If millennials are fed up, what hope for Generation Z?

Of all the records millennials can claim to have set, our newest is (as with all the others...) unlikely to win us many fans: we are the most disillusioned generation “in living memory”, according to a new report from the University of Cambridge. Those born between 1981 and 1996 are more dissatisfied with democracy than our parents or grandparents were at the same age, left struggling to find comfort in a system that has given us “higher debt burdens, lower odds of owning a home, greater challenges in starting a family, and reliance upon inherited wealth to succeed”. This has not led to rising support among young people in the 160 countries surveyed for autocratic systems, just created more disenfranchisement with their own.

These fissures are keenly felt, democracy seeming – to many in my cohort, the majority of whom have never lived under a government that has echoed their cross on the ballot paper – an abstract concept. But the problem is only set to get worse in the generation that follows mine. Among Generation Z (born between the mid-nineties and mid-noughties), the fun, formative years that come before “real world” concerns set in are fast evaporating. Future disillusionment must to them sound like a luxury in a landscape where year-group shutdowns are forcing schools into a permanent in-out hokey cokey, socialising is an offence, the “university experience” is a Deliveroo through the locked-down halls’ letter box and travel is the stuff of lucid dreams. I don’t know whether dissatisfaction can begin in the womb, but at this stage it might as well.

For Gen Z-ers the discontent among those who have come before them, on top of a world closing its doors at the precise point they should be opening, may be impetus to rewrite the guidelines entirely; a chance to create a system they might actually be a part of, rather than apart from. The political is now inextricably personal: the Cambridge report found that 41 per cent of millennials believe that “you can tell if a person is good or bad if you know their politics” which, if this trend continues, will only snowball among the generation after mine, driving yet bigger wedges in every conceivable relationship from dinner tables to dating apps. Democracy is meant to be about bringing people together; for the young, it is now doing the opposite.

And my cohort are the lucky ones: the young-ish who could at least cultivate our thoughts and belief systems in a sphere that didn’t involve Brexit or a pandemic, enjoy a youth without smartphones glued to our fingers and enough of the reckless stuff to make perilous adolescence feel worthwhile. Yet if millennials have been left wanting, and the benefits of youth – namely, freedom – are being swept away, what remains for today’s teens and early twentysomethings? With material opportunities gone, and personal ones obliterated (how many university romances will be struck up after three debt-filled years of online lectures from the sofa?), the idea that they will feel more heartened than we do about the state or state of things seems fanciful.

Perhaps this is just the chance for the “snowflake” youth to prove that they have new, better ideas about how things should be done. But if the next report finds that they feel more apathetic about their place in the world than ever before, who could blame them?