Gen Z and increasingly Millennials are disaffected. For many, the dystopian stories they consumed as kids, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, The Hunger Games, the Divergent series and the like, are now reality. Adherents of YOLO (You Only Live Once), Z’ers and Millennials often maintain a “winner take all and consequences be damned” attitude.
Their “Ok, Boomer” eye-rolling may be more than a generational angst necessary to establish their own place in history, but a resentment believing they have done everything right, often at the cost of their own individualism. Z’ers as they write their college essays often grieve their scheduled childhoods, many realizing their fragility, yet intolerant to disappointment, believing they deserve more.
Many Millennials once again live in their childhood bedrooms, sometimes their children and spouses in tow, steeped in the unrealized promises of peace and prosperity for participating in the academic meritocracy—“doing ‘good’ in school, graduating college to live a life of wealth”—their American Dreams fading from the realm of possible.
Raj Chetty and his team of researchers at Harvard’s Opportunity Project only punctuate Z’ers’ and Millennials’ pervasive disaffectedness:
While Boomer parents of the Millennials and Z’ers also technically earn less than their Greatest Generation parents, the downward propensity for less wealth accumulation over a lifetime is only gaining waterfall-like slope. A day of reckoning may be upon us, a time where we either collectively decide to truly think of the next generation—not just more lip service— or sit down to a banquet of our consequences.
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