimer. I am a proud elder Zoomer, being right on the cusp of the new greatest generation. When I was growing up, Millennials were taking shots left and right, from just about everybody. Millennials were often seen as lazy, entitled, and out of touch, which is funny because the generations leveling these attacks were the same ones that raised them. Recently I was reading Dove, a book about a teenage boy sailing around the world in the late 1960s. I was struck not only by the grand adventure, but some of his commentary on the times. He talked about how the older generations saw his as being “rotted” from all the new fangled entertainment, TV heard of it? “Rotted” is interesting as the term “brain rot” has taken off in recent years as a response to Zoomers being chronically online. The term of course doesn’t apply to Gen Z exclusively, it’s really anybody who is chronically online, but it is always closely associated with Zoomers. Yes, it’s true, the internet holds so much information that when one doom scrolls for eternity they will likely get a case of the rot. We are seeing it in data too, many people are reporting feeling cognitively slow, and unable to think as clearly as they once did. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, computers do a lot for us, and as time has gone on they have become an essential component of most people’s lives. How many people drive around their own city with sat nav on constantly, even for places they go to all the time? I digress.

So yes, technology has a massive role in our lives, and that can be problematic. But everybody and their mother has written about that, and while true, it’s not exactly productive or interesting. What I do find interesting is where we go from here. Us Zoomers have been raised in the internet age, we have been exposed to more information and knowledge than most humans in history did over their entire lives. We watched YouTube videos to learn and have acute knowledge of what so many people are doing every day. This naturally led to low self esteem, exhaustion, and in many cases, existential dread. But I think there is benefit to experiencing all of this young, it helps many to understand what is important earlier on. We have been raised in the matrix and we got to take the red pill. We watched as our parents were devastated by the 2008 financial crisis, after working so hard to chase the American dream, only to find out some coke addled bros on Wall Street were rigging the game. We were faced with realities of the world much younger than most. We went off the college and accumulated life changing amounts of debt, all in pursuit of that dream we were told about as kids. We went off into the workforce and found little of anything. What we did find was more bills, more stress, and more expectations. Expectations that were never our own, and now we sit here, wondering when we’ll arrive. Institutions which we once thought would save us are crumbling and the people who told us this was the route are making an exit out the back. It’s all kind of bollocks, so what now?

Gen Z had it’s midlife crisis at 25. In the face of all of this you would expect this panned generation to roll over and go back to TikTok. But that isn’t what I see happening. I see a generation of builders, who wish to return society to a more opportune place. Who wish to do away with the systems and institutions which made the Boomers rich. I see a generation more cognizant of it’s dependence on technology than any other, well aware of its far reaching, negative impacts. Recently I was at a small music festival. The vast majority of attendees were Zoomers. I was struck by how few were on their phones, as you walked around the festival there would be the occasional person trying to text or call their friends they had been separated from. There was some photo opps and the occasional video of their favorite song. That was it though, no scrolling, no videoing the whole concert. It was a bunch of young people, yearning for something real, something outside the digital world. It was genuinely heartwarming and inspiring. It gave me an immense amount of hope for us. Now, all we have to do is not put up such an ugly system in the place of this one, much like the Boomers, and so many more before them did. America is a uniquely individualistic place, and that is in the fabric of this flag, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do a better job of looking out for each other.

Kyla Scanlon recently wrote an excellent piece about all the investment in the digital world and the lack of investment in the physical world, I’ll link it here. As the world around us continues to fall apart (see the infrastructure gap) somebody will have to deal with it. It seems, due to timing that this will largely fall on Gen Z, and God save us Gen Alpha. While this is terrifying and a daunting task, I believe it’s also an incredible opportunity. We have an opportunity to build a world which we have all dreamed of. We can narrow the inequities that we all became very aware of growing up in a connected world. We can use common sense and move away from arbitrary rules and institutions that have little purpose (40 hour work week anyone?). We can use all this amazing technology that has been developed to make our lives easier and open up more opportunity to explore more than the four walls of an office. I envision an enlightening of sorts, thanks to our incredible access to information. The internet and technology has been hijacked by billionaires who seek profits and exploitation, but it doesn’t have to be that way and I think Gen Z is well aware of that. So yes, we have been rotted, but most beautiful things must come from a place of destruction, and I think that’s pretty cool.

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