Gen Z young people, especially men, have their parents deeply concerned because they are not having sex or partying the way young people used to. This may be the first time in history that an older generation has screamed at their kids to turn that damn music up.
Gen X Parent, Gen Z Kid
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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“The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village. I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand years’ life. The change came late to our Cotswold valley, didn’t really show itself til the late 1920s; I was twelve by then, but during that handful of years I witnessed the whole thing change.” — “Cider With Rosie,” Laurie Lee.
With a smartphone, the world comes to you. Go out and meet people? With what money? Go somewhere? Where? The mall went out of business thanks to Amazon. And with the phones, we can’t really “get away.” We’re always a text message away. It is quite possible that a lot of the young people have “normalized” their depression (and who can blame them) into a new status quo. Almost like someone with bad knees simply learns to live with the low level of pain.
Gen X did something similar, back in the day. And we were there too, just like Laurie Lee, to witness the whole thing change. And many of us are still here now to grimly witness the reckoning that’s approaching. Lee was talking about a level of modernization that would seem hysterically twee to us now, a hundred years later. AI? It’s a horror movie written by Karl Marx and directed by John Maynard Keynes (with a creative consultant credit to Thorstein Veblen.)
I’ve seen the tech bros. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos? None of these people has ever exhibited anything even remotely akin to genuine compassion for other people’s plights. To expect any of them to institute safeguards to preserve jobs is absolutely ridiculous. They don’t care if the entire system derails. They will survive almost any upheaval.