If you are under 30, there’s a message you’ve likely received many times during this painful year: You’re inheriting the wreckage of a once-great world, and your life will be less prosperous, peaceful or productive than the one older generations have enjoyed. You’ve heard it apologetically from your parents and their peers, ominously from the media, and perhaps angrily from your own mind. You may even be among those who’ve vowed not to bring children into “this world.”

I get it. The unprecedented period of global growth and betterment that lasted from about 1990 to 2010 predated your adult life. Instead you’ve watched, over the last decade and especially over the last year, as older generations and their leaders have crashed the planet ecologically, allowed autocratic-minded figures and intolerant extremists to seize key parts of the democratic world, set out to replace human labour via resource-guzzling data centres, and left you a future seemingly without decent jobs or affordable housing and a catastrophically diminished world order.

But this is a dangerously shortsighted vision.

Today’s end-time pessimism is a fallacy. It’s built on path dependency: the notion that the downward curve on the graph will continue, that the current decline has become irreversible. And it’s built on this century’s underlying belief among liberals and moderate conservatives that we must be passive victims of history, rather than its agents.

In fact, it is much more likely that Gen Z has come of age at a fortuitous time. We are not approaching the end, but coming to a beginning.

People who are young today will very likely be the heirs to the greatest period of rebuilding, growth and new invention of this century – not as a matter of choice or ideology, but out of urgent necessity. They face a role comparable to those who were young in 1946, when the decades of rebuilding after the Second World War had only begun.

At that time, surrounded by the endless ruins of nations and institutions and economies and the threat of terrifying new technologies, prospects for the new generation looked grim. The young adults of 1946 were surrounded by severe inflation, unemployment, food shortages and the worst government debt in history. Western countries struggled with fears that the forces of nationalism and authoritarianism that had propelled the war were about to come sweeping back, supported by a miserable generation suffering declining living standards, without any of the glory of the war years.

Yet the opposite proved true. The boomers inherited an era of renewal. The rebuilding of the world’s economies and the creation of new international structures and institutions led to the greatest explosion of economic growth, well-being and international co-operation in human history, one that propelled two decades of full employment and upward mobility and an unprecedented spread of democracy and human development.

This comparison might have seemed hyperbolic before the catastrophic events of 2025. The collapse of the United States into a shockingly extreme form of far-right strongman rule – one that even cautious and conservative analysts now freely call fascism – has rapidly threatened the security, institutional and democratic stability of the free world. It became a global threat earlier this year when Washington made the promotion of extreme-right and racially intolerant governments in European democracies its official international-security policy. “The decades of the Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe,” Friedrich Merz, Germany’s conservative chancellor, declared this month. “It no longer exists as we know it.”

And 2025 capped off the three consecutive hottest years in recorded history, leading scientists to declare that a dangerous atmospheric warming of 1.5 C (at least temporarily) is now unpreventable. That occurred as the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, withdrew from virtually all climate agreements and aggressively pushed its own economy away from renewable energy and electric vehicles and toward coal, while constricting global trade with punitive tariffs and shutting down the world’s largest sources of humanitarian, medical and military aid.

After a decade of democratic governments backsliding into de facto authoritarianism and illiberalism, this year marked a nadir: The Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance........

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