"In fact, Gen Z might just be the most risk-averse generation on record. Fewer Gen Zers got a driver’s license, drank alcohol, or had sex as teenagers than their parents did. The same young adults now report skyrocketing rates of anxiety and other mental illnesses, with some estimates finding that as many as 1 in 5 18-to-24-year-olds have been diagnosed with depression. Timidity—not to mention self-conscious neuroticism—is increasingly the norm.
“An ongoing study from Montclair State University argues that some of this risk aversion is due to the current political climate—or perhaps young people’s perception of it. “Gen Z’s mental health has deteriorated due to a worldview that the society and environment around them are crumbling,” writes justice studies professor Gabriel Rubin. “Rights are being taken away, the Earth is burning, maniacs could kill you with a gun, and viruses could shut down society again.””
See also, for counterpoint: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcperna/2024/06/18/gen-z-thriving-entrepreneurship/
18-to-24-year-olds
Weird grouping with Gen Z being 3 years older than the max
But the way they use the computer and internet shows they aren’t risk adverse, just different risks
The anxiety is probably because like millennials, they’ve been told the world is ending their whole lives and instead of doing anything about it we’ve just made the middle class poor
Don’t forget the rapid fire misinformation they are addicted too. Manipulation is off the charts
People like Tate and Peterson have done immeasurable damage to Gen Z… Instagram was deeply damaging to women’s mental health but the manosphere has done damage that will probably never be undone.
Millennials were not told that. Millennials grew up on in the golden era and then it all fell apart on them when they became adults. They were raised on high hopes.
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Millennials include people 10 years older than you. We were definitely being sold a future of sunshine and rainbows until at least late high school, if not our 20s.
Millennials were sold the same promises as Gen X, only it was quickly becoming apparent that those promises were straight up lies. The young millennials cam of age in the wake of the 2008 crash while the older ones lost everything in said crash. Zoomers are still being sold the American dream, only now it’s more of a hostage demand.
And we all will land gently into a third world of our own making. The extremely rich, who are countryless/boarderless, will settle into their private islands as they use people to rack up “money points” and abuse underage childten.
I’m certain Ill be dead/dying in time to tell story’s have how we use to have rights and how Rosa Parks sat at the front of a bus once and helped change a nation. I will instill ideas of democracy that my current countrymen seem to hate so much, now. Then I will probably pick up a pack of smokes so I can look cool as I die rambling on about the ballot or the bullet.
I am an elder millennial graduated in 02, the 90’s were fucking great. It’s literally been a downhill slide since 9/11. We were told we were post history.
Yeah, my brother is an elder millennial (43), I’m 33. It’s wild the different stories we were told about how our lives were going to be. If he hasn’t gone into the military, I doubt he’d be any better off then I am, and I am… Not doing great, financially.
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Yeah I’m 30 and had to explain to my father that he could raise a family on a single engineer’s income, but I wouldn’t be able to. That was when I was a teenager
Affording a house on a single income isn’t doable, never mind raising a family!
You absolutely can. All you need is to be an engineer or other highly skilled professional or a tradesperson who works a ton of overtime and live in a low cost of living area on a tight budget and save for a decade
I am an engineer 🥲
Me too. And if I wasn’t fleeing Ohio I’d be looking at buying a house here. Not a big one but there are decent small houses in the suburbs that are affordable as an engineer on a single income if you save aggressively. Instead I’m spending my down payment on moving to the west coast.
I am a mid to early melenial. I was born in 1986. My first time concerned about the future was y2k. Yes, nothing ended up happening but it was a lot of doom and gloom(and long hours for the people preventing the doom and gloom becoming reality). I remember freshman year of hs when September 11th happened. Most of my friends graduated college in 2008-2009 during the financial collapse. We recover but significantly struggling more than expected and more than our parents. Now in the background there is still the Afghanistan and Iraq wars which seem to be at a stale mate.
The you have the chronic issues… Aids appeared in the 80s, probably never to leave. Global warming… Need I say more?.. The multiple diseases spreading like Sars.
Then you have the crazies pushing that a apocalypse will occur in 2012.
We get out of that all and enter into trump. Then covid 19 occurs. Now inflation.
What do we have to look forward to? The housing bubble collapse. Increase global warming. Automation reshaping the job land scape. The loss of the ability to truly own something. The same wage as 30 years ago with prices exponentially growing.
