Gen Z Is Screwed

But we can prevent the world from going down with us.

Gen Z is screwed. I wish it weren’t true. I’ve spent years practicing gratitude, excited to wake up alive each sunny day and deeply appreciative of little things, like the fact my smartphone has YouTube. The great kings of old got to hear Mozart performed twice a year. I get that every day, plus running water and toilets. Talk about privilege.

But the sad truth is that those advances don’t make us happy. Humans are ambitious, greedy, and have an in-built negativity bias. We thrive on communities and love that are disappearing into a bleak isolation. Depression and anxiety and suicide are on the rise. None of us can count on marriage or kids or a family, let alone homes we consider nice and things that make us feel rich enough or successful enough. Some of my dreams are not only unfulfilled, but I don’t feel I have the right to pursue them.

The sad truth is for all the joy we’ve created, we have also created a great well of intense pain.

People are suffering.

Gen Z does not have a childhood to look back on. We learned far too young about the terrible things happening on the planet and we took it to heart. (If we didn’t, we risked being ostracized for ignorance or cruelty.) We didn’t party much or have sex. We worried about long-term partners. I have yet to meet anyone under the age of 23 who had a happy, carefree, and frivolous childhood. Kids are no longer kids.

Then we grew up. Today, half of Gen Zers over 18 have reported lost jobs and pay cuts, significantly higher than the shares of millennials, Gen Xers, and boomers. Young workers were particularly vulnerable to job loss over the pandemic year.

We are so stressed. We are significantly more likely than other generations to report negative mental health. For a full quarter of us, discrimination is a key stressor. Over 45% of teens say they are online almost constantly, especially on YouTube and Instagram. Well-known for toxic influencer culture, unrealistic beauty and life standards, and perpetuating mental health problems, those platforms are causing real harm to our self-esteem and self-worth.

Then there are rising costs of food, rising sea levels, and rising student loan debt. I often hear we are unlikely to do as financially well as our parents or to live as long as they will. It’s as if everyone has given up hope.

The world is suffering.

I am currently in California for the month of July — visiting earlier than intended to avoid the now yearly fire season. But there is already smoke in the air. It started over a month and a half early.

Tragedy goes beyond the dying environment. Animals are going extinct, the international health care system is broken, and authoritarianism is on the rise. Gen Z grew up with armed conflicts, market crashes, and wanna-be dictators. If the pandemic had been even a little worse, we’d have been decimated. Literally.

And we feel all this pain to our bones. Three quarters of American Gen Z are significantly stressed about mass shootings, which continue to plague our classrooms. We are more likely than adults to be stressed about sexual harassment, assault, and deportation of migrant families. Nine in ten of us have experienced physical or emotional stress symptoms. When the world suffers, we suffer.

And it’s one planet now.

Gone are the days where we could justifiably — or possibly — focus on our local community, state, or even country. If we could not be great in the world, we used to be important to those around us.

Today, people move around far more than ever before. It’s expected that families break apart when teenagers go to college — an American cultural tradition that spread like a virus. People thrive on community, not just a nuclear family. But with the downfall of libraries, community centers, and houses of worship, jobs are the closest things to family left.

Then there is competition and hustle culture. Good colleges have lower and lower admissions rates (everyone in the world wants to go to Harvard). Being rich and famous today means being internationally successful — same with global job markets, global creative competition, and global activism.

Global are the worries too. Surveillance affects all of us, as do fights for the free internet. If we aren’t living in a country in the middle of an emergency, we are friends with someone who is. So whenever we get too selfishly focused on our own lives, we feel guilty for that too and back off — trading our dreams of fashion design or brand-building to become healthcare workers or activists.

We are all unsatisfied and struggling to succeed, comparing ourselves to seven billion others, and wanting to reach a point where we feel secure, even if we know, deep down, there is no security left on this Earth.

We are entitled to nothing. But we are responsible for everything.

Today, I look back at the many different careers I’ve had and I can’t find the optimistic delight in them I could once muster. To succeed in physics today is to be born smarter than the one percent of the one percent, to claw your way up through rigid bureaucracy, and to ignore years of skin-crawling sexism. As an author, I see white-washed cliches dominating a capitalist-driven market. The legal field is full of rich people who feel poor, people who struggle to kick alcoholism, and people who ignore the hard realities of where their million-dollar paychecks truly come from (the sweatshops of companies who’d rather pay an American lawyer $1200 an hour than a child in South Asia minimum wage). With print media long gone, online magazines struggling, and media bias well-entrenched, I don’t know if there is such a thing as journalism left. Art, music, and most fields are now about brand-building, self-promotion, and struggling to avoid the depression and insecurity that comes with it. Politics is beyond hopeless.

But there is one broken ladder in the wretched quicksand, one spark that left the Pandora’s Box of a cursed generation who didn’t even get hope. And that is us.

I find the gratitude and joy in my life at an international, majority-minority nonprofit with programmers and videographers and writers and therapists, all changing the world for free. I see the hard-fought optimism in the activists and volunteers and frontline workers from every hidden corner of our despondent globe.

Saving the world is my oath. It is the oath of a thousand Gen Z’ers I’ve seen and worked with from Parkland survivors to young writers, from teenagers refusing to serve a transphobic military to 15-year-old leaders at Dweebs Global.

People are suffering and the world is suffering, but it’s our planet now. We know we’re the last chance. The endgame. The sacrifice. We will not leave problems to our kids and grandkids yet again. We don’t expect others to help and we don’t dare to hope. But we’re going to go down fighting anyway.

We refuse to accept deaths from curable diseases. Hell, we even refuse to accept deaths from the incurable. We refuse to accept the racism and sexism and homophobia of our ancestors. We refuse to accept worldwide injustice and police brutality and a lack of basic healthcare. We refuse to accept the cruelty of slaughterhouses or the lead in our water or the coal in our air. We are diverse, have diverse friends, are progressive, are well-educated, and do not see the United States as superior. There are no borders in our generation. I hope we continue to refuse to see them.

And above all, I hope that we fight, every single day for the rest of our lives. I hope we realize that if we don’t get to pursue careers in selfishness or money or frivolity — if there are a million Isvaris who choose to serve the planet instead of becoming the singers or artists or wealthy recluses we wish we could be, it’s because our sacrifice means the next generations can. I hope we burn bright but that we never burn out.

Because at the end of the day, we are the future. And we are screwed.

But if we try hard enough, the world may not be.

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For more articles on why I fight the good fight:

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