@Party Hat Wurmple isn't wrong. The fact that you're all giving him top hats is indicative of the state of this generation more than any of the doomposts in this thread.
I've certainly had moments of discontent with the world I was born into, but good Lord, some of my fellow zoomers talk about Getting By Despite The Awful Fucked Up Hand I Was Dealt as if we're being forced to live in caves and eat gruel. Everyone is gripped by this expectation that everything will eventually turn to shit (if it hasn't already!), yet their master plan for dealing with this
apparently inevitable scenario is to shrug their shoulders, say "well shucks, at least it wasn't MY fault!", and then live out the rest of their days playing Elden Ring in a one-bedroom Airbnb until the Sun explodes. It's a brand of pessimism that seems almost universal even among the more outwardly "happy" Gen Zers and it's not only pathetic, but also deeply insidious.
PSA FOR MY ZOOMER CONTEMPORARIES:
If you approach life with the anticipation of a negative outcome, that will inevitably colour your decision-making whether you intend it to or not, because you train yourself to stop caring about if things will work out in the end. It doesn't matter how bad you think things are. The healthy response to failure is not, in fact, "whatever, it's out of my hands now"; in the biz, that's called an
external locus of control, and it will melt away your self-esteem and reduce you to an ineffectual wimp. At risk of sounding like a cringe ass boomer, I truly genuinely think that this mindset is behind a majority of our issues and is far more relevant to the grievances voiced in this thread than the housing crisis or the loss of shopping malls or anything of the sort.
The questions always centre around similar themes: why should I bother talking to people when everyone is
so boring? Why should I attend my classes in person when everyone else is taking them online? Why should I engage in my hobbies/interests when everything is WOKE and full of ICKY TROONS now?
...hang on, where have all the people like ME gone? How are people consistently failing to put two and two together and realise that
they're contributing to the cycle of dispassion that seems to affect them so severely? You aren't doing yourself a favour when you detach yourself from your own personal outcomes and pretend to be Enlightened or above it all; you're merely replacing the peaks and troughs of happiness and disappointment with the steady hum of indifference.
I've started actively calling out this attitude in people when it comes up (oh BOY does it come up), and most every time I'm met with the same response -- a sour grimace like I've just asked them to cut off a limb, along with some excuse to the effect of "but Doktor... the Cards... they're stacked against us". MY FRIEND. YOU DO NOT LIVE IN A DYSTOPIAN Y/A NOVEL; YOUR NAME IS BRAYDEN OR SOME SHIT AND YOU JUST GOT FINISHED WATCHING TWELVE VIDEO ESSAYS ON RADIOHEAD. "I can't afford rent right now" and "It's kind of hard to make friends" are definitely real issues that I sympathise with, but they're not indicative of some insurmountably terrible period in history, and by pre-emptively giving up in a feeble attempt to own The Capitalist Machine or Globohomo or Da Jooz or whatever, you feed into the spiral of negativity that put you here in the first place.
Are our lives really
that much worse than those of our parents and grandparents? Our circumstances change, but at our core, we're the same humans who existed thirty, fifty, a thousand years ago. Your people are out there, and just like you, they're sitting alone in their pod wondering where you are. None of this will change until a certain amount of us choose to seize control of our own lives and
put our whole selves into achieving the things we want. Why are you struggling to meet people you connect with? Is it because those eeevil Gen Xers and their devious social media contraptions have erased our capacity for genuine human-to-human interaction? No, that can't be true; there are still people out there making lasting real-life friendships, though perhaps less often than before.
The game has become harder but it is STILL YOUR FAULT IF YOU LOSE. Remember this. The onus is on
you to put yourself out there and set reasonable standards, just as it was for your parents, and their parents before them.
To give a personal example: I maintain regular contact with just about everyone I've met since high school, and once or twice a week I take it upon myself to organise an in-person meetup between myself and at least a couple of others. Let me tell you it is like HERDING CATS. Some of these people barely have the self-determination to make themselves breakfast in the morning. Yet, as much as I despise being the designated organiser for every group event, I pester them into dragging their sorry arses outside, because I enjoy their company -- and guess what? I've now earned myself a reputation as the Guy With Lots Of Friends in my circle, not because I'm irresistibly charming, but because I choose to assume responsibility for my own interpersonal relationships instead of blaming external factors and doing nothing. Am I just lucky? Considering that four years ago I was an asocial wreck, I doubt it.
When you're in the control mindset, failure will suck. It's *supposed* to suck. But it happens to everybody. Yes, we're under a lot of financial stress, and forming meaningful relationships is harder than it once was, and we have less opportunities overall than those before us; still, we're one of the luckiest, most fulfilled generations in human history, and we have much to be grateful for. Instead of blaming The Powers That Be when you fall upon hard times, try "I'm in a bad situation, my own actions led me here, and I have the ability to change it". It's not always applicable, but WOW is it empowering, and if we're going to turn this ship around, we have to be confident in ourselves more than anything.
(tl;dr: gen z is not a generation of downtrodden realists making do with what little we've been given -- we're the quitters of the world, the joyless pricks who, upon being served a slightly narrower piece of the metaphorical pie, tossed it away to go sulk in a corner because YOU GUYS HAD MORE PIE THAN ME. but also pies are LAME and were invented by boomers so i don't even care actually lmao. get a grip pls.)
