Commentary
Generation Z is starting to enter adulthood, and there are signs in this pandemic age that has taken up a fair portion of their adolescence that things
aren’t going so well. Whatever course they take in that delicate transition out of youth, we may be sure that it will be quite different from what transpired with the previous generation.
You see, something extraordinary happened to Millennials when they were young. Older generations passed through adolescence feeling a little insecure, rebellious perhaps, but knowing they didn’t have all the equipment a grownup needs, which only comes with experience and age, trial and lots of error. Even the fractious youth of the Sixties felt it, their don’t-trust-anyone-over-30 bravado barely hiding their dismay over the loss of trustworthy authorities. For all its fervent calls for radical change, there was an elegiac undercurrent to the
Port Huron Statement.
Millennials had a different experience. For the first time in human history, a younger cohort grew up believing in their superiority and were handed the
evidence to prove it. Teenagers in the past thought they knew it all, of course, they mocked the elders and had their own youth culture from hot rods to comic books to rock ’n roll, but when it came time to leave home and school, get a job, pay the rent, and settle down, those teen traits wouldn’t much help. They needed guidance from above.
This time, though, in the 2000s, the young could claim to be out front on a condition that affected everyone. The Digital Age was upon us, Web 2.0 leaping forward, and Millennials were the Digital Natives, the Early Adopters, the ones most adept and innovative with the tools. Nobody dove into MySpace and Facebook more avidly and creatively than they did. With their adroit thumbs and hungry egos, they ran circles around old folks who stared at the handheld with furrowed brow. They helped President Barack Obama win the White House, favoring him over McCain 2-to-1, because the Obama campaign reached out by social media and youth turnout went way up.
This was not a talent that would grow irrelevant as they aged. Social media were more than social. They were politics, marketing, news, and entertainment, too. That put Millennials at the front of Progress; they would lead America into the 21st century. “
The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming,” announced “60 Minutes” in November 2007; Bob Herbert at the New York Times six month later declared, “
Here Come the Millennials.” No uncertainty, no need to rebel. They’d already won.
Fifteen years later, the excitement has dimmed. Life in middle-age for Millennials doesn’t seem so historic. Time turns us to the next cohort, Generation Z, which hasn’t been granted the novelty and advent of the Millennials. Facebook and texting and selfies lost their glow many years back, and today’s teen is no more expert with tools than a 30-year-old. That opens once more the question of youth rebellion. Gen Z doesn’t have the confidence Millennials had; they don’t assume any epochal moment for themselves. But every generation has to come into its own, and it does so in part by renunciation of the old.
There’s something different about Gen Z’s circumstance, however, and it comes back to the same thing that marked the Millennials: social media, which now work oppositely. Social media freed Millennials from the authority of the elders. For Gen Z, they function as surveillance. Cancel culture hadn’t come along yet when most Millennials came of age. Gen Z-ers leave high school and find themselves right in the middle of it. Gen Z-ers feel the dominant outlook of Woke, which strikes them as a discipline, and social media is one way the Woke enforce it. As youths bristle against the censorious eye, as they tend to do, their acts of rebellion and mischief will be recorded. Some acts will be politically incorrect, some offensive or fatally un-woke, and the irreverent Gen Z-er will be punished, as was the 2018 Heisman winner when tweets he sent in 2012 that tossed the word “queer” as an insult were
dug up and published.
The digital eyes are upon them, and they have an effect. A Gen Z-er eager to enter a top college or grad school, win an internship or kill a job interview, will keep his head down and her mouth shut, track social norms and play it safe. A dumb racial joke, a sexist meme, an abusive prank... they give outlet to the refractory spirit. They’re inappropriate, though, hurtful, and they’ve been recorded. The culprit will find himself pulled out of the pipeline of success, the resume tossed in the garbage by the recruiter, the admission to college rescinded.
This is not healthy. Teens need room to be stupid; moral codes can’t be applied too tightly. Adult brilliance and rectitude often emerge from youth waywardness. The ambitious Gen Z-ers I see are conscientious, diligent, and thoughtful—perhaps a little too good, too careful. They have to be. The conformity they experience is five times as high as what I experienced in 1983. The idiotic things I did back then would have closed many doors for me if I’d done them in 2018 with a cell phone nearby.
Gen Z isn’t so lucky. The elders who run the pipelines into the elite need a little more forgiveness, or understanding, or, perhaps most of all, courage. To all those people who admit and recruit and hire young people: give the ones who’ve slipped a little slack, acknowledge that some of the ones who’ve seen a little trouble here and there may have heightened imaginations and active intellects, be a little forgiving. Keep cancel culture away from teenagers.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
