gen z years

Gen Z Years, or How to Age Gracefully in a World That Never Learned to Adult
by Our Correspondent Somewhere Between TikTok and Existential Despair

The generational cartographers at Pew finally drew the line: 1997–2012. In other words, if your first phone had Snake instead of Spotify, congratulations—you’re a millennial fossil. If you learned to swipe before you learned to wipe, welcome to Gen Z. The rest of us are merely unpaid interns to history, watching them grow up in real time like a global Truman Show with worse lighting.

Globally, the cohort now crests one-third of the planet’s population, outnumbering both boomers and mosquitoes in many jurisdictions. They were born into the smoke of the Asian Financial Crisis, teethed on the rubble of 9/11, took their first steps during SARS, hit puberty with the Great Recession, and graduated into COVID’s open-mic night of economic collapse. If trauma were a frequent-flyer program, these kids would own the airline.

Consider Bangladesh, where a 17-year-old climate activist livestreams floodwater lapping at her ankles while the prime minister tweets about “youth innovation.” Or Lagos, where teenagers run Instagram thrift boutiques out of bedrooms that double as load-shedding shelters. In São Paulo, digital-nomad Gen Zers rent co-living cubes arranged like beehives for humans who can’t afford actual bees. Meanwhile, in suburban Ohio, their American cousins perform TikTok dances to protest student-loan interest rates set by people who still think Wi-Fi is a type of pasta.

The currency of their coming-of-age isn’t dollars or euros but attention, traded at brutal exchange rates. A 15-second clip of synchronized hand gestures can buy a week’s groceries in Jakarta; the same clip in Helsinki merely buys ironic backlash. Everywhere, virality is the new remittance: diaspora kids send memes back home instead of cash, and somehow both sender and receiver end up poorer.

Employers, bless their analog hearts, still demand “ten years’ experience” from people whose attention span has been scientifically clocked at eight seconds. Multinationals respond by rebranding internships as “micro-apprenticeships” and paying them in exposure bucks redeemable nowhere. The World Economic Forum chirps about “reskilling,” which is Davos-speak for “teach yourself to code while the planet melts, darling.”

Governments, never late to a moral panic, oscillate between scolding them for screen time and begging them to vote. In Russia, the Kremlin’s youth wing pays influencers to dance in khaki, hoping to make conscription trend like oat-milk lattes. In Tehran, morality police scour Instagram for “improper hijab” while Gen Z women weaponize filters to flash forbidden hair at 24 fps. Even Switzerland, land of neutrality and chocolate, recently floated a bill banning TikTok after 10 p.m.—as if bedtime ever stopped a teenager armed with VPN and spite.

Climate change, of course, is their inheritance, wrapped in a bow made of oil-company greenwash. A Kenyan 20-year-old recently told me she’s saving for two things: a house and a passport. “Whichever comes first,” she shrugged, “is where I’ll try not to die.” Her sentiment echoes from Manila to Marseille: mobility as the last luxury good. Meanwhile, carbon-offset startups sell them indulgences in app form—plant a tree, absolve your Uber guilt, post the receipt.

And yet, for all the doom-scrolling, Gen Z displays an almost irritating capacity for earnestness. They crowdfund strangers’ insulin, pirate textbooks into accessible formats, and turn grief into glitch art. Somewhere in Ukraine, a 19-year-old streams drone footage of shelled playgrounds intercut with Minecraft speed-runs; donations pour in from viewers who can’t spell Kyiv but know trauma clickbait when they see it. The line between activism and content has not so much blurred as merged into a single anxious organism.

So what do we, the older tenants of this burning planet, owe them? Not advice, certainly—our track record is a flaming landfill. Perhaps we could start by relinquishing the illusion that experience equals wisdom. After all, we’re the ones who left the oven on and are now surprised the kitchen’s ablaze.

In the end, the Gen Z years aren’t just a demographic slice; they’re a global stress test for humanity’s ability to adapt faster than it destroys. If they survive us, they’ll have earned the right to rename the entire epoch. My suggestion: “The Age of Whatever, I Guess.” At least it’s honest.