Lazy, entitled, stupid,
selfish, dumb, crazy, lost, ignorant,
spoiled, bad, sensitive, snowflake, annoying,
fucked, and on and on and on.
That's how Millennial and Gen Z-ers
say they're routinely described,
according to SUNY psychologist Karla Vermeulen,
author of the new book
"Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post 9-11."
Who can blame them for being pissed off?
One of the quotes that I use was someone saying,
"I feel like our generation has been handed a bill
"for a party we didn't get to attend."
So this is really one of the main sources of anger
at older generations, at Boomers in particular.
Younger Americans have been raised to believe
that their leaders lie about everything,
that the entire financial system existed
to bail out big banks when they crashed the economy,
that endless war is the natural state of things,
and that they were about to be blown up by terrorists
or shot during school at any moment.
I have a chapter in the book
called Lockdown Drills in Kindergarten.
They literally have had these drills
the same way that we had fire drills.
Vermeulen's book looks specifically
at people born between 1990 and 2001,
but her conclusions are broadly relevant
to folks under 40 or so.
She says their fears are mostly overhyped.
Our focus on statistically rare events
such as school shootings have jacked depression, anxiety,
and resentment through the roof.
The psychological effect of participating in these drills
for young kids and kids writing wills to their parents
and thinking they're literally gonna die.
And it's security theater,
the disproportionate attention and resources that go
towards preventing these highly, highly unlikely events
relative to the more direct mental health stressors
kids are actually dealing with.
But the biggest driver
of Generation Disaster's stress and anger, says Vermeulen,
are narratives about how climate change
is about to destroy the planet in the very near future.
The world is gonna end in 12 years
if we don't address climate change.
Whether or not you think that is exaggerated,
this is the messaging that they've been receiving
and this is definitely the biggest source
of anxiety for them.
I would say school shootings
are kind of the most acute stressor for them,
but their worries about climate change
and the future of the planet is truly existential for them.
They talk about not thinking
that they won't be able to have children
or they don't want to have children
because they don't want to leave them this planet
that they've inherited.
I think that what makes it so hard for them to deal with
is they feel like there's so little they can do about it.
Baby Boomers, who hated their own parents
and used to shout slogans like don't trust anyone over 30,
should be able to empathize
with how Millennials and Gen Z-ers are feeling.
We need to find ways
of talking more productively across generation.
Vermeulen says that the essential starting point is respect.
To the parents, I guess I would say really listen to them.
A lot of them are delightful.
They are creative.
They are thoughtful.
They are far more sophisticated than I was at their age
because they've had all of this access
to all of these resources,
everything that they now have
literally in their hand at their fingertips.
And take their concerns seriously
because they are valid in many ways.
I'll add to that.
We need to have more fact-based discussions
that take into account vast amounts
of huge social, economic, and environmental progress
that we either take for granted
or politicians and the press ignore
because it doesn't fit their agenda.
Extreme poverty has been cut from 94% to 10%
over the past two centuries,
education and literacy have skyrocketed,
racism, sexism, and homophobia have all declined,
global life expectancy continues to increase
and democracy is on the rise.
The 2018 UN Climate Report that supposedly claimed
that the world is going to end in 12 years
actually says nothing of the sort.
Policy analysts such as Scott Winship note that 70 percent
of American 30-year-olds are doing better
than their parents were at the same age.
For Generation Disaster, why are their parents
or their grandparents having these negative reactions?
Beause you don't understand them
any more than they understand you,
but you could probably try that.
Every generation fights for its place in the world
and there's no question that the same Boomers
who once sang along to Bob Dylan's
"The Times They Are a-Changin'"
are incredibly slow to exit the stage
and give anyone else a turn in the spotlight.
There's no question that Millennials and Gen Z
are facing unique problems that they didn't cause,
but that's also been true of every other generation.
We've just lost the ability to talk to each other
and to listen to views,
not lost entirely, but it is challenging,
listen to views that are in conflict with our own
and try to understand why people have these perspectives.