gen z

Generation Z: The Planet’s First Global Cohort Learns to Live on the Ashes of Optimism
By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg

If you want to meet Generation Z in the wild, skip the TikTok montages and try the overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. You’ll find them trading memes about climate collapse in one WhatsApp group while haggling over side-hustle startup capital in another, all on a cracked-screen Android that still runs Android 6. Their playlist jumps from K-pop to Bongo Flava to a bootleg Bad Bunny remix without changing facial expression—an emotional flatline that passes for cosmopolitan cool. This is the first generation raised not merely “online” but inside the same algorithmic pressure cooker from Lagos to Lahore, and the steam is starting to smell like burnt future.

Demographers like to bracket Gen Z as those born 1997-2012, which means the eldest are now 27 and the youngest just learned to read and already suspect the adults are lying about everything. They have never known a world without a forever war, a forever pandemic, or a forever 50%-off sale on planetary habitability. Their childhood lullabies were push notifications. Their babysitters were touchscreens. Their inheritance will be the bill for our extended adolescence.

From Seoul to São Paulo, the symptoms rhyme. South Korean Zoomers postpone driving licenses because cars feel as obsolete as fax machines; Brazilian ones skip them because a tank of gas costs more than a month of streaming subscriptions. In France they riot against pension reform that won’t bite until they’re 64—an age they privately doubt the climate will allow them to reach. Meanwhile, in India, 23-year-olds launch AI startups that promise to automate their parents’ jobs by Thursday. The venture capitalists applaud; the parents open another pension app.

Language itself has bent to their fatalism. Global English now contains phrases like “main character energy” and “delulu,” linguistic eye-rolls that translate effortlessly into Bahasa, Spanish, or Arabic. It’s a coping mechanism: when every feed delivers a fresh atrocity, the only sane response is to pretend life is just a badly written sitcom. Cynicism is their universal tongue, memes their Esperanto.

Yet the stereotype of the fragile, phone-addled snowflake misses the mark. In Kyiv, Gen Z medics run field hospitals powered by Starlink and spite. In Tehran they swap makeup tutorials as coded protest manuals. In Lagos they turn thrifted clothes into gender-bending fashion statements faster than customs agents can learn the insults. They riot, code, unionize, and ghost employers with equal fluency. The world taught them that institutions are unreliable narrators; they replied by building parallel economies on Discord servers and Instagram close-friends lists.

Economically, they’re the first cohort whose global baseline expectation is downward mobility. Chinese Zoomers speak of “lying flat” while their Spanish peers call it “mileurismo”—the art of surviving on a thousand euros a month and infinite irony. Home ownership is a Boomer fairy tale, pensions a punch line. Instead they hustle: dropshipping Filipino phone cases, tutoring German kids in Minecraft architecture, selling NFTs of feelings they haven’t had time to feel. Each microtransaction buys another day of rented stability.

Politically, they terrify every establishment equally. They don’t fear socialism or capitalism; they fear commitment. Parties try to seduce them with TikTok dances; Gen Z responds by doxxing the interns who suggested it. Their activism is decentralized, swarm-like, allergic to leaders. When the Iranian regime shut down the internet, they smuggled footage on USB drives hidden inside sanitary pads—an innovation as practical as it is metaphorical. Revolution, like everything else, runs on subscription.

And still, they swipe right on hope—if only because despair doesn’t offer group discounts. The contradictions are the point: climate activists flying budget airlines to COP summits, eco-influencers hawking fast-fashion hauls, anti-capitalists monetizing anti-capitalism. Hypocrisy is just another filter; authenticity died with the front-facing camera.

As the generation born into the end of history contemplates an actual ending, their greatest rebellion may be refusing to inherit our despair wholesale. They’ll remix it instead: sample the apocalypse, add a lo-fi beat, drop it at 3 a.m. when the grid flickers back to life. The planet may be on fire, but at least the Wi-Fi still works—for now.

In the smoking lobby of the 21st century, Gen Z is busy hot-wiring the PA system. Whether they broadcast a eulogy or an evacuation plan is still TBD. Place your bets, but remember the house always wins—unless, of course, the house is still on Zillow.