But now there’s data showing just how pervasive this feeling really is: according to an NBC News Decision Desk Poll, almost half (yes — HALF) of Gen Z adults want to live in the past. This isn’t so much about aesthetics, though, as it is about emotions.

I joined NBC News Now with Morgan Radford and Vicky Nguyen today to talk about it. You can watch it here:

By the numbers, NBC poll:

• 47% of adults 18-29 said they’d live in the past if they had the option

• One-third would go back less than 50 years; 14% would go back more than 50

• 62% said they expect life for their generation to be “worse than previous generations” 🤯

This tracks with the latest Harvard IOP youth poll which shows a generation weighed down by economic anxiety — and increasingly convinced the future will offer less than the past did.

By the numbers, Harvard IOP poll:

• Just 13% of young Americans say the country’s on the right track

• Half of of young adults say they are personally affected “a lot” by inflation

• 45% are “struggling to make ends meet” or “getting by with little financial security”

• And in the past five years, young adults’ belief that they’ll be “better off” than their parents has shrunk

• In 2021, there was a “+21-point gap between those who expected to be better off (38%) and worse off (17%),” but that’s now narrowed to “just +3 points, with 29% saying they will be better off and 26% expecting to be worse off”

Young Americans are supposed to be more optimistic, idealistic, angsty but hopeful. Not anymore.

When it comes to the future 🔮, both the NBC and Harvard IOP polls asked young adults what they’re looking for from national leaders. The findings offer insight into how to turn generational anxiety about the present around.

What they’re looking for…

• 37% in the Harvard IOP poll want a congressional “candidate who shares their values”

• 33% in the NBC news poll are looking for a 2028 presidential candidate who “will bring needed change”

The Up and Up’s take: Gen Z’s longing for the past is a critique of the present. A life lived in chaos — political and economic — and live-streamed in real-time has left our generation yearning for a time before that felt more calm, less toxic, and perhaps, even more kind.

Noteworthy reads:

• Why Are So Many Influencers Speaking at Harvard Business School?, Madeline Schulz for Vogue Business

• There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work, Jessica Grose for The New York Times

• The internet made us archive our lives – now we want out, Laura Pitcher for Dazed

• Gen Z Men Stress About Fertility Way More Than You’d Expect, Nicole Pasulka for Cosmo

I was in DC for events around the White House Correspondents Dinner, which took a terrifying and surreal turn when a shooting occurred at the dinner, and later, charges were brought against the suspect for trying to assassinate the president.

In the aftermath, wrote a powerful piece on the cognitive dissonance that occurred after the shooting. I encourage you to read it, and watch my friend Dylan Wells behind the scenes report of covering the night from outside the dinner. I watched Dylan spring into action from the Substack party just across the street from the White House, focused and fully in reporter mode. I couldn’t be more proud of her.

Tune in

On Thursday at 7pm ET, I’m moderating a conversation with former White House Chief of Staff and US ambassador Rahm Emanuel for Big Tent USA. You can RSVP here. Hope to see you there. Send any questions for him my way!

We know that Gen Z is AI-anxious. Early career job openings are dwindling. In 2025, just 30% of college graduates landed a job in the field they hoped for — an 11-point drop from the share who did the same in 2024.

Understanding these dynamics, I teamed up with of Visible Ventures — an early-stage venture fund focused on health, wealth, and upward mobility — to unpack what the transition to adulthood looks like today for young adults. The result is a report on “Generation F*ck It,” which you can read here.

Read our report

(You may remember last year, when Lori and I worked together to grasp how young adults were spending, saving, and investing.)

This time around, we were squarely focused on life preparedness and the future of work. We spoke with more than 50 students and early career professionals from Ignite Bentonville, a pre-professional high school in Arkansas, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, Mesa Community College, Miami Dade College, and a range of four-year universities.

The problem with preparation

What we found was that despite *plenty* of discourse about how “unprepared” today’s young adults are for our changing world, that’s not actually painting a full picture.

Truth is, young adults today are preparing more than ever before — stacking their resumes, applying to dozens of jobs, and building their own “brand” in hopes of standing out from the pack.

Many of them are following a carefully prescribed pathway — taking pre-requisite courses, applying to internships they feel they’re supposed to have, rather than embracing the everyday jobs they already have (most students are working their way through college), and climbing the rungs of a ladder that no longer leads where it used to. In fact, they’re preparing too much, and experimenting far too little.

We’re calling this Gen Z’s preparedness paradox — the challenge of gearing up for a future that’s changing in-real-time with little incentive from institutions and stakeholders to take a risk, stop preparing, and start living.

Thinking about the macroeconomic impact here, failing to foster risk-taking is not only a disservice to a cohort of very creative young people — it’s also undermining the possibility of a strong and thriving future workforce ahead of a massive generational wealth transfer that will fall squarely into the hands of Gen Z.

Our research shows that the answer to Gen Z’s preparedness paradox is, ironically, to stop preparing in the traditional sense, and to just get started. The young adults we spoke to made clear that the key to building confidence is starting before there’s a roadmap to justify the best path forward.

When we asked the young adults in our listening sessions what they felt helped push their futures forward most, an 18-year-old student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas put it bluntly:

He mentioned helping with digital marketing for a local music festival.

“That was so out of my view... and I’ve learned so much from that, [rather] than sitting in my lecture.”

There are clear, existing examples for how to foster this attitude and mindset amongst young adults who will benefit from it. And the responsibility to do so falls on young adults themselves, as well as their mentors, institutions, and employers.

That looks like leaning into pre-professional programs, celebrating extracurricular jobs (not highly curated or fancy ones that align with one’s degree, but real ones, like babysitting, being a summer camp counselor, scooping ice cream — that don’t require any credential), and encouraging that young adults take on work that might deviate from a young adults “brand.”

All of this encourages students to push back against their anxiety — AI and otherwise — by learning to be adaptable, to work with their hands, and to embrace the fact that the real world is often a little bit messy. And sometimes, they’re going to need to just say “f*ck it.”

Gen Z voters are ‘swingy,’ and they’re protesting less. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention to current events or interested in what’s going on politically.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Their “political interest” throughout President Donald Trump’s second term has jumped since President Joe Biden was in office, according to a Morning Consult report from earlier this month.

Both when looking at the share of Gen Z who are “not at all interested” in politics and those who are “extremely” or “very” interested, the data points in the same direction ➡️ young adults are getting MORE interested.

The report, based on Morning Consult Intelligence, compared respondents’ replies from March 2021-2022 to March 2025-2026. They label Gen Z as anyone born from 1997-2012.

According to Morning Consult:

“The share saying they are ‘not at all interested’ in politics fell from 27% to 20%, and those who are ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ interested grew from 24% to 33%.”

Beyond a spike in political interest, the issues they’re prioritizing have shifted.

• Morning Consult found a six-point jump in Gen Zers focus on economic concerns over the same time period, from 32% to 38% 💸

So what? We know that Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 have a distinct relationship to politics — and that Gen Z 2.0’s activism looks markedly different than their older siblings. There’s less of it.

(I also joined The Bulwark’s Lauren Egan last week to discuss her reporting on a recent dip in campus protest culture).

But to make it more clear, just because young adults aren’t showing up in the streets like they did for gun safety, the climate, or racial justice — it doesn’t mean they’re disengaged. They haven’t stopped caring about politics. They just stopped performing it. And they’re tuned in, they’re just expressing themselves differently. Part of that’s because when life feels increasingly hard to afford year after year once you hit adulthood, it’s hard to focus on anything but that.

