One thing I was not expecting as I aged was the sense that new generations were partially as foreign as a new species.
One in five Gen Zers are not in employment, education, or training because they’ve given up on the rat race entirely.Jonathan Haidt and others will tell you it's social media and the lack of free play. Some will argue it's the decline of religion or the increase in therapy culture or that we’re in a “comfort crisis.” I'm not a social scientist—I'm just a crotchety old 22-year-old—so I won’t present you with a perfectly correlated data set, but I think we’ve ended up here from all of the above to some degree. Emerging technologies, including the internet, have made us comfortable, and when we were no longer in survival mode, we began to look for meaning and found it lacking. We began to ruminate about ourselves. As the internet democratized information we exchanged wisdom for facts, religion and community for evidence-based psychiatry, and social connection for social media.When the internet made us smarter and we no longer needed God, we became small Gods. The internet showed us all we could be. We could make our own meaning and morals—but where to start? When I scroll through social media my brain is bombarded with real-time images of wars, cat videos, politics, shoe ads, medication ads, and parties I wasn’t invited to all in the space of ten minutes and I feel paralyzed. Meaning escapes me then. How does someone create their own meaning when they can hardly leave their bed? And why would anyone leave bed when every action one takes limits their future, which the internet convinced us is unlimited and infinite?
I do believe the kids will be alright though. Many of us are trying to reconnect with ourselves.There are movements to “rawdog” flights, meaning to sit there without any form of entertainment. Some are moving to flip phones, dumbphones, or putting their smartphones in grayscale to make them intentionally less addictive.Another promising trend is the recent resurgence of religion among Gen Z following years of decline, which I believe is linked to my generation recognizing our need for structure. Naturally, it makes sense to return to structures that have tapped into the human psyche for thousands of years. I’m not advocating for a return to Christianity—I’m an atheist heavily influenced by Buddhism—but to follow whichever scaffolding grounds you by providing built-in rules, rituals, and a moral community, which make the onslaught of daily life more tolerable.