Emily Chan
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.
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