Noteworthy reads

• New poll reveals how Trump’s support among young Americans is significantly changing, Stephanie Perry and Marc Trussler for NBC News

• Gen Z Is Trading the Neighborhood Bar for the Spin Studio, Oyin Adeoyin for The Wall Street Journal

• The new age of performance anxiety, Megan Garber for The Atlantic

I heard how these young women really feel about everything that’s been in the news this week.

In many ways, young women have more opportunities (and choice) today than ever before. But by no means do things feel equal, or easy.

You might be thinking that this sounds familiar, such has been the plight for women since the beginning of time. That’s fair.

But what’s unique about growing up as a Gen Z woman is the way that social media algorithms have sorted them by their gender in an unrelenting virtual world that mimics — but doesn’t mirror — the real one.

And when it comes to politics, they only know an ecosystem dominated by a president who was elected for the first time just weeks after the release of an Access Hollywood tape that would have ended anyone else’s political career — and elected a second time after being found liable for sexual abuse. And in some major ways, they have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers years ago — after all, this is the first generation in more than 50 years to reach adulthood without the federally protected right to an abortion. Even six years post-Me Too, just this week, two members of Congress resigned following allegations of sexual misconduct.

For these young women, at the core of their gender identity is the fact that they were raised to expect freedom and equality as a given, yet have come of age in a culture that still imposes expectations that say otherwise.

They were raised in the early 2000s, when “girl power” (as one young woman put it last night) was all the rage (think Princess Diaries, Kim Possible, Legally Blonde, even Hannah Montana). Many of them came of age during the peak of the girlboss movement in the late 2010s, amidst a cultural backdrop that included the Women’s March and the Me Too movement. Over and over, they were told that they could do anything they set their mind to.

Yet a lot of this was just vibes — cultural trends around empowerment that did little to actually change the systems that hold women back from equal pay, fair treatment in the workplace, and balanced partnerships. Like their mothers before them, today’s young women seem to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t — feeling judged or penalized for either starting a family or prioritizing their career, or exhausted by trying to do both.

Meanwhile, the dynamics of dating haven’t kept pace with cultural change.

As one young woman put it last night:

All of this happens against a backdrop of constant noise about the gender gap. This week alone, there were dozens of headlines about Gen Z women:

• Yale youth poll data showing Gen Z women are still so far away from Gen Z men politically

• The ‘stay-at-home-boyfriend’ discourse

• A deep-dive cover-story from the UK’s New Statesman on ‘Angry Young Women’ in the UK (who are politically, socially, and emotionally far apart from young men and increasingly alienated in the “femosphere”) showing that the Gen Z gender gap is not solely an American phenomenon

• A WSJ article on how ‘The Family Will Survive Girlboss Feminism,’ breaking down why birth rates are falling… writes it’s not that women don’t want to have kids (I agree) but that it’s the result of a “mismatch in standards” between men and women more than anything else

So what? Raised with a phone in their hand and a social media profile to curate amid crippling economic anxiety, Gen Z is an inherently individualistic generation. This is even more pronounced for the youngest half, who are keenly focused on themselves. That impacts how they feel about the opposite gender.

This plays into how they think about their futures — when it comes to their careers, their partners, and themselves.

At the same time, the prevailing narrative that Gen Z women don’t want to get married or have kids isn’t true. For many young women, they just aren’t ready to do that yet. If paid leave felt more accessible or child tax credits were more pronounced, that might help — but many young women struggling financially don’t trust there are adequate systems in place to support starting a family right now.

And as the dialogue around what it means to be a young woman continues to shift, they’re weighing the pressure of the expectations placed upon them and trying to keep up in real time.

Hear more of what they had to say….

Inside today’s full report

• The “acceptable” age to get engaged

• Why tradwife culture is a myth

• The dual income dichotomy

Read more

ICYMI, in November 2024, I wrote the following:

In all of my work researching and analyzing Gen Z, I consistently see two distinct factions of the generation: those who graduated high school pre-Covid and those who really grew up during Covid. Surely, for anyone whose adolescence was impacted by a once-in-a-century global pandemic there are extreme social and emotional ramifications. Whether that meant entering a workforce disrupted by the pandemic, years of college Zoom classes and campus social distancing, or having high school and middle school defined by a year without much socializing at all, it’s had a massive impact on how we see the world.

But it hasn’t changed everyone in the same ways, and I’d argue that those members of Gen Z, who were younger at the peak of the pandemic, had a very different — and frankly harder — experience than those a bit older.

But Covid isn’t the only thing that has fragmented the experiences of Gen Z.

What might seem like subtle differences in age are exacerbated by the rapid speed by which social media has changed over the last decade. The habits of the older members of Gen Z (where I fall) vs. the younger members of Gen Z are distinct. Older members of Gen Z might have had a flip phone before an iPhone. Instagram and Snapchat didn’t exist until our time in late middle school. In high school (and most of college) there was no TikTok. But younger members of Gen Z have had an entirely different experience online. They only ever knew phones to be smartphones, with all the apps that exist today. They may be more prone to message on Snapchat than iMessage. And they are so acutely familiar with TikTok that they may not appreciate the way it’s transformed our culture.

Fast forward, and the case for the two Gen Zs keeps getting stronger.

A new Yale youth poll offers fresh evidence of a split within Gen Z — specifically when it comes to young men.

The data shows that young men are souring on President Donald Trump (according to the poll, “compared to the fall 2025 poll, Trump has lost the most ground with women under 35 and men under 30”).

‼️ But the poll also shows those young men aren’t necessarily moving toward Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms.

And there’s a big difference in support for Democrats amongst young men ages 18-22 (i.e. those in Gen Z 2.0) and young men ages 23-29 (i.e. those in Gen Z 1.0).

• Among men ages 18-22 – Gen Z 2.0 – Democrats hold a narrow +3 advantage in a hypothetical general ballot.

• Among men ages 23-29 – Gen Z 1.0 – that advantage is +20.

🚨 That’s a 17-point gap within the same generation.

The bottom line: When it comes to young men, Gen Z is not one political cohort. The men who came of age before Covid and before TikTok reshaped culture are politically distinct from those whose adolescence was defined by both of those factors.

Zooming out: The data also shed light on the pronounced and well established gender gap within Gen Z.

• Young men ages 18-22 (Gen Z 2.0) lean just +3 points toward Democrats

• While young women ages 18-22 (also Gen Z 2.0) lean +44 points toward Democrats

🤯 That’s a 41-point gap, one of the biggest we’ve seen to date.

So what? Gen Z is not behaving like a traditional generation of young voters when it comes to politics (nor are they really behaving traditionally in any aspect of our culture or society, fwiw). This cohort was shaped by the Trump-era, Covid, social media, and now AI. That combination has made their politics more fragmented, more reactive, and more shaped by culture in real time. It also helps explain why the divides within Gen Z, especially by age and gender, can be so stark.

On the whole, these young voters are less driven by partisanship and more driven by whether something feels like it’s working. They’re wired by instant gratification, and move at the speed of the internet. That has consequences.

They see everything happening in real time for them — what’s working, what’s failing, what’s happening, who is breaking through, who is losing ground. They want responsiveness and proof of action. This helps explain why this group can appear so swingy (and 56% identify as a political independent, according to Gallup).

They moved toward Trump in 2024 because they wanted results. And they’re moving away from him for that very same reason. They expected results they’re not getting.

