She’s A College History Professor Explaining Why Gen Z Is So Depressed

Emily Chan |

May 14, 2023

insta_photos - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual person

As you may know, Generation Z is currently the second youngest generation, comprised of people born between the late 90s and the early 2010s.

This generation has been shaped by the age of the internet, the realities of climate change, economic instability, and a global pandemic.

Living through times of uncertainty has produced rising levels of stress and poor mental health among Gen Z.

Yet older generations dismiss their struggles, deeming them the laziest, most entitled generation of all time and citing smartphones to be the culprit of their behavior.

A creator who goes by the handle @lilmaverick3 is a college history professor, and she’s explaining why Gen Z is so depressed. And it’s not because of social media.

In a three-part series on TikTok, she discusses the research she conducted about Gen Z. It took her a year of collecting data to reach the conclusions she did about Gen Z.

During the pandemic, she assigned her students the task of finding a meme or TikTok video that demonstrates what their generation is like for their U.S. history lesson.

Most of her students are Gen Z and millennials, with even a few Gen X’ers. But she immediately noticed there was something different about her Gen Z students. Their dark humor made them stand out from the others.

Here is an example of the dark humor she displayed on-screen that one of her Gen Z students shared for their assignment.

insta_photos – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person

“Gen Z culture is debating if it’s milk before cereal or vice versa in class and then having that one kid come in and go ‘I put bleach before cereal’ and then dabbing as the rest of the class laughs and goes ‘same’ while your gen X teacher looks horrified.”

This set her on a quest to determine why Gen Z is always joking about ending their lives. At first, she attributed it to bad parenting, but when her own son started displaying the symptoms, she was left more confused than ever.

As part of her research, she asked many Gen Z students to tell her about their generation and explain why they found dark humor so funny.

She also asked many baby boomers whether they enjoyed high school and college, then compared the two generations’ answers.

She found that the average baby boomer recalled those periods of their youth as the best time of their lives. They couldn’t wait to grow up and generally looked forward to the future.

However, when she interviewed Gen Z’ers, they gave vastly different responses. About thirty percent of them did mention social media as a contributing factor to their mental health, but it was not at the root of all their problems.

To sum up their responses, most of them said what was wrong with the world nowadays was because they couldn’t picture a future for themselves.

They talked about school shooting drills, the economy, the ever-increasing cost of living, the destruction of the environment, and how unaffordable college tuition is.

In the third video of her series, she breaks down how Gen X parents and younger baby boomers contributed to Gen Z’s grim outlook on the future.

The older generations tend to blame Gen Z for being miserable and refuse to understand why and how they are partly responsible for the situation Gen Z is in today.

Gen X was raised by baby boomers, who typically didn’t care what they did or where they went. As a result, Gen X kids were largely ignored.

So when they had their own kids, they overcompensated and wanted to give them everything they lacked during their own childhoods: birthday parties, extracurriculars, cable TV.

Gen X gave their children the American dream. And when those kids came of age and realized the realities of life, they became overwhelmed and felt almost betrayed.

Although Gen X parents had good intentions, they must realize that the beautiful childhood they provided only made reality uglier. So extend compassion to Gen Z as they navigate a world slowly falling to ruins.