Gen Z Has Too Much Freedom
The “anxiety generation” really is in crisis.
Gen Z is, in most ways, no different than the generations who came before us. Cigarette lighters in our cars were replaced with phone chargers, but we still follow the incentives given to us and do what is required of us to survive. The problem is, to survive requires almost nothing.
We don’t have to hunt or gather food, nor do we have to drive to a grocery store or restaurant. We Doordash and work from home. We use dating apps and social media to cultivate relationships from our couch. As long as one can afford rent, one never needs to leave. But to afford rent, one must work two meaningless jobs, plus a passion-project-turned-side-hustle because any time not monetized is time wasted. What I’m saying is, we’re incentivized to numb ourselves. We created a world where we were no longer needed.
So we sedate ourselves with technology and processed foods and gorge ourselves on the narrative that we could be otherwise. We were told we could be anything when we grew up and Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok fed us more options than we could ever imagine in an endless scroll. Gen Z was given too much freedom.
One in five Gen Zers are not in employment, education, or training because they’ve given up on the rat race entirely. Johnathan Haidt and others will tell you it’s social media and the lack of free play. Some will argue it’s the decline of religion or the increase in therapy culture or that we’re in a “comfort crisis.” I’m not a social scientist—I’m just a crotchety 22-year-old—so I won’t present you with a perfectly correlated data set, but I think we’ve ended up here from all of the above to some degree. Emerging technologies, including the internet, have made us comfortable, and when we were no longer in survival mode, we began to look for meaning and found it lacking. We began to ruminate about ourselves. As the internet democratized information we exchanged wisdom for facts, religion and community for evidence-based psychiatry, and social connection for social media.
When the internet made us smarter and we no longer needed God, we became small gods. The internet showed us all we could be. We could make our own meaning and morals—but where to start? When I scroll through social media my brain is bombarded with real-time images of wars, cat videos, politics, shoe ads, medication ads, and parties I wasn’t invited to all in the space of ten minutes and I feel paralyzed. Meaning escapes me then. How does someone create their own meaning when they can hardly leave their bed? And why would anyone leave bed when every action one takes limits their future, which the internet convinced us is unlimited and infinite?
Growing up, I was more likely to spend hours on Minecraft building a virtual treehouse than going outside. As screens became normalized and parents thought playing outside was dangerous, Gen Z became the most disembodied generation, living in our minds rather than bodies or communities. Social media provided enough loose social connections and quick dopamine hits to temporarily assuage loneliness and depression. Strong-rooted local communities atrophied. Third spaces—from churches to shopping malls—became sparser.
As a teenager, I thought internet communities were amazing and they still bring me fulfillment. Internet communities taught me that I wasn’t alone—there were people out there like me—and they gave me a place to experiment and learn about myself. I know they have given others so much. It’s wonderful that a young gay person in a prejudiced rural town can reach elder gay people and understand that they can have a good life outside of where they came from. But these online communities also deprioritize our physical place in the world, which has consequences. We run the risk of becoming so disembodied and self-absorbed that we forget our obligations to ourselves and one another.
Many of our parents sacrificed us at the altar of the algorithm before they understood what it was. It’s hard to blame them. Parenting is difficult, and there didn’t seem to be much harm in giving the kid a phone to calm them down for an hour—enough time for a shower and a nap. But if parents weren’t teaching us strong morals and we didn’t have a religious community, the internet raised us, and it raised us without manners.
The rise of the social internet made it much easier to ghost people because it lacked consequence. The internet made it easier to have undefined situationships that never leave the DMs. There are so many options and escape hatches at our fingertips, why deal with inconvenience? To be inconvenienced is to be connected to people. We’ve optimized, efficiencied, and intoleranced our way into a generation that has fewer close friends than ever, is more single than ever, and going “no contact” with family has become increasingly common. When does “protecting your peace” teeter over into crippling loneliness because we were unwilling to pay the uncomfortable price of putting in effort, of being obligated to support someone else? Real peace comes when we see pieces of ourselves reflected in the ways we interact with the people around us.
The internet allowed so much to blur into postmodernist soup. Take politics—we were born around the time TV news blended politics and entertainment, which Neil Postman began warning about in 1985. It’s only accelerated with the rise of alternative and influencer-driven news. Now, Pew Research cites Joe Rogan as a source from which 12% of Americans regularly get news. Every journalist is encouraged to be an influencer (see: half of Substack). Not to mention that our president is an actual reality TV star. Gen Z grew up in the Trump era—I remember watching his first inauguration in my eighth-grade classroom—and is too young to remember 9/11. We never experienced a unified country not ridden by polarization, and Obama-era civility quickly went out the window.
When we’re not grounded in our communities, when we’ve unshackled ourselves from the obligations of being good friends, family, and neighbors (75% of Gen Z avoid their neighbors!), it opens the door for politics to infringe on those relationships. While the majority of family estrangements and friendship breakups aren’t driven by political differences, a not insignificant portion of them are. And why wouldn’t they be when the vastness of the online world allows for low tolerance of different beliefs, and we’ve mixed politics, entertainment, and morality? And then we end up with the same group of self-selecting educated, politically-left-of-center elites talking about high art and representation in White Lotus and Succession completely disconnected from the working class watching Love Island.