Noteworthy reads

• Top Influencers’ Secret Weapon for Engagement Might Be Replaced by AI, Andrew Zucker for The Hollywood Reporter

• Relatedly, The Clip Economy, for

• The Campus Protest Culture That Targeted Biden Goes Silent for Trump, for

• Relatedly, Why Aren’t The Kids Out Protesting Trump?, Thomas B. Edsall for The New York Times

• Women in Their 20s May Not Be Having Babies, but by 45 Most Probably Will, Claire Cain Miller for The New York Times

The more pervasive AI gets, the more anxious teens and young adults feel about it.

That’s based on data from a new Gallup, Walton Family Foundation, and GSV Ventures study released today, which shows that Gen Z is souring on AI.

It also confirms that the two Gen Zs are experiencing AI differently, a trend we started to see surface last year. This makes sense, given that students in Gen Z 1.0 had no exposure to AI in high school (or even college, for some Zillennials like me), while students in Gen Z 2.0 have already experienced the rise of AI in school.

How they are using it:

• More than half of Gen Z uses AI at least weekly

• Gen Z 2.0 (14-21-year-olds) are using AI more regularly than Gen Z 1.0 (22-years-old and up), they’re also less anxious about it than their older peers

How they feel about it:

• Only 22% of Gen Z is excited about AI

• Only 18% are hopeful about AI

• Nearly a third of Gen Z feeling angry about AI

• Yet, more than half of Gen Z students believe they’ll need to know how to use AI in education after high school

There’s a racial divide: Black and Asian Gen Zers are the most likely to use AI regularly.

Workplace worries: About half of Gen Z employees see more downside than upside to AI at work, while just 15% see the tech as a “net-positive.” Men and college-educated employees are the most likely to use AI at work.

But growing educational impact: Broadly, schools’ relationship to AI has changed over the past year, with more access to and also more school policies around AI.

Parental permission: As AI’s impact increases, conversations between parents and children are changing too. Nearly 60% of Gen Z K-12 students have talked to their parents about AI.

This survey data comes alongside the ongoing ‘Voices of Gen Z’ Study with Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation. Data from this series has been important for making sense of how Gen Z feels about their futures and present, especially when it comes to school and work, and shed light on Gen Z’s rightward shift well before the 2024 election. The Walton Family Foundation also supports my work on these topics.

AI is the biggest storyline for our generation right now. At The Up and Up, we’ve been tracking how both students and young adults feel about AI for quite some time — in fact, it’s been one of our biggest priorities over the past year.

My other Gen Z AI-focused writing:

• Gen Z Uses AI But It Makes Them Anxious, The Up and Up, April 2025

• Gen Z & AI in the Heartland, The Up and Up, May 2025

• Opinion: The AI cheating panic misses the point, Washington Post, August 2025

• The AI Policy Craze, The Up and Up, January 2026

• Good Luck Banning AI, The Up and Up, February 2026

• Gen Z’s Gut Reaction to AI, The up and Up, February 2026

• Gen Z Has a Love/Hate Relationship With AI, The Bulwark, March 2026

Just last night, on our April ambassador call, high school and college students stressed what they’re calling the “death of the dream job” as a result of AI anxiety — and how they’re preparing for workforce changes amid the new tech. They also touched on what they called ‘AI etiquette’ concerns in education i.e. when teachers and students respectively should use it vs. how they are currently using it.

I’ve written a lot about Gen Z and AI, but today’s findings gives us the most recent snapshot of how young people feel about how dramatically the quickly evolving technology is impacting all parts of their lives. It complements our qualitative research in recent Reality Checks, listening sessions, and community calls.

Let’s hear what our community has had to say firsthand…

In our latest Reality Check with our Gen Z community, we asked respondents to tell us the biggest thing older generations don’t understand about their experience with AI.

Here’s some of what they told us:

• “I/we as a generation have to learn to use it in order to survive (in the workforce) in the coming years. They think it’s us being lazy, but in reality, we need to know how to use it so that we don’t loose our jobs to it.”

• “I don’t use it to cheat or anything, but I use it to help make practice problems for me for Physics or Calc AB. It can also show how to solve various questions that I might need to know before my test. I try to limit the amount I do use it because I understand the amount of water it uses.”

• “It’s really infiltrating every segment of society from school to work to fitness to dating advice to being a therapist. It can do almost anything better than humans.”

• “I don’t think they understand that I don’t use it very often (but I think I am in the minority).”

• “AI is not magic. It is still developing and makes mistakes. And my enthusiasm for it is not high.”

• “How AI can be super useful for research. I feel my older professors are still wary of its use entirely.”

• “I think it’s a lot harder to figure out what’s ours now. With AI, the line between what are my ideas, my writing, my thinking and its ideas, writing, and thinking is much harder to distinguish.”

• “That I fear not having time to work in a meaningful career and make the progress towards a worth while future due to Al.”

• “They don’t fully get how integrated it is into everyday work and learning. It’s not just a shortcut, it’s becoming a tool you need to know how to use well.”

upgrade for more insights like these

The Up and Up’s take

A few things stand out in these comments about AI:

• It’s being politicized.

• They’re incredibly wary of the environmental toll.

• It’s fueling economic anxiety across the entire generation.

The quiet drumbeat about Gen Z’s economic anxiety has been present since 2024. A few years ago, I wrote that despite headlines leaning into Gen Z’s embrace of social and culture war issues — or the manosphere — the economy was their number one concern. That’s obviously still true — and in many ways it’s driving the gender divide I often talk about. Young adults’ economic anxiety has been the cornerstone of any successful campaign that’s reached young people in the past few years (Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, etc). It’s the biggest issue facing Gen Z today and is the most important storyline of our generation. And it’s heavily interwoven with how they feel about AI.

But Gen Z’s feelings about AI are more than just their fears of what the technology is doing to the economy and the job market. They’re worried about what it’s doing to the climate — and its human toll.

The irony of having grown up lonely, online, and amid Covid, is that Gen Z, and Gen Z 2.0 especially is hungry for everything IRL.

So when young adults talk about AI, and say they worry as much about what it’s doing to humanity as how it will affect their education and careers, it’s all part of the same puzzle — about their social and emotional wellbeing, and their calculus on how stable they will feel, as employees yes, but also as human beings.

That dynamic is not only effecting their educational and professional experiences and choices, but also their relationships — and their politics.

“A successful campaign in 2026 must operate like a full-time production studio.”

That’s the argument at the center of a recent New York Times op-ed from Democratic strategist David Plouffe — the architect of Barack Obama’s campaign and a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ — who argues Democrats need to act more like influencers, turning their message into constant, made-for-social content.

The piece poured fuel on an already lit fire among Democrats still trying to figure out what went wrong in the 2024 election — a result that surprised many even though it probably shouldn’t have, given there were plenty of warning signs.

Plouffe has a point (even if making the case for influencer politics through the New York Times opinion page is, in itself, a very old-media move). But there’s more to winning in 2026 (and 2028) than turning every campaign headquarters into Barstool. Not every candidate has the personality to pull that off — and when they don’t, voters can tell. More importantly, Democrats risk misreading a strategic, political problem as a tactical, media one.

Here’s my view, informed by conversations and listening sessions with thousands of voters, mostly young ones:

In 2026, the most successful politicians will do two things well.

1. They will listen closely enough to understand what their constituents are actually dealing with.

2. They will be everywhere, always, all at once — without seeming robotic or fake.

Operating like a content studio can help with both of these things. But it’s not the strategy itself. It’s the vehicle. And there are plenty of slick content operations deploying the right tactics, but with the wrong message.

