Emily Chan
“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.
