It’s official: the kids are not alright. Frankly, who can blame them? The modern world is in a perpetual state of economic and ecological crisis. Tech bros have infiltrated the White House. AI is eradicating entire industries. People’s sex lives are dictated by algorithms. And, as illustrated in the latest Netflix hit, Adolescence, there’s the growing threat of the manosphere, a once niche corner of the internet dominated by violent and misogynistic ideologies, whose anti-women theories have gone mainstream.
To be clear, I’m talking about Gen Z, the generation that is coming of age in a society defined by disruption, fear, and instability. Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z is the cohort that’s currently between the ages of 13 and 28. For jaded millennials such as myself, they used to represent a more positive future: back in the mid-2010s they were a group of people on whom we could pin our hopes, dreams, and projected fantasies for years to come. They were apparently progressive. They felt emboldened, educated. And they might have possessed enough information at their fingertips to tackle the wave of right-wing nationalism that’s been building both in the UK and overseas. That was the hope, anyway. But our optimism is quickly being eroded.