To win on the internet, you have to have to understand it. The savviest digital operatives are the ones who actually know how the world online works — which means they’re always scrolling. They don’t post in overly produced paragraphs (or form-template reels) or stale talking points or yesterday’s memes. They post like real people talking to other people. They know when to take risks and also that any imperfect post or faux pas will be irrelevant by the next time they post.

*Remember when Senate Democrats flooded Instagram feeds with a scripted video last year?*

But this is more than just being too online — digital culture is often a reaction to real-life frustrations, needs, and experiences.

And at the end of the day, it comes down to cultural fluency. Like it or not, this is why our reality-tv-star president is president again. For a time, maybe better than anyone else, President Donald Trump had a feel for what people wanted to hear — and how to make them feel seen. I’ve written before about the similarities between Trump’s 2024 campaign and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s style in New York City. What they share (or shared, because I honestly think Trump lost this touch) is definitely not ideology, it’s instinct. They have an ability to sense what resonates and deliver it in a way that feels natural. They’re not tacking to trends. They’re operating in a voice that feels completely their own.

Media matters enormously but it is not everything. The notion that politicians should communicate directly to voters through their phone screens isn’t some great revelation. In a different era, that would have meant newspapers or cable. Important, of course. But no medium can compensate for a weak message.

You should only say something if you have something worth saying. And that’s where Democrats still seem stuck. In my listening sessions with young Americans, the complaint I hear over and over is that Democrats don’t have a clear message. That was true in 2024, and it may be even truer now.

I think of a young woman who told me, “the last time I heard about Democrats rallying together was during the shutdown,” meaning only when they were playing defense. Or the young man who described the party as “a chicken running without its head.”

Young Americanas are not demanding purity politics or litmus tests but they are asking for some glue — a unifying vision, a sense of direction, and a reason to believe the party stands for something beyond opposition.

Personality matters but a bunch of personalities online alone can’t carry a party without a coherent vision for what comes next. (That challenge is compounded by the fact that many young voters no longer feel particularly attached to party labels or drawn to today’s political candidates at all.)

Which leads me to my final and most important point.

The core job of a candidate is to listen. It’s not to produce content. If clips from real conversations help show understanding and reach more people, great, but the human element has to come first. Otherwise, voters will feel the difference.

One of the clearest social trends of the past few years has been Gen Z 2.0’s so-called analog revival. Yes, younger audiences are online. But they also crave a life lived in person.

One of the biggest critiques I hear from young people is that, when it comes to politics, they feel like an afterthought, or like candidates only show up to talk to them just before an election. One of the biggest compliments I heard in 2024 (and this was true of Trump, even if his actions were performative), was that he showed up, on campuses, at frats, at McDonalds, at UFC fights.

Politicians should take that seriously. Actually go to where people are.

Go to community hot spots. Show up in places where culture is being formed and lived. And while you’re there, listen. Have a conversation. Ask them what’s going on in their lives. Really engage, one-on-one.

Some of those moments may later make for strong political content. Maybe that looks like Mamdani’s viral walk across Manhattan, or Texas Senate candidate James Talarico giving an Easter Sunday sermon.

But if the main goal is capturing the moment instead of actually living it, people will feel that too. There is a time and a place for cameras and memes. But if politicians become too fixated on turning every interaction into content, content itself can become their Achilles heel.

Noteworthy reads

• What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots, Kashmir Hill for The New York Times

• The Real Religious ‘Renewal’ Happening in Gen Z, Luis Parrales for The Atlantic

• Inside the Gen Z Shark Tank where influencers are becoming venture investors, Leo Schwartz for Fortune

• Nearly half of young Jewish American women are dating less over antisemitism fears, Danielle Cohen-Kanik for Jewish Insider

• AI ‘Slop’ Is Flooding Children’s Media. Parents Should Be Very Alarmed., Emily Tate Sullivan for The 74

Earlier this year, Gallup data broke the political internet when it revealed that 56% of Gen Z identifies as politically independent. But if you’ve listened to enough young Americans in the past few years, you already knew this was the case.

The thing is, young adults are always less tied to traditional political parties. But Gen Z is taking this further — identifying as independent at higher rates than millennials and Gen X did when they were their age.

This *really shouldn’t* come as a surprise to anyone. Gen Z hates labels: from strict gender roles to job titles, dating (read Tuesday’s newsletter on Gen Z’s dating deficit), and of course, politics.

Actually, everything you need to know about Gen Z voting habits can be seen in how they date.

1. Commitment is scary

2. Communication is key

3. There’s risk involved, but the payoff can be big

Ultimately, both political engagement and dating can feel “not worth it” to Gen Z.

Being in a relationship can feel cheugy, cringe, or even hard to admit (Remember the ‘Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing now’ Vogue piece?) — and so can aligning with a political party, especially given the caricature of today’s Party leaders.

Hear the similarities, in their words.

Read more

Welcome to Gen Z’s dating deficit.

Just one in three unmarried young adults ages 22-35 are dating, but more than half want to be dating. That’s according to a report from The Institute for Family Studies – a conservative family policy think tank – and the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.

And while the media loves to harp on Gen Z’s sex lives writ large, let’s be clear, this data is really mostly focused on straight Gen Z 1.0 and younger millennials in their early thirties. (Those in Gen Z 1.0 are roughly currently 29-24. Those in Gen Z 2.0 are roughly currently 23-14.) My read is that the issue, based on this data and the listening sessions I conduct regularly for The Up and Up, isn’t that young people have opted out of relationships altogether, it’s that more and more of them seem stuck on the step before one begins.

Not all of Gen Z is moving through this in the same way, and there’s (inevitably) a clear gender gap surfacing in the dating data.

The Family Studies Institute report, called ‘The Dating Recession,’ found that:

• 26% of young adult women are “active daters” meaning they date 1x a month or more, while 36% of young adult men are “active daters”

• 74% of young adult women said they “had not dated or dated only a few times in the last year”, the same was true for 64% of young adult men

At the same time, 51% of all young adults surveyed said they’re interested in beginning a relationship (moreso for young men than young women).

So the math isn’t exactly mathing. What’s holding them back?

Well, there’s a clear confidence gap. When asked specifically about the biggest barriers to dating, nearly half of all young adults said a lack of confidence is a hurdle. It ranked just below not having enough money for dating activities, something we’ve covered for a while at The Up and Up.

And the deeper you get into the data, the more obvious that confidence gap becomes.

• Just one in three young adults feels confident about their dating skills

• Only one in three young men say they feel confident in how to approach a potential partner. For young women, that number drops to one in five.

The survey also found that:

• Only 37% of young adults trust their own discernment when it comes to finding a partner

• 34% feel comfortable sharing their feelings with a partner

• 36% feel they understand social cues on dates

So what? When it comes to Gen Z 1.0’s dating deficit, there are three core factors at play.

1. The gender divide – More young men want to date than young women, which means the odds are stacked against young men looking for a relationship. On top of that, young men and women are increasingly far apart politically, and for many young women especially, that is a dealbreaker.

2. A lack of resilience – The older half of Gen Z seems especially uncomfortable with rejection, which is, of course, one of the basic risks of dating.

3. Compressed confidence – Dating takes courage. It also takes practice. But if young people aren’t dating in the first place, they’re not building that muscle – and the longer they go without using it, the harder it is to start.

So, where do we go from here? Lately, I’ve been having the same conversation over and over with my single friends. Dating apps feel futile (and don’t always lead to an IRL date), and yet it feels nearly impossible to actually meet people in person. So many end up opting out of dating altogether.

On the flip side, as Gen Z 1.0 looks to recycle the 90s, girls night out in the spirit of Sex In the City seems to be making a comeback.

