A shield of armor 🛡️

Gen Z 1.0 was considered snowflakes. But today's tweens and teens are hardening.

Scrolling through The Up and Up’s recent editions – from red flag summer to the gloomcycle, sinking American pride, and the sexcession – I realized that not one of them has been particularly uplifting. Chaos isn’t new, and every generation has its own brand of it. But for today’s young people, it hits different. It’s all they’ve ever known. It’s unrelenting, global, and streaming into their hands in real time. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have come of age in a nonstop cycle of negativity and division. This summer crystalized that.

Let’s roll back the clock…

In June, after ICE raids, the tragic shooting of two Minnesota lawmakers, and strikes between Israel and Iran, a 28-year-old from Indiana told me they “expect to wake up to horrible news.” At the time, members of The Up and Up’s Gen Z community said they felt “overwhelmed,” “worried,” and even “infuriated” by the current status quo, suggesting that the national and global instability was a result of distrust and polarization.

“I’m worried about escalating wars around the globe, including culture wars. I think the right and left have gotten too far apart. I am afraid they hate each other — and they shouldn’t,” said a 25-year-old from Washington, D.C.

As one 24-year-old from Colorado told me: “The lack of empathy is bizarre.”

That set the scene for a Gallup report just before July 4, showing that generally speaking, American pride is sinking, with Gen Z Americans expressing lower levels of national pride than older generations.

Chaos is our culture

Beyond hard data demonstrating young adults’ collective feelings of frustration, we see mayhem trending in our pop culture and personal lives, too. It literally is the vibe on TikTok… think about everything that goes viral. It’s all a little bit messy.

I pulled at this thread in my declaration of ‘red flag summer,’ when I wrote that Labubus – the coveted mischievous monster dolls that attracted long lines – are a physical manifestation of crashing out. The obsession with these objectively bizarre dolls is indicative of our current homeostasis. Glamour even wrote a story called ‘It’s the summer of the crash out.’ On and offline, young adults are finding community in collectively co-commiserating.

When it comes to our personal lives, 50% of Gen Z is spending $0 per month on dates, and, on the whole, having less sex. On the surface, it’s easy to critique our generation’s dating habits as a result of social media or the gender gap, but when you go a level deeper, power dynamics, internalized fear and anxiety, and years of isolation during Covid truly bear the brunt of responsibility for our generation’s bleak aspirations and the value prop on romance.

What happens when broken is the point of reference

All summer, I’ve heard from hundreds of young Americans who personify this data and these trends. Since I started writing about young voters as a college student, they’ve lamented a broken political system and world around them. But in order for something to feel broken, there must have been a time when it felt intact.

Gen Z 1.0 remembers that before-time.

“I think the entire US political system has gotten completely out of touch with what Americans actually want and it’s causing things to collapse,” a 25-year-old from New York told me earlier this summer.

The fact that this young woman was able to say the system has “gotten” to a point where it’s out of touch means there was a time when it wasn’t.

But for Gen Z 2.0 and Gen Alpha, that point of reference may not exist. Instead, they may expect this to just be how the world works.

We’ve reached the point where broken stops being a description, and instead, is the point of reference. Those who don’t remember anything other than this think it’s normal, while others, stuck with a lack of options, are living in the inertia of it all.

In recent listening sessions, those as young as 11 have shared a striking awareness of the world around them. They are mindful of economic concerns, global wars, human rights crises, and the rise of AI. In a way that’s unusual for 11-year-olds, many couch their feelings as a response to “everything that’s going on in the world right now,” admitting that this is just the way it has always been for them. They see the problems clearly and don’t hold much optimism that anything will change, upending the conventional myth that all generations of kids are hopeful and idealistic. Yet, they remain firm in the belief that just because it’s happening doesn’t make it ok.

But while chaos is the baseline, it doesn't mean it’s welcome. If my conversations with tweens, teens, and young adults prove anything, it’s that this chaotic equilibrium that feels outside of their control is painful. It makes them crave autonomy and freedom, but also leaves them worried they’ll come up short. It’s shaping how young people think about everything – politics, relationships, their own lives – as something they simply need to endure – and that they should avoid hard conversations altogether for the sake of keeping the peace with friends and family members.

If Gen Z 1.0 was seen as snowflakes, soft and outspoken about their hopes to change the world around them, today’s teens and tweens possess a shield of armor. That resiliency and maturity isn’t necessarily something we should praise.

Noteworthy reads

• You may remember that The Up and Up teamed up with Visible Ventures for a series of listening sessions on Gen Z spending, saving, and investing habits. This week, Visible Ventures’ Lori Cashman penned an oped for Fortune based on our findings. You can read it here: ‘I’m a VC founder and mother to 5 Gen Z kids. My listening tour of 50 young adults shows a hunger to work hard and rewrite the American Dream’

• Gen Zers have serious investment FOMO, Rebecca Torrence for Business Insider

• Will Jubilee host the next Presidential debate?, Brittany Luse, Alexis Williams, Neena Pathak for NPR

• How Alex Cooper Built a Media Empire, Alesandra Codinha for Vogue