Polarization and class separation divide neighborhoods and entertainment spheres because our social identities matter, and so do our personal identities. Teenagers and twenty-somethings make and remake our personal identities through understanding the interaction of our minds, bodies, and souls and integrating them, experimenting until we find the better (and worse) versions of ourselves. But Gen Z lives in our minds because there isn’t a reason to be in our bodies. Generations ago moving our bodies was a part of our daily lives and now we’re lucky if we can convince ourselves to put the phone down and go to the gym to enforce an arbitrary amount of cardio and weightlifting. Not to mention living in climate control means our bodies rarely have to do much to regulate our temperature, unless you’re a cold-plunge-and-sauna bro. The consequences of being disembodied, I’ve learned, are quite vast. We forget how to trust ourselves and unfamiliar sensations start to trigger anxiety. It’s hard to know and understand ourselves without understanding the limits of our bodies along with our consciousness. Because our bodies have limits, when we severed our connection to them we called it freedom.
Our relationship to physical space has a lot to do with our bodies, but I also think about the way these generational shifts have bled into things as basic as our architecture. The en vogue house layout is “open concept.” There aren’t rooms demarcated for living, dining, or working. Partially because we’re fortunate if we can afford more than one room at this point, but also because many people use their kitchen as their dining room and their dining room as their office—which is great, use your home in whatever way works for you. But the lack of walls, allowing you to see and hear everything at once with constant access to the TV, junk food, and conversation at the same time reflects so much of our culture. Leisure, work, and entertainment all take place in the same spot.
When I say Gen Z has had too much freedom and too little obligation to one another, I’m not advocating for conservatism or traditionalism. I myself am not the most traditional, and I advocate for tolerance, diversity, and political freedoms. But healthy societies also offer structure and guidance to young people. Any good parent knows this already. You can give a child a choice about what shirt to wear, but they must wear clothes. Similarly, any good artist, like Picasso, knows they must learn the rules before they can break them. Gen Z grew up in a secular wild west internet age, in a politically undignified and polarized Trump era, with open-concept living—without guidelines on how to be a good and effective human in the world.
Gen Z increasingly doesn’t drink, drive, or have sex and older generations look befuddled: “Why wouldn’t they be itching to drive? Don’t they want freedom?” But we already have it. We don’t rebel because anything transgressive can already be done from the screen in our pockets. We didn’t fully understand then that billions of dollars had been poured into keeping us addicted to those transgressions across social platforms.
I do believe the kids will be alright though. Many of us are trying to reconnect with ourselves.
There are movements to “rawdog” flights, meaning to sit there without any form of entertainment, some are moving to flip phones, dumbphones, or putting their smartphones in grayscale to make them intentionally less addictive.
Another promising trend is the recent resurgence of religion among Gen Z following years of decline, which I believe is linked to my generation recognizing our need for structure. Naturally, it makes sense to return to structures that have tapped into the human psyche for thousands of years. I’m not advocating for a return to Christianity—I’m an atheist heavily influenced by Buddhism—but to follow whichever scaffolding grounds you by providing built-in rules, rituals, and a moral community, which make the onslaught of daily life more tolerable.
Figures like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro often advise young people to become religious, get married, and have kids young for a happy life. Many, including myself, object to such a narrow vision of happiness, but they aren’t wrong about having connection, moral framework, and responsibilities as footholds in life. Too many of Gen Z have fallen into a life with little connection or responsibility to the outside world because it’s no longer a basic requirement to survive. And by responsibility, I don’t mean feeling pressure to solve the big issues like climate change; I mean a life of small responsibilities, of things that will not save the world. Driving our friends to the airport instead of letting them Uber. Helping a neighbor carry groceries. Showing up to a nephew’s sports practice. Starting a garden to tend to. Little by little we can find structures for our freedom that enable our joy and build a life of them.
Clare Ashcraft writes The Mestiza where she makes observations about identity, psychology, and culture. She is a proud Ohioan.
This piece originally appeared in The Republic of Letters.
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Wow, good article, honest, intense, and disturbing. But I would contest that "freedom" is the problem for Gen Z. People on the left like to knock "freedom" equating it with selfish individualism, for example. Regarding this article, the Gen Z people the author describes are the opposite of free. Yes, in a certain sense they have many options, ( but that's not the same as freedom). However they are extremely unfree because they are crippled by their anxieties, their lack of tolerance for discomfort, and their lack of purpose and inability to develop their own moral code. Real freedom is that you can envision the person you want to be and you are able to work towards becoming that person.
I don’t know how to break it to this columnist, but she is in fact a conservative. And that’s fine. I realize she might feel some pressure (especially at such a young age) to renounce and condemn that label, and she explicitly does so. But, right after ostensibly rejecting conservatism, she then makes a pitch-perfect argument supporting it:
“But healthy societies also offer structure and guidance to young people. Any good parent knows this already. You can give a child a choice about what shirt to wear, but they must wear clothes.”
If I weren’t fairly certain that she has never read Edmund Burke, it would be easy to point out that she’s basically paraphrasing him here. I would only add that healthy societies typically provide structure and guidance through well established institutions following relatively standardized norms. And the structure provided tends to benefit everyone. Not just young people.
It may also be important to point out for clarity’s sake that I view Trump and MAGA as reactionary: NOT conservative. So it is not my intention to place this columnist in that camp.
And, at certain times and in certain situations, a conservative and a liberal can overlap in their slow and careful embrace of good change (hence the majority support for gay marriage).
So, sure, this writer could perhaps argue that she is in fact on the liberal end of the moderate spectrum.
But, just as she does not belong in the MAGA camp, she also clearly does not belong in the progressive camp. The argument quoted above is a cogent argument against both far right as well as far left efforts to remake society in their own images. And I’m glad to see that kind of insight in today’s youth.