I’ve heard plenty of stories about young women going out in groups, sitting at bars, hoping a group of men will be there too. But this all feels really gendered (and yes, of course, this is only relevant for heterosexual couples). Most of the places these young women are going aren’t necessarily occupied by the young men they’re hoping to meet, who haven’t necessarily caught onto these tactics (though I will say, amid March Madness, I have heard of girl groups going to sports bars in hopes of finding some guys, or in D.C. going the polymarket bar to “monitor the situation”).

Still – if the men these women are hoping to meet aren’t showing up in the same places, and aren’t trying the same strategies, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to find each other.

That more than anything may be the clearest sign of the problem. This is a generation that says it wants relationships, but no longer seems to share a common script for how to begin one.

In the short term, the fallout is deeply individual. There will be more loneliness, more isolation, and fewer opportunities to build the emotional skills that intimacy requires. In the long term, it becomes macro, with fewer durable partnerships, fewer families formed, weaker community ties, and a society expecting a generation to sustain its future without having supported the foundation needed to get there.

Noteworthy reads

• Go Viral, Beat Your Rival, Mary Julia Koch for The Wall Street Journal

• The Sneaky-Saver Generation, Faith Hill for The Atlantic

• Have You Seen the ‘Gen Z Pout’, Callie Holtermann for The New York Times

• What’s Cool in High School? Personal Finance, Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal

• Democrats Need a New Promise: A House by 30, Rotimi Adeoye for The New York Times

Thank you for joining us, and if you missed it, hope to see you next time :)

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Gen Z moves at the speed of the internet. Obsessed with something one day, cringing over it the next. Look at any viral trend. It burns hot and then disappears. Which is why so many people, brands, and institutions fail when they try to keep up with the viral trend of the day.

The brands and creators that break through don’t follow trends, they define them. It’s rarely on purpose but instead because they have a point of view and trust their gut.

And that’s what’s been so frustrating in the political conversation about internet relevance. For years, the vast majority of people trying to crack the code on internet culture aren’t actually chronically online themselves.

There will never be a Joe Rogan of the left because Joe Rogan isn’t a format waiting to be recreated. He is a singular person with a distinct voice, point-of-view, audience, and instinct. Form-template reels will never break through to young voters (or consumers) for the same reason — internet resonance comes from authenticity, not an overtly scripted performance that seems reverse-engineered in a strategy meeting.

But lately, I’ve been getting the sense that internet culture, driven by algorithms and speed, isn’t just moving too fast. It is driving Gen Z a little insane.

In my conversations with young adults, many put it bluntly.

She described certain aspects of social media as “like a cigarette.”

“I know it’s bad for me, I shouldn’t click on it, I shouldn’t watch it,” she said, lamenting rage-bait videos, for example. “And then I’ll end up clicking on it and I’m like, this is not making me feel good, and yet in some ways I can’t stop, sometimes.”

This explains why millennial culture is having its renaissance. Twenty-something-year-olds, teens, and tweens are looking for something that feels entirely antithetical to the curated made-for-social world in which they’ve been raised — and longer lasting than the fleeting speed of rage-bait.

To get a better sense of how digital natives are actually feeling about the speed of digital life, we asked them.

You can hear what they said, in their own words.

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In case you somehow missed the early 2000s sitcom, the show chronicled the double life of Miley Stewart, played by Miley Cyrus, who got the ‘Best of Both Worlds,’ by being a small-town girl and a world-famous pop-star, Hannah Montana. The phenomenon went beyond the TV show. There were concerts, merch, and even a movie. According to Spotify, “the announcement of Miley Cyrus’ comeback caused nearly a 115% spike in streams,” from Gen Z and millennials.

But Hannah Montana was just one in a slate of classic early 2000s Disney channel shows on which Gen Z 1.0 and cuspy millennials (zillennials, if you will) were raised — and we’ve lost a lot with the end of shows like these. I know from personal experience.

I was nine-years-old when Hannah Montana premiered. There was nothing better than weekends with Disney Channel. In our household, TV was a luxury reserved for the weekends, so for those years of peak-Disney, my siblings and I would excitedly await Friday and Saturday nights, when prime-time new episodes of Hannah Montana, Suite Life of Zack and Cody (starring Dylan & Cole Sprouse), and Wizards of Waverly Place (starring Selena Gomez) would drop, one-at-a-time, on cable. There were also the classic Disney Channel movies, from High School Musical, to The Cheetah Girls, and Camp Rock.

This was our version of appointment viewing. There weren’t special episodes geared toward girls and others meant for boys. My brothers, sister, and I would gather around the living room TV, and enjoy — we shared the same culture.

Tween culture looked different for Gen Z 2.0 than it did for Gen Z 1.0. Gen Z 2.0 may have caught the back-end of the Disney dynasty, but even pre-Covid, cable had started to dwindle, and they experienced the rise of streaming — likely watching Netflix, HBOMax, Hulu, etc.

It’s certainly now a whole different ball game for Gen Alpha. Who are being raised on YouTube and TikTok, for the most part.

With the end of this OG-Disney era, there’s a lot we’ve lost. Here are four core themes.

There was an in-person element to this viewing experience. While the programs were on cable, you had to tune in at the right time (or record it) to watch. It was not on your time, you were on Disney’s time. There was a certain level of togetherness that came from everyone watching the show at the exact same time when it premiered.

Across-the-board appeal. These shows were *not* gender specific. Sure, Hannah Montana centered on a girly pop-star, but my brothers loved it. And I loved Zack & Cody, despite its focus on twin boys. Today, that looks really different, as creators, shows, and even music is geared toward one gender or the other, with algorithms driving girls and boys in Gen Z 2.0 and Gen Alpha further and further apart.

Patience. There was no better feeling than the moment a new episode would start, and they would come out one episode at a time. You couldn’t binge the whole season in a night, or even a week. You’d have to wait, patiently, for the next episode, next week.

Wholesomeness. These shows promoted friendship, family, and self-expression. They were, on the whole, really feel-good. Say what you want about the trajectory of many of these childhood Disney stars (many have had a rough go of it), but there were lessons to be gleaned in these programs. I’m not seeing so much of that geared towards these days, who seem to be more focused on skin-care, TikTok trends, and leaning toward the same violent shows the rest of us are watching.

The Up and Up’s take: Gen Z 1.0 was the last generation to experience real analog life — our childhoods were pre-social media, pre-Covid, and certainly pre-AI. Whether it’s the gender gap, screen addictions, a compassion recession, or a chaotic political culture, it’s no wonder there’s such a sense of pure happiness to revisiting this before-time. It’s a strong reminder of the importance of having collective, in-person experiences and cultural moments that bring together an entire generation. Unlike a TikTok trend or streaming phenomenon, the Disney Channel shows were more than a temporary fad. They had staying power then and their impact lasted, continuing to resonate, even today.

Noteworthy Reads

• ‘It Feels Like There’s No Jobs’: 12 Gen Z Voters on the U.S. Economy, Kristen Soltis Anderson and Adrian J. Rivera, New York Times

• Gen Z’s relationship with gambling and the unique vulnerabilities it faces, Scott Simon, Diana Douglas for NPR

• Funmaxxing: Should we all be playing more?, Madelynne Flack for Dazed

• Trump’s voter crackdown reaches college campuses, Bianca Quilantan for POLITICO

And ICYMI

This weekend, I hosted ’s Focus Group podcast with North Carolina Democratic Party Chair and Gen Z political star, Anderson Clayton. Watch it here.