It was the golden age before mellenials… We just hung on through the downfall…
Fuck now I’m depressed…
Maybe that’s what makes millennials different. So many of the big scares ended up being big nothings.
AIDS was going to kill everyone… except it’s a STI, and now can be almost fully managed with drugs.
Weed was going to kill everyone and make everyone else go crazy… except it’s arguably less harmful than even caffeine, let alone tobacco or alcohol.
Y2K was going to end the world… except people put significant money and effort into solving it.
The hole in the ozone layer is growing… except we put regulations in place to stop it from growing and saved ourselves.
We managed to save ourselves, as a species, from all of these things. It wasn’t until 9/11 when we didn’t really know what to do and never really recovered from it as a society.
It makes sense that that’s often where people say the 90s really ended. And it’s a decent cut-off for when someone is Gen Z. If you don’t really remember 9/11 (and especially nothing before it), you’re not a millennial.
We didn’t get it that bad. We had the golden age of the internet and were the first with actual broadband. We have tons to look forward to like robot butlers and self driving cars. Also flexible screens that are hard to break.
More automation can be real good if we say use it to make a 4 hour work day while keeping the full time pay. Prices for weed are going down.
We may be going through a rising wave of right-wingism currently, but last time Trump and his goons were in charge they got replaced. A couple of ways to deal with this is to not be a minority or poor. If people can figure out those two things they can survive another four years of Trump’s America. The better way to deal with this is organize locally, because the Federal courts are fucked, the Senate is fucked, and the President is Trump so we aren’t gonna get much done nationally.
The US was fighting wars in the Middle East for the first 30 years of our lives, we watched the worst mass casualty event since pearl harbor on live tv, we lived through the worst economic crisis since the great depression, covid, tea party, trump, Katrina, isis, Putin, etc etc. When were these high hopes you speak of?
2008-2020, very high, me.
Basically, pre-2008.
Wars in the middle east were the norm, but they were always elsewhere, and the govt sold us that they were fighting the bad guys, that everything was under control, and that home would continue to be safe and prosperous. There basically weren’t any other militaries that could reasonably rival the US World Police. Yeah, it was seen as problematic, but in a way that seemed TOO safe, never unsafe. Random acts of terrorism was sold to us as the only real threat (even though it realistically wasn’t).
As kids, millennials were told that the American dream was real, that if you go to college you will get a good job and be able to provide for your family. It wasn’t until around the time of the 2008 recession that people really started noticing how worthless a lot of their college degrees were, and how much debt they had been saddled with.
Similarly, climate change was being successfully sold as “maybe a complete hoax” in the media. Even if you did believe it was real, it wasn’t crazy to feel optimistic that there was still time for the science to settle, and voters/politicians to make the right decisions before things got too bad.
Putin, Trump, and Covid were all solidly during Millennial adulthood, not representative of their youth.
Kyoto protocol was 1997, and that was just extending a climate treaty from 1992
You’re thinking of boomers
Driving cost money (remeber used cars selling for more than new?). They use to get drivers license to hang out (and have sex) with their friends. Now everything moved online.
Alcohol decreases where marajuana is legalized, a safer alternative.
Women saw the right to an abortion disappear- and more than half of gen Z men support it. That plus sex ed leads to low levels of sex.
But, no, it is because all of Gen Z is “Timid”.
As a millennial, fuck this article and all of those like it. Now they’re going after Gen Z with their Pro-Boomer attacks. My generation got fucked but Gen Z and Gen α are getting it even worse, without even getting the childhood benefits that we had.
Boomers have stolen the futures from at least two generations, and if you include Gen X, that’s three generations sacrificed on the altar of “Generation Me.”
And all the while they’ve been gaslighting us and spreading their ignorant nonsensical arguments as though they understand anything about anything. It’s beyond frustrating.
Boomers are not a collective hivemind, generations are divisions the rich use to dominate the working class.
It does feel like an accusation, doesn’t it?
Why did they get the black eye I gave them with my status quo?
Turns out “you have no future and the planet is dying” is kinda shit for morale.
I hate these articles that try to paint entire generations of people with the same brush.
I don’t think any article about generations is doing that when they point out percentages vs other generations. Groups exist, generations are a thing. It’s gonna be ok buddy.
