Is Gen Z “utterly screwed”?

Gen Z was born too late.

By the 2020s, the boomers had already bought up all the houses, while the millennials had commandeered the good careers. Zoomers have, therefore, been condemned to hovels in irradiated outlying districts and dead-end internships where they train the AI that will replace them.

What piddling wages the zoomer ekes out goes to their landlord and alma mater. What hopes for the future they momentarily summon gets incinerated by thoughts of global warming. The generation is, in a word, “screwed.” And it is responding to its dispossession in all the usual ways: by sinking into despair, falling prey to porn addiction, and developing a fondness for Adolf Hitler.

If you’ve ever logged onto TikTok, then you’re probably acquainted with most of this story. Zoomers have been lamenting their generation’s plight for almost as long as millennials have been whining about our own. But my caricature of Gen Z doomerism does feature one slightly novel idea: Zoomers are the generational equivalent of the Weimar Republic, propelled towards Nazism by economic instability.

That notion garnered attention last week, when the conservative blogger Rod Dreher published a dispatch from his recent trip to DC. Dreher came away with the impression that “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Republican Party’s Zoomer staffers were fans of Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi influencer.

Asked to explain the antisemitic sympathies of his colleagues, one zoomer conservative told Dreher that the root cause was largely economic. His generation “is so utterly screwed.” They lack “good career prospects,” will “never be able to buy a home,” and “are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out.” As a result, they want to “tear everything down” (beginning, it seems, with the Jews).

This analysis has some obvious flaws. For one, young conservatives in DC tend to have excellent career prospects. Right-wing institutions suffer from a perpetual shortage of college graduates idealistic enough to forgo jobs in business, yet reactionary enough to support Trump’s GOP. For another, it seems rather odd to respond to high housing costs or onerous student debts by thinking to yourself, “Huh, I guess the Holocaust was actually a good thing.”

Nevertheless, Dreher’s anecdote underscores how pervasive — and potentially hazardous — Gen Z’s economic pessimism has become. It’s therefore worth noting that this gloom isn’t entirely justified. In material terms, zoomers are not actually “screwed” — or at least, they haven’t been screwed just yet.

Gen Z’s Wehrmacht enthusiasts aren’t alone in thinking that their generation has drawn the short straw. Relative to their predecessors, zoomers consistently express a more negative impression of their economy, labor market, jobs, and financial opportunities. And Americans of all ages seem to agree that young people are getting a raw deal. In a 2022 Pew Research survey, 72 percent said that children today would end up being “worse off financially” than their parents.

These attitudes are understandable and partly reflect genuine economic problems. But they’re also a bit detached from Gen Z’s actual economic experience. By most metrics, zoomers are doing better materially than past generations were at the same age.

Take annual income. According to an analysis from the US Federal Reserve, the median 25-year-old zoomer made over $40,000 a year in 2022, after inflation, taxes, and transfers are taken into account. That is 50 percent more than the typical boomer earned at the same age.

Wealth data tells a similar story. As of 2023, Americans born between 1990 and 1999 — in other words, young millennials and older zoomers — had a median net worth that was 39 percent higher (in inflation-adjusted terms) than previous generations boasted at the same age.

Likewise, the median wealth of Americans under 35 in 2022 was the highest on record.

Zoomers have also enjoyed an unusually favorable job market. As of this June, the unemployment rate among Americans 16 to 27 was the lowest in at least half a century.

This is not to deny that Gen Z has encountered some serious economic challenges. America is mired in a severe housing shortage. As a result, it is much harder for a 25-year-old zoomer to afford a home than it was for boomers at the same age — at least, if the former lacks family money. Nationwide, 58.6 percent of Gen Z adults were rent-burdened in 2022. Zoomers trying to get a foothold in cities rich with economic opportunity — such as New York or San Francisco — face especially onerous housing costs.

Further, zoomers who attended college have had to pay more than twice as much tuition as boomers did, in inflation-adjusted terms. This has forced much of Gen Z to amass large student loan debts.