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Thank you for joining us, and if you missed it, hope to see you next time :)

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War is raging in Iran and throughout the Middle East. A Michigan synagogue, home to a Jewish pre school, was attacked last week. A bomb was thrown outside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home on the Upper East Side. There was a shooting at a bar just off campus at The University of Texas at Austin. And just months ago, two American citizens were shot and killed by ICE Agents in Minnesota. Violence is everywhere, and we constantly observe and absorb it on our feeds, in-real-time, every single day.

Meanwhile, the “death of wokeness” amongst Gen Z, as one of our ambassadors put it, is manifesting itself in normalized hate. In a community call this week, students at a range of schools shared that antisemitic jokes are now commonplace, anti-immigrant rhetoric is running rampant, and a complete lack of action to tamper violence —whether that’s gun violence, war, or political violence — has pushed many to “tap out” of political conversations altogether.

“I think people have honestly gotten… kind of numb,” a 21-year-old student at The New School shared.

In December, I wrote about Gen Z’s compassion recession — a willingness amongst some young people to condone political violence, along with a sheer numbness to the amount of violence in our political culture today.

Here we are, three months later, and it’s gotten worse.

In our conversation with some of The Up and Up’s ambassadors and community members this week, we focused on hate, antisemitism, and safety in the U.S.

🚨 What we heard is alarming 🚨

• There’s a general sense that bigotry is now “based” (Gen Z’s term for “a truth teller” who speaks out against the “woke intelligentsia”).

• Jewish students fear being judged (and blamed) for the Israeli government’s actions

• And Spanish speaking students have to weigh which neighborhoods are safe to visit amid immigration crackdowns

Earlier this week, I joined ’s to break down some of these findings. You can watch our conversation here.

Upgrade your subscription to The Up and Up for a full analysis of what I heard this week ⤵️

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Young men hate the political establishment. But they sure are big fans of former President Barack Obama.

In fact, more than half of young men ages 18-29 say they look up to him, according to a new report from the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative family policy think tank.

The report shows that of all public figures asked about, Obama ranked the highest, clocking in above Lebron James, “the online influencer you follow you most closely,” Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Joe Rogan, John Legend, Pope Francis, and Andrew Tate.

That’s not an isolated finding. A report from the ‘Speaking With American Men’ initiative reported by Puck earlier this year shows a similar trend. In that survey, Obama also ranked highest in terms of favorability of any public figure amongst young men ages 16-29 at 56%, outpacing MrBeast (55%), Rogan (53%), Trump (46%), RFK Jr. (44%), Tate (35%), and J.D. Vance (33%). *Yes, Tate ranked higher than the current Vice President in that specific survey.*

There’s even further proof. A Blueprint Research poll from October 2024 showed that Obama ranked as the top political figure for young men ages 18-29. At the time, his net favorability amongst this cohort was +38 points, remarkably higher than Trump, whose net favorability was +6, former Vice President Kamala Harris, whose net favorability was +5, and former President Joe Biden, whose net favorability was -23. To top that off, when it comes to monumental events, the election of Obama had a net +27-point positive rating from young men ages 18-29.

So why, exactly, are Gen Z men so Obama-pilled?

The simplest explanation is not that Gen Z men are secretly more liberal than they appear, or that they’ve suddenly rejected anti-establishment politics altogether. It’s that Obama no longer reads to them as “the establishment.” Instead, he represents something that feels largely absent from public life today — political leadership without chaos, and masculinity that isn’t performative.

That helps explain the apparent contradiction. Obama is, on paper, the establishment. He is a former two-term president, U.S. senator, and lifelong institutional politician. But for many young men, especially those who came of age during the Trump era, he feels less like a symbol of the system and more one of a coherent time. His style (measured, confident, aspirational) feels both distant and appealing.

Part of that appeal is of course nostalgia. We know Gen Z is drawn to a past they don’t quite remember, whether in politics, culture, or aesthetics. They’re seeking hope (it’s why we see candidates like James Talarico and Zohran Mamdani doing well with young people) and recycling millennial trends. Obama belongs in that category. He is culturally distinct in ways that older politicians are not. He’s contemporary and recognizable, but distant enough to stand apart from how exhausting our current reality is.

And then there’s how Obama signals positive masculinity. When it comes to the leadership young say they value, the Institute for Family Studies report reveals an important clue. While masculinity has been stigmatized thanks to locker room talk and the manosphere, young men describe it differently. According to the survey, 89% of young men agree that “manhood involves strength, responsibility, and leadership,” and 85% of young men agree that “being a man requires a willingness to sacrifice for others.”

Obama’s drawn his fair share of criticism. But, at least in retrospect to this group, he fits that mold. He projects a version of masculinity that is composed (not reactive), disciplined (not aggrieved), and fluent in culture (without being consumed by it, or trying to define it himself).

He doesn’t appear to chase attention, but he commands it anyway. That helps explain why young men’s admiration isn’t as paradoxical as it may seem. What draws them to Obama is less of an ideological shift and more of a longing for a long-lost, coherent kind of masculine authority.

Noteworthy reads

• In Defense of Influencers, Cyrus Veyssi for TIME

• Gen-Z is changing the meaning of “independent” voter, Elena Moore and Brittany Luse, It’s Been a Minute, NPR

• Turning Point USA Clubs Expand to High Schools Across America, Michael Anthony Adams, Mark Boyer and Luke Piotrowski for the New York Times

• High Schools Are Losing the Struggle to Block Pot—Even During Class, Andrea Peterson for The Wall Street Journal

And watches

• Jake Paul recently sat down for a 1:1 interview with President Trump. And Trump recently endorsed Paul for office (but he’s not running, yet). Take a peek.

Spring break is here, but it’s different this year. War in the Middle East is threatening safety around the world, travel prices continue to rise, America’s spring break hot-spot Miami Beach has cracked down on partying and on the whole — Gen Z is partying less than prior generations of college students. Gone are the Four Lokos or spring break days of yore, or so it seems.

Beyond the headlines, it’s a bit more complicated. Gen Z still parties. They just do it differently. When you boil it down, post Covid and with social media, there’s more social pressure, and social stigma, around those who do party and those who don’t.

To really hear how students are *spring breaking*, we asked them — both in our latest Reality Check and with the help of our ambassadors, who crowd sourced the spring break vibes on their campuses.

Insights from dozens of students point to three core themes.

1. Global instability is upending travel plans and changing destinations.

2. Financial concerns are top of mind, even for those who decided to splurge.

3. Some are staying home because it’s just less stressful.

So what does spring break look like for Gen Z 2.0? Upgrade your subscription to hear first-hand insights.

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Today’s edition of The Up and Up is sponsored by the Pew-Knight Initiative, which supports research into the modern news and information environment conducted by Pew Research Center with funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Gen Z is shaping what comes next across industries and because everything is changing so fast, they’re the first generation forced to adapt in real time. And nowhere is that more obvious than the way they consume news.

Here’s the paradox: Gen Z is jaded and less trusting than their parents and grandparents, but that doesn’t mean young people are not engaged. If anything, it means they’re more selective about who they listen to, and quicker to clock when something feels off. They’ll pay attention when something feels relevant and specific, but they’ll tune out quickly if something feels like spin.

And while Gen Z’s news consumption habits are unique, they’re not entirely unpredictable. That’s partly because there aren’t gatekeepers the way there used to be. The line between news and entertainment has become blurred — as has the one between journalist and content creator. In that world, the individuals and outlets earning trust look different than ever before.

Gen Z is not monolithic — but young Americans’ news consumption habits aren’t random either. There are a few consistent truths about how our generation consumes news that shape how we watch current events in-real-time, make sense of global affairs, and, in turn, decide what’s worth taking seriously.