I think there are some things we need to learn about people that grew up on the unregulated internet. I normally hate generation generalizations but Millenials (at least us 80s kids) were the last people who got to grow up without the internet being omnipresent in our lives before we hit puberty.
You make an excellent point.
That’s already a statement that doesn’t apply to me and other “Gen Z” people I know. Which doesn’t make it a false claim or an irrelevant point. The changes between milestones / turning points in the western world aren’t irrelevant, but people often take them as isolated pieces of information and then value them too much. It’s an important aspect about a human being, but it’s only one of many uncountable aspects that is superficial on its own.
Generational theory at best serves as a nice sentimental touch that encourages older rich people to feel less entitled and spoiled, because they “didn’t have the iPhone when they were twelve” (a product that wasn’t available when they were twelve).
All the pussies from that generation are too scared to be older than about 25. They’re all too lazy to be born before around 2000-something.
I’m surprised only 1 in 5 is depressed. Oh, diagnosed, got it.
Undiagnosed gang represent
A bunch of them helped Trump get back in the WH. Not exactly risk-averse in my book.
I’d prefer the risky sex and drinking to trump any day of the week.
I feel like an old man at 37 being like back in my day we did coke and promiscuous sex and voted for Obama like a proper youth damnit!
This isn’t just Gen Z. Yes, it’s happening to them, but it’s also happening to the rest of us. It’s impacting low to middle income folks the most, because we can’t afford the rising costs of, well, everything.
Job security is also extremely hard to find these days, and Healthcare costs have been getting worse ever since Obama left office.
People love to scapegoat the parents of the prior generation but I believe we’re gonna find out the plastics or some other environmental toxin had a substantial impact and causal Relationship with this sort of thing.
Yes, or it could be the incredibly obvious fact that it’s a generation that grew up on media and technology that amplified fear and anger for profit and with corporate powers leveraging the most advanced technologies in the world to seek, compete for, gain, and hold attention as much as possible in almost every waking moment.
I can attest to this. My kids and nieces/nephews are all reaching high school and they are so chill compared to my generation. They’re not interested in booze, sex, drugs or being out all night. They’re happy at home gaming together online or coding or something. It’s good really, we were not risk averse enough
What age is it okay to walk a couple miles from your house these days?
18, with a license to do so
“Risk averse” = broke as fuck
Well if that’s true, I sure hope they don’t become leaders in creative industries. There’s already a lack of risk taking in favor of bland bullshit that tries to have mass appeal.
Sorry to say that from the Gen Z I know they’re even more into big brands and “collabs”. It’s disheartening how much more deeply they’ve been sucked into the big corporate marketing machine.
Oh, hell, and you’ll be judged if you don’t conform. No other shoes than Nike, no other phone brand than Apple, no other earphones than AirPods, hell, I even got made fun of for my choice of wireless carrier (I went for the cheapest - rather than one providing unlimited data for apps like TikTok and SnapChat plus 5GB for other traffic for €17/month until the EU banned that crap, I chose 300GB for €12/month. But, it was the cheapest, so…)
There’s a big difference between not wanting to be a (teenage) parent and not having any imagination?
I urge people to please read the article. When you read it properly, you can see that it mentions that Gen Z are emotionally risk averse but says nothing about their risk taking in other avenues like finance, entrepreneurship, career direction, etc.
In fact, the Forbes article clearly shows how Gen Z are taking more risks in entrepreneurship and work related activities.
It seems like the generation may be more willing to take risks when safe at home behind a screen.
safe at home behind a screen.
You have to define safe here. Investing in starting a business, even one involving sitting behind a screen and writing code, involves a appreciable amount of risk of losing your money. In no way is that person in a position of safety.
I would actually like to see if gen Z are more risk averse when it comes to participating in adventure sports - mountain climbing/rock climbing, skydiving, rafting in fast flowing water, etc
So if you wanna know my personal story, I was given the feeling that even looking at a girl directly was sexual harassment, when I was 12 years old.
Now do 1+1 and figure out why Gen Z is “timid, self-conscious neurotic”. And I say it again, human contact is essential for mental wellbeing, as humans are incredibly social creatures. Yes, contact without physical contact is not to be considered proper contact.
“Careless mans careful daughter.”
See parents be dumb sometimes leads kids to not want to be like them.
