Everyone has a take on whether young people are “screwed.” So I asked them.
"I feel like I’m playing by rules that may change halfway through the game," one told me.
This month, business advisor and writer Ben Carlson published a blog post with a blunt question: “Are young people screwed?” He’s hardly alone. A growing stack of analyses point to a rough landscape for this generation where the youth unemployment rate has nearly doubled, AI is reshaping entry-level work before many have even entered the job market, and the average age of first-time home buyers has jumped 7 years since before Covid.
Days later, conservative writer Rod Dreher weighed in from a very different angle (I encourage you all to read it). He described what he sees as “the new radicalism racing through the young Right,” which is steeped in antisemitism, racism, and bigotry, and traced the rise of Nick Fuentes and the Groypers among early-career men in “official Republican Washington.” Dreher argues that economic precarity and instability fuel a generational belief that they are “utterly screwed,” as one young man put it. And that there’s a distinction between those who want to burn the system down or reform it. That instinct, in my view, isn’t isolated to the right, but rather a generational divide incentivized by extremist politics on both sides of the aisle.
As Dreher writes: “The inability of us older people — Boomers, Xers, and older Millennials — to comprehend the world through the eyes of Zoomers is a big, big problem.”
Then came (whose work on gen z I devour) who brought Carlson and Michael Batnick on his podcast to debate how gen z’s situation stacks up against previous generations. (Thompson followed with a newsletter version of the same argument — I lost count of how many people forwarded it to me). Thompson touched on Dreher’s account of zoomer life in DC, emphasizing young people’s nihilism. Then, on Monday, Vox correspondent Eric Levitz published a similar essay. Rinse, repeat.
Phew! In short, there’s a lot of *discourse*. Everyone seems to have a take on whether gen z is uniquely doomed or actually well positioned for what lies ahead. But few of these think pieces (outside of Dreher’s conversations with young conservative men, which is a very important pov) are including gen z’s own perspective.
So I asked some members of The Up and Up’s gen z community how they’re feeling.
Here’s what they told me…
🔑 What You’ll Unlock: Highlights from this edition
What young people actually say about whether or not they feel screwed
Five core tensions that emerged from their responses
A closer look at the dynamic between nihilism and grit
What those in power must do if they want gen z to believe in anything beyond themselves