At the end of last year, Pew Research Center released an analysis on ‘Young Adults and the Future of News’ from the Pew-Knight Initiative, breaking down how young adults ages 18-29 consume news.

Beyond showing that young news consumers are more reliant on social media platforms (like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram) than news sites, podcasts, and email newsletters, the analysis underscores something deeper — we don’t just get news differently, we relate to news and newsmakers differently than our parents and grandparents did.

Pew’s analysis found that young adults are:

• Less active news consumers

• More flexible about who “counts” as a journalist

• And, as a result, redefining what the job even is

Journalists have historically been expected to stay neutral. But young adults are more comfortable with journalists showing where they’re coming from, particularly on social media.

• 63% of 18-29-year-olds say it’s acceptable for journalists to “advocate for the communities they cover” on social media

• 31% say it’s acceptable for journalists to “express their religious beliefs” in these online spaces

• And 32% say it’s acceptable for journalists to “express their political views”

To complement those findings, I spoke with members of The Up and Up’s Gen Z community about what actually earns their attention.

In a January listening session with a dozen Gen Zers ages 18-26 from seven states and Washington, D.C., the group shared that while they rely heavily on social media for news and information, algorithms can take a meaningful toll on their mental health and up the ante on political partisanship. And what they see online often translates to real life. We spent a good chunk of time discussing debate-style videos, made popular by leaders like the late Charlie Kirk or platforms like Jubilee.

Here’s what we heard.

YouTube’s prominence cannot be overstated. Participants emphasized the role YouTube plays in their media diet — often serving as background noise to the sounds of everyday life. To our community members, YouTube feels more like Netflix, a platform to stream news content, often under the guise of entertainment.

For one 22-year-old woman from Ohio, YouTube feels like a controlled “detox from doomscrolling.” She often forces herself to sit down and watch long-form content to train herself that she can handle it, rather than relying solely on short-form content.

Algorithms often reflect short-term fixations > long-term interests. Look something up once and you’ll get videos of it for days. That’s the general sense of how the young adults I spoke with feel their algorithm works. Which means that when a global event is happening and trending online, it feels like everyone is talking about it 24/7, but it really may only be 24/1, for one day (or even a few).

That same 22-year-old from Ohio said that her TikTok algorithm moves so fast that she feels like a “different person hour to hour.”

Meanwhile, an 18-year-old from Arizona said his algorithm feels “scarily accurate.” But he’s noticing more and more “rage bait” or engagement-bait content that lacks substance or real nuanced arguments.

One thing older adults are getting wrong: Gen Z news consumers are more discerning than they’re given credit for.

“Some of the stereotypes that the older generations label us with, I think we are aware of it. That we’re scrolling all the time, that we have a hard time focusing, but that is unfortunately part of the world we grew up with and we have been exposed to both the good sides of it and the negative of it. We are aware of the downsides of it and are trying to actively prevent ourselves from being exposed to the more negative sides of social media,” said a 22-year-old from Massachusetts.

Others say they feel like their friends know that they’re watching junk, but decide to watch it regardless, for the bit.

A 19-year-old young man from New York said that older generations don’t understand the “metacognition” of Gen Z news consumers, who know that some content is “brain rot” or “dumb” but choose to watch anyway, often ironically.

And there’s outdated conventional wisdom that social media has turned Gen Z “woke.” According to our listening session, that’s not the case.

“That’s certainly not what has made this generation woke. We have grown up with so many world-changing political situations. Most of us were probably really young around the time of the housing crisis and stock market crash of 2008, we went through Covid, we’ve gone through police brutality and George Floyd, we’ve gone through so many social movements that I think have influenced our political opinions. And maybe access to media has made us more informed on those topics, we know about it more than maybe generations before us may have. But it’s the political climate we’re in that has made us woke,” said a 22-year-old from D.C.

The Up and Up’s analysis: Reading between the lines of the Pew-Knight Initiative data and my own, a few things are clear.

1. Gen Z news consumers know that no one is unbiased. Everyone (even journalists), brings their personal experience to their work, and as a result, young adults’ respect it when (and have even grown to expect) journalists are upfront about how they’re coming to a story.

2. Transparency is key. This is true of Gen Z consumers across industries. They want to see how the sausage is made — or they won’t trust it. Gen Z news consumers will reward creators who are willing to show how they got to a story, and what was left on the cutting room floor. There’s a way to do so while maintaining sources’ trust.

3. Nuance may not immediately go viral, but it’s driving long-term engagement. Everyone’s sick of rage-bait or over-simplified headlines that reduce a story to its bones, taking out any real character or contradiction. Instead, they’re looking for stories that go a bit deeper, offering a new perspective or bringing friction to a preconceived notion.

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It’s becoming exceptionally clear to our generation that no one in traditional positions of power has any idea of what’s going on. Not the politicians in charge, not their professors, not their parents. If you’re wondering where widespread distrust and disillusionment comes from, it’s pretty clear.

Distrust is the baseline. That will have consequences. This morning, I joined Ali Vitali on MS NOW to break it all down.

In our Reality Check, we asked our community how they feel to be an American today.

American patriotism, for some, feels like something their generation hasn’t been privy to. One respondent went so far as to say they are “anti-American.” The consequences of toxic political partisanship and violence, paired with little to no government accountability, is leading to the demise of national pride.

Young people are tired of feeling this way. Instead, they want something to celebrate.

We also asked which, if any, politicians stand out for doing a good job right now.

There was a lot of range in the replies. But none of the candidates who stand out to our community currently code establishment.

James Talarico and Zohran Mamdani — who cracked the code on the attention economy — are both top of mind.

Across the board, the politicians mentioned have heterodox politics. They’re defying party norms (with the exception of Marco Rubio, maybe), saying things like they mean it, and using plain language that’s clear and easy to understand.

And, aside from Bernie Sanders, they’re all relatively young.

The distinguishing factor: these candidates have differentiated identities of their own and stand for something — not just against President Donald Trump.

Inside today’s full report

• What being an American means to the country’s youngest voters

• The politicians doing a good job, according to our community

• The allure of being earnest

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This is what a 25-year-old in Massachusetts said in The Up and Up’s recent Reality Check about how the Trump administration’s recent foreign involvement plays into their broader view of where the country is headed.

He’s not alone.

On the surface, young people aren’t feeling so confident about the direction of the country right now. And there’s no shortage of reasons why. For them, everything feels linked.

The cost of living. The Epstein files. Foreign conflict. The threat of WWIII.

From their point of view, it feels like all the decisions being made by people in power (who are out of touch with the lives of young people) have very *real* consequences every single day on the lives of young people.

I wrote about this for Vox last month. But it’s even more relevant now.

Historically, Americans don’t vote on foreign policy, and I’m not saying Gen Z is too different when it comes to their prioritization of global affairs > domestic issues. Like everyone else, young people rank the economy and cost of living above all else, but war, or the possibility of it, threatens their personal emotional and financial stability, and therefore impacts their lives every single day.

Just last week, I wrote about the State of Our Union, according to our Gen Z community.

Since then, I’ve heard from even more young people about how they feel about the state of things in the U.S. right now.

And I didn’t know this was really possible (although it shouldn’t be surprising at this point), but it’s gotten… worse.

Here are some of the latest replies to that question specifically.

How do you feel about the state of things in the U.S. right now? Be specific.

• “Bad! It’s bad! It’s really really bad.”

• “A bit dismayed, but also feeling that (in the economy especially) everything is topsy-turvy and based on too much speculation.”

