Is Gen Z “utterly screwed”? |
Key takeaways
• By many metrics, Gen Z is doing better economically than previous generations at the same age.
• Zoomers are especially vulnerable to displacement from AI.
• Gen Z’s economic pessimism may partly reflect its high rates of social media use and loneliness.
Gen Z was born too late.
By the 2020s, the boomers had already bought up all the houses, while the millennials had commandeered the good careers. Zoomers have, therefore, been condemned to hovels in irradiated outlying districts and dead-end internships where they train the AI that will replace them.
What piddling wages the zoomer ekes out goes to their landlord and alma mater. What hopes for the future they momentarily summon gets incinerated by thoughts of global warming. The generation is, in a word, “screwed.” And it is responding to its dispossession in all the usual ways: by sinking into despair, falling prey to porn addiction, and developing a fondness for Adolf Hitler.
If you’ve ever logged onto TikTok, then you’re probably acquainted with most of this story. Zoomers have been lamenting their generation’s plight for almost as long as millennials have been whining about our own. But my caricature of Gen Z doomerism does feature one slightly novel idea: Zoomers are the generational equivalent of the Weimar Republic, propelled towards Nazism by economic instability.
That notion garnered attention last week, when the conservative blogger Rod Dreher published a dispatch from his recent trip to DC. Dreher came away with the impression that “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Republican Party’s Zoomer staffers were fans of Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi influencer.
Asked to explain the antisemitic sympathies of his colleagues, one zoomer conservative told Dreher that the root cause was largely economic. His generation “is so utterly screwed.” They lack “good career prospects,” will “never be able to buy a home,” and “are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out.” As a result, they want to “tear everything down” (beginning, it seems, with the Jews).
This analysis has some obvious flaws. For one, young conservatives in DC tend to have excellent career prospects. Right-wing institutions suffer from a perpetual shortage of college graduates idealistic enough to forgo jobs in business, yet reactionary enough to support Trump’s GOP. For another, it seems rather odd to respond to high housing costs or onerous student debts by thinking to yourself, “Huh, I guess the Holocaust was actually a good thing.”
Nevertheless, Dreher’s anecdote underscores how pervasive — and potentially hazardous — Gen Z’s economic pessimism has become. It’s therefore worth noting that this gloom isn’t entirely justified. In material terms, zoomers are not actually “screwed” — or at least, they haven’t been screwed just yet.
By many metrics, Gen Z is doing better than past generations
Gen Z’s Wehrmacht enthusiasts aren’t alone in thinking that their generation has drawn the short straw. Relative to their predecessors, zoomers consistently express a more negative impression........