Being Gen Z In A World That Refuses To Get Better

When the Supreme Court chief justice compared youngsters to cockroaches, the youth made their contempt known. The “Cockroach Janta (people’s) Party” took over our Instagram feeds for a few days, before seething commentary on the CJP’s insincerity began to permeate all subsequent discussions on the matter. There is also a widespread defence: how can we expect a nascent social media group to account for all the wrongs thrust down our throats by the political leaders in power?

This essay is not about the CJP or the cockroach. We have all, at some point, identified a larger pattern of prior generations looking at the newer ones with blame-coloured glasses.

The Doomer & the internet

Tanu Biswas, associate professor in pedagogy at the University of Stavanger, calls Generation Z a “generation born into an overheated era” in her 2021 research for Frontiers in Political Science. Biswas refers to anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s definition of Anthropocene neoliberalism as a phenomenon not confined to environmental crises, but rather said crises being part of a larger ecosystem where economic and social disparity is at its height.

This intermingling of crises is evident in the evolution of environmental activist Greta Thunberg – also a Gen Z, who was mocked throughout her teenage years for seeking accountability from older political leaders – as she continues to deepen her ideological base through anti-capitalist commentary. 

For better or worse, Gen Z’s deep ties to the internet and social media have made this generation both extremely aware and depressingly helpless in the face of it all. We are best described by the neologism “Doomer.” The term is attributed to an online subculture in the late 2000’s, where internet users congregated virtually to discuss the world’s “apocalyptic” situations, such as the oil crisis of 2008.  

This subculture rose not as a cultish catalyst of any theological apocalypse, but with the knowledge of economic recessions, human-manufactured environmental catastrophes, and the nature of our complicity in our own ruin. 

Over the years, the Doomer was made into a caricature of a lonely, self-absorbed young man, often “memed” along with his female counterpart, the Doomer girl. If you dare to lament your future in a burning world, you would be called an uncaring Doomer.

The Doomer is “to use the 4chan phrase, been ‘black-pilled’ into nihilism and despair.” Since COVID-19 and the worldwide lockdowns, an entire generation has come to be associated with the Doomer. We share our disdain for the world’s socio-economic ruins through memes, spend hours doomscrolling and consuming headlines about wars and neo-imperialism through a form of humour that rarely makes us laugh.

We have been swept into a passive cycle of witnessing the human race’s downfall, the structural inequalities of race, caste, class and gender, and doing nothing about it because we don’t see ourselves holding the power to make a tangible difference. That, of course, does not reflect the reality of every single young person in the world.

Massive protests have broken out time and time again – the CAA-NRC protests largely led by late millennials and early Gen Z’s in India, the Black Lives Matter protests in the US, and literal overthrowings of governments in Nepal and Bangladesh. 

We create trending slogans and repost the rising number of dead Palestinians, all while looking at images of dead children on our phones. We say we condemn generative AI, but get our barely sufficient paychecks from institutions that profit from suffering. All of this should, ideally, and perhaps is, be leading towards greater mobilisation, but we don’t know for sure. 

The Doomers are correct in their assessment of the world, and our troubles must be named rather than subjected to the insincere tag of “doomer mentality.” In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote, “Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”  

Doomscrolling does something similar. We consume our own ruin, and the older generations tell us it is our moral failing, that we deserve this ruin because we are lazy and uninterested. 

In defence of Gen Z

An entire generation cannot be a monolith, even as much of our internet-focused lifestyle draws us together into one large group of youngsters who complain and complain but do nothing to actively create change. The need to mobilise is real, and so is the need to critique, to question, to have difficult conversations.

But what is solved by blaming a generation that spent the most formative years of their lives in their bedrooms, graduating from school and college through Zoom? I argue that we cannot mobilise without empathy as much as we cannot mobilise without accountability.

More and more young people are seeking community in increasingly conservative spaces that are strung to what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia, the longing for an imagined, ordered past, instead of a future that can be saved.

A politics that only mocks despair will inevitably drive young people further into cynicism, apathy, or reactionary fantasies of order. If there is to be any meaningful mobilisation, it must begin by treating despair not as weakness, but as a response to the world as it currently exists.