In 1993, the classic Brit-pop band Blur closed “For Tomorrow” with a spoken aside: Modern life, as far as their narrator was concerned, was rubbish. It became the title of the album and, eventually, shorthand for a certain flavor of Gen X disillusionment: bored, unwilling to take the world’s dysfunction too seriously because taking it seriously wouldn’t change anything.
Three decades later, the generation that Gen X largely raised has inherited the sentiment, minus the irony. The evidence is stacking up across polls, surveys, and countless anecdotes that Gen Z isn’t the problem, it’s just that modern life is a bit rubbish. Or as global advertising firm Ogilvy puts it in its new Gen Z Pulse report: “Gen Z isn’t contradictory. Modern life is.”
