Sunday's Cool: I Sure Hope Gen Z Is Okay
Studies say the kids are not alright. Let's find someone to blame.
There’s been a lot of writing lately about the kids these days, and just what is up with them. Studies say the zoomers aren’t doing great mental-health wise, with teen girls in especially bad shape. From the Intelligencer:
Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 increased by nearly 60 percent. After declining over the ensuing two years, youth suicides rose again in 2021.
For every American who takes their own life, many more suffer from nonfatal forms of mental distress. The rate of major depressive episodes among U.S. adolescents increased by more than 52 percent between 2005 and 2017. The number of teen suicide attempts in the U.S., meanwhile, increased dramatically between 2019 and 2021.
Online, older generations are arguing over the root cause of all this unhappiness. Is it the phones? A tempting theory, with some data to back it up. To quote social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “Only one suspect was in the right place at the right time to account for this sudden change: social media.”
But others argue that our unfettered capitalist chickens have finally come home to roost, and Gen Z is taking the brunt of the fallout. This is the preferred theory of most people in my ideological cohort and, again, they make some points. “People are like ‘why are kids so depressed it must be their PHONES!’” wrote the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz. “But never mention the fact that we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic [with] record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world. Not to be a doomer but u have to be delusional to look at life in our country [right now] and have any [amount] of hope or optimism.”
Of course, there are other possible culprits. Video games, for sure. Mass advertising. The pandemic. I can’t help but note that this rise started right around 2012, which is the same year Underoath announced they were breaking up. Much to consider.
And as usual, nobody seems to be entertaining the possibility that there could be more than one thing going on here. I want to make the case that there are multifarious reasons for the zoomer dilemma, and suggest a baseline remedy that we’ve got to get sorted before we try anything else.
Conservatives have really latched onto the idea that screen time might be at least partly to blame for the sad state of zoomer mental health (it’s become a go-to talking point for the embarrassingly unserious Josh Hawley) but if you can strip the issue of its culture war language, it’s a fairly left-wing position. The idea that huge corporations should be reigned in from pushing a bad product on the American public with zero regard for the consequences sounds more progressive than conservative to me. Seems worth a shot, in any case.
But I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that at least part of the reason Gen Z is struggling so much these days is that reality kinda sucks! Commentators both conservative and liberal tut-tutted Lorenz’s “late stage capitalist hellscape” analysis, pointing out that actually the economy is doing pretty good, jobs are more secure and we are really trying hard on climate change, okay?
Fair enough. Lorenz’s analysis definitely suffers from being a little too online for its own good. But I think she does understand something her scolds don’t, which is that the internet gives us a front row seat to the vast array of rich, powerful people who seem to have devoted their lives to undoing every hard fought win. How exactly is a Zoomer supposed to rest easy in the knowledge that they live in an era of unparalleled equality when they see their elected leaders campaigning on a promise to take it away? How comforted is a teenager supposed to be by a robust economy when their lives are considered acceptable collateral for the Second Amendment? It’s true that their phones have made them more aware of these realities than my generation was when we were teenagers, but that doesn’t mean they’re not realities. The bright future these people think Gen Z should be grateful for sure looks like a house of cards, liable to topple in a light breeze.
Matt Yglesias, among others, suggests that these teens just need to get it together and cut it out with the victim mentality. I’d suggest that’d be a lot easier if teens weren’t shamed, belittled and ultimately dismissed every time they dare to take a stand on something. You can only undermine someone’s attempt to take some control over their own wellbeing so many times before they start to very reasonably assume they have no actual control.
But where I regrettably and with infinite goodwill part ways with Lorenz’s analysis is her last sentence: “u have to be delusional to look at life in our country [right now] and have any [amount] of hope or optimism.”
No tweet is designed to withstand much scrutiny, so I don’t want to get too pedantic here. But hope and optimism are two different things, sustained by different degrees of delusion. Optimism is just playing the odds, choosing to bet on good things instead of bad. I guess you could argue it’s a little delusional to call heads instead of tails every single time. In my experience, optimism can pretty easily turn to cynicism when it runs up against misfortune too many times. But there’s nothing inherently bad about it. Nothing inherently good either.
But hope is different. It’s a virtue, and in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul seems to hallow it into one of the three basic elements of the spiritual universe, along with faith and love. It’s a discipline and, like most disciplines, is most important to exercise at the moment when it feels most impossible. Lorenz may be right that it’s delusional to have any hope for a better world, the future may well belong to the delusional. “We have to look beyond our despair to imagine a world worth saving,” Nick Cave recently told the former Archbishop of Canterbury. “Hope is an act of the imagination.”
So when I say I’m hopeful for the future of America, that emphatically does not mean I’m optimistic about it. It means that I choose to imagine a future in which the next generation has the resources they need for a just world and a flourishing people. If I was optimistic, that would probably mean I could just sit back and wait for this world to build itself of its own accord. But being hopeful’s going to take a little work. Hope will not and can not, on its own, solve any of our problems. But if we don’t have it, why would we bother trying to solve anything at all?
I’d be remiss to not highlight Diana Butler Bass’ analysis of the shockingly bad state of young women’s mental health, and her suggestion that the rise in Christian Nationalism may be at least partly to blame. Kinda think she’s got a point.
Michelle Goldberg’s essay at the New York Times does a great job of exploring how teen mental health is falling prey to politicization.
Time to go start getting ready for Hollywood’s most magical night! I’m already feeling physical revulsion at the thought of Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes about “the slap.”