Does Gen Z Care So Little Because Millennials Care Too Much?
The roasting of earnest Millennials reflects an ancient, intergenerational war of feelings
There’s a moment from college that I remember with mortifying clarity. It was 2002, and I was sitting in a classroom, midway through a course on memoir writing as a form of social justice. This entailed a lot of personal disclosures from my classmates, all of which I found brilliant. Racism, sexism, homophobia; the war, which had recently started and which we vowed to end; the worst president in American history, George W. Bush. These issues concerned us, we cared about them, and more importantly, we were right about them every single time we opened our mouths.
“It’s amazing,” I clearly remember thinking, “belonging to the first generation to see what’s wrong with the world. I guess we’ll be the ones to fix it.”
If I were given one chance to use a time machine, I would not use it to rectify any injustice. I would go right back to that classroom, where I’d promptly slap my younger self across the face. In 2021, millennials have not, in fact, fixed the world, which is more of a plague-infested garbage dump than ever. Now, our only distinction — being the youngest and coolest people in the trash heap — is about to be usurped as Gen Z comes of…