• “Abysmal.”

• “I honestly feel extremely uneasy. I currently am a student at UT Austin and live just a few minutes from the mass shooting that just occurred. Knowing classmates, community members, and just anyone was innocently killed so close to me makes me sick. I hate what our world has come to and constantly am asking myself why there is so much violence everywhere.”

Like last week, it’s not all negative — some are appreciative of this administration.

• “Good. Happy with the presidential administration but less enthusiastic with congress,” said a 23-year-old from Wisconsin.

• “I feel like the state of the US economically is better than what’s in the news, politically always polarizing, and as a nation is strong, but we need to ban together,” said a 25-year-old from Texas.

But the majority of Gen Zers I heard from shared a number of nuanced concerns, especially when it comes to what comes next after the U.S. strikes in Iran.

How do you feel about the U.S. strikes on Iran?

• “I think Iran had a bad government, but I am also worried that we’re just bombing places now,” said a 24-year-old from Nevada.

• “I think we’re getting involved in something we shouldn’t be, so I am not on board at all with these decisions,” said a 20-year-old from Texas.

• “It’s unexpected and unnecessary. While intelligence is important, striking a foreign nation while we are in active negotiations is bad faith,” said a 25-year-old from Massachusetts.

• “Yes! The regime is over! Iran called out for help for a while and we finally answered,” said an 18-year-old from Arizona.

And yet, despite some appreciation for the United States’ recent actions in Iran and belief that the country should set an international standard for foreign policy, there is little faith in the country’s current posture — and a growing appreciation for isolationism given the fact that it feels like we have enough problems of our own here at home.

What role should the United States play in foreign policy around the world?

• “Role model,” said the 24-year-old from Nevada.

• “The United States should exert military supremacy overseas to deal with foreign adversaries and threats that endanger our security at home. Moreover, we should aid our allies and oppose Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea. However, while we should take an active role in global affairs, we ought to not become bogged down by ‘forever wars’ and have mission scope creep,” said the 20-year-old from New York.

• “I believe we should help our allies, but fully striking and becoming violent in fights that we are not a part of, benefit no one,” said the 20-year-old from Texas.

• “Not being an imperialist hegemon,” said a 30-year-old from New York.

• “It’s scary, but definitely the enforcer, opposed to the enforced on,” said the 25-year-old from Texas.

• “I think they should play less of a role than they do now but they are also doing good at setting an example and showing the rest of the world we’re not gonna take any crap,” said an 18-year-old from Ohio.

• “Probably more isolationist,” said the 18-year-old from Arizona.

The Up and Up’s take: Gen Z isn’t necessarily dovish or hawkish, so much as they are actually, pretty rational. Their posture is “prove it.” Prove the threat, prove the plan, prove it won’t spiral, prove how it will help them and the country.

For our generation, two things can be true at once. Iran’s regime can be dangerous and the US’s actions can be reckless without transparency or a clearly thought out strategy. If leaders can’t explain the stakes and the plan, young people know the costs, financial, emotional, personal, and human will land on them.

War signals instability, which signals higher costs — and this feels like yet another decision made by people insulated from the consequences.

That’s why Gen Z’s foreign policy reads moderate, not because they don’t care about the world, but because they’re demanding limits, receipts, and a plan before they’re asked to bankroll the fallout.

The gender gap is not overblown. It’s very real. But at this point, it’s literally just the backdrop of young Americans’ lives. It’s our president, the media, celebrities, influencers, and yes, even our parents, and sometimes our teachers, who seem to be fanning the flames of furor, pinning young men and women against one another.

This conversation is playing out front and center this week, reigniting much of the dialogue that perpetuates the same noise and stereotypes that got us here in the first place. It’s not necessarily that the divide is fake, but it’s that internet culture flattens everything into “teams”, and gender is an easy one.

A recent example of this is what’s going on with the Olympic gold-medal winning men and women’s USA hockey teams, which has all sides of the internet up in arms.

Tl;dr, after the men’s team beat Canada, they shared a locker room phone call with President Donald Trump, in which he invited them to the White House and joked that he had to invite the women’s team, too, or risk impeachment. The men laughed at his joke, captured in a now viral video. (The women’s team declined his invitation.) Everyone and their mother — including game-winning goal scorer Jack Hughes’ mom — has a take. And predictably, most of these takes have more to say about the commentator’s politics as they do about the actual dynamics between the teams.

That said, I wrote about mine for , which you can read here.

Young men and women know they have different worldviews. It doesn’t mean they can’t get along, or support one another. At this point, a lot of Gen Z just assumes they’ll disagree on some things, but what they don’t want is for every disagreement to turn into a character indictment. Millennials, especially in Trump’s first term, weren’t always great at that. And Gen Z, especially the youngest amongst us, watched politics turn into a type of moral sorting, and took note.

As women’s hockey icon Kelly Pannek put it:

“Our experiences with the men’s team [were] different, I think. That’s something, we all know being there what it felt like to have their support throughout the tournament, to support them, and how great of a moment it was for everyone that was a fan of both teams to come together and say how great it was that we both won a gold medal for the first time ever. And it really was such a special feeling being there and being able to spend time with them after their win and the respect that they were showing us. And I think the video is what it is. You’d have to ask them their feelings on it. I think there’s also elements to it, with the phone call specifically, it’s not surprising, to be frank. So, I don’t know why we expect differently?”

Also this week, The Atlantic published a great piece by Faith Hill, titled, ‘Young men aren’t the only ones struggling.’ It’s been sent around quite a few of my group chats. My main takeaway is this: we’ve spent years agonizing over young men and their struggles — a discussion that is completely warranted. But the truth is, life is hard for both boys and girls right now. And it shouldn’t be a competition of who has it worse. In fact, our constant banter of which gender is worse off is part of the problem. It pins our boys and girls against each other, without allowing them to be each others’ biggest allies.

Hill writes:

“Young men, as a population, are struggling more than they used to. But sometimes that point gets twisted into a different argument: that young men are struggling more than young women. Women tend to be present only as a comparison; they’re the ones who are more likely to attend college or to lean on close friends, less likely to depend on drugs or alcohol or drop out of high school. They’re symbols of success, used to make a point. The problem is that, in a number of ways, young women are actually doing worse than men. That this fact has been obscured—that women themselves have been obscured in this conversation—says a lot about who gets prioritized in American culture, and how misguided our understanding of human flourishing is in the first place...Hardship shouldn’t be a competition. Well-being is not a zero-sum game for men and women.”

The trouble is that our culture is defaulting to zero-sum thinking. If one group is named as struggling, the other group must be thriving. Or even blamed. Earlier this year, I wrote about the fact that young men and women want out of the gender war.

I write a lot about the youth gender gap. I’m obsessed with it. I’ve had thousands of conversations with young people across the country, and it comes up every single time. It’s one of the biggest phenomenons of our generation. Through listening to Gen Z, I’ve realized the divide is exacerbated by a lack of intervention looking to bring young men and women together, which is already resulting in tangible consequences — lower birth rates being one of them. (In fact, fewer people are pairing up at all.)

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many young men and women are looking for a way out of their full-fledged gender war.

And this is what it boils down to. Much of the divide between young men and women is manufactured by people who benefit from putting a wedge between them, and there are really few stakeholders working to bring them together, even if boys and girls themselves don’t see their opposing political or social viewpoints as detrimental to their ability to get along.

If you don’t believe me, listen to them.

Inside today’s full report

• Young adults’ actual pov on the gender gap

• What they’re asking for from adults

Read more