In Quillette, Freya India considers the plight many of her cohort find themselves in during the ongoing efforts to combat the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus (aka Covid-19):
“Gen Z” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
My generation is miserable. Gen Z, those of us born after 1997, are the saddest, loneliest, and most mentally fragile age group to date, cursed with rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide. How can that be? How can a generation with everything feel so desperately unhappy? By almost every metric, human life is dramatically better today than it ever has been. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from around 90 percent in 1820 to just 10 percent in 2015, while rates of illiteracy, mortality, and battle deaths are also in rapid decline. For the most part, Gen Z are heirs to an immense fortune: a utopian world of instant gratification and technological dynamism. In theory, this should be the age of happiness.
And yet, misery abounds. In the United States, 54 percent of Gen Z report anxiety and nervousness, according to researchers at the American Psychological Association. This is compared with only 40 percent of millennials and a national average of 34 percent. It isn’t just a case of self-report bias either, since the suicide rate for Americans aged between 15 and 24 has risen by over 51 percent in the last decade. For Gen Z women in particular, suicide rates have risen a staggering 87 percent since 2007. In my home country of the UK, one in four girls is clinically depressed by the time they are 14.
There’s no shortage of articles trying to make sense of the mental health epidemic at a time of such global prosperity. Teens and pre-teens today, we’re told, are simply interred beneath the weight of political issues like climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, as well as fatigued by job stress, exam burnout, and the attainment of unrealistic social media standards. The antidote, many suggest, lies in practicing better “self-care,” from daily gratitude journaling to adopting a 38-step skincare routine. And it’s a popular remedy. Since the pandemic began, online searches for “self-care” have risen 250 percent, with schools, universities, and employers turning to compulsory wellness programmes like mindfulness training and meditation sessions to improve mental health.
But, I suspect the problem is more nuanced than this. I don’t doubt that Gen Z is under a lot of strain, but I also think our plight is unique. For the first time in history, much of our misery stems not from too much suffering, but from not suffering enough. Gen Z does face real problems. I have certainly felt beleaguered by the pressures of social media, an oversaturated job market and the impact of coronavirus restrictions on my education. On top of that, there’s the difficulty of simply trying to exist as a fallible human in a political climate which demands infallibility, where nothing feels light-hearted anymore, and everything we say or do in our youth is stained onto the Internet for all time.
So, pressure is no doubt part of it. But previous generations faced egregiously difficult times: world wars, pandemics, economic crises, political rebellions, totalitarian regimes, and conditions of extreme poverty. Not only that, but today there are a wider range of mental health services available than ever before, and Gen Z are more likely than any other generation to seek treatment. So, for our rates of mental illness and suicide to be so high in a time of relative peace, there must exist a more convincing explanation than simply the asperities of life.
What lurks over my generation is not just a sense of misery, but meaninglessness. We exist in a state of lethargy and unfulfillment, tormented not by the tragedy of it all, but the futility. This is a point most articles and public figures today are less willing to discuss. But, to examine this possibility isn’t to say that Gen Z never struggle — but to suggest that at least some of us are caught in a rut of boredom, not burnout.