This is not inevitable. Public policy can and should reduce the cost of housing and higher education.

Nevertheless, Gen Z as a whole is still in better economic shape than its predecessors, as its high incomes offset its peculiar burdens. According to an analysis from the Economist, Americans under 25 spent 43 percent of their post-tax income on housing and education in 2022 — which was slightly below the average for that age group between 1989 and 2019.

All this raises the question: If zoomers are doing unusually well economically, why do so many believe the opposite?

One answer is that they are young. Zoomers who lack a fetish for Federal Reserve data aren’t comparing their lot to that of millennials in 2012 or boomers in 1980. They’re looking at how their generation is doing compared to others today. And while some 23-year-olds have trust funds or tech startups, most are much poorer than the typical older American.

Meanwhile, some of Gen Z’s angst is likely rooted in rational fears about its economic future. The oldest zoomers have barely started their careers, while much of the generation has yet to enter the labor force. Thus, what really matters for their life prospects is not how they’re currently faring economically, but how they will fare over the next five decades.

And artificial intelligence gives Gen Z some cause for doubting its prospects. AI is already adept at many of the tasks typically entrusted to junior staffers at white-collar businesses; it can summarize case files for law firms, assemble spreadsheets for banks, prepare meeting briefs for consultancies, etc.

And companies have started to realize this. In fields heavily exposed to AI, hiring for entry-level roles appears to be slowing. And although zoomers still enjoy a lower unemployment rate than their predecessors, the share of recent college grads without jobs has ticked up since the rollout of ChatGPT (although, this development could also be attributed to the Federal Reserve’s nearly simultaneous decision to raise interest rates).

AI’s long-term impact on the labor market is far from certain. But it does seem likely to saw off the bottom of career ladders before it comes for the top. And if robots do replace America’s interns, then Gen Z’s present sense of its singular deprivation could end up looking prescient. The automation of junior-level roles would be liable to swell salaries and 401k returns for millennials and boomers in senior positions while eroding the rising generation’s prospects for career advancement and wealth building.

And zoomers do seem to be worried about AI. In one recent survey, nearly one in five Gen Z workers said that they were “very concerned” that artificial intelligence would take their jobs in the next two years.

This said, I don’t think Gen Z’s economic pessimism is entirely attributable to anxieties about AI or the disadvantages inherent to being young. After all, in both surveys and viral videos, zoomers don’t merely express alarm about their future economic prospects but also about their present ones. Further, most surely understand that younger people typically start out with less wealth and more undesirable gigs than older workers hold.

So, I suspect zoomers’ economic doomerism isn’t entirely attributable to objective conditions but also to forces that negatively bias their perceptions of those conditions.

Human beings do not evaluate our economic circumstances by timeless or absolute criteria. No American wakes up every morning ecstatic at the fact that they enjoy radically higher living standards than virtually all people in history. Rather, we tend to judge our prosperity in relative terms: Are we doing better or worse than our peers?

Thus, one hazard of modern media is that it exponentially expands our “peer” group. Today, people aren’t just measuring their economic well-being against that of their neighbors or family members. They’re also comparing their living standards and job prospects against those of influencers. In a context of steep economic inequality, these upward social comparisons are liable to make many middle-class zoomers feel bereft.

Indeed, a 2023 study suggested that social media use tends to lower teens’ sense of subjective well-being, in part by promoting the impression that others are “better off” than themselves.

Further, social media also encourages negativity. Humans are more easily captivated by negative information than the positive kind. We’re therefore more likely to engage with posts telling us that our generation is “utterly screwed” than ones saying “actually, if you consult the Survey of Consumer Finances, you’ll see that your birth cohort has a relatively high inflation-adjusted income.” This tendency has been empirically verified. One study suggests that social media users are nearly twice as likely to share negative news stories than they are to disseminate positive ones.

Finally, although zoomers aren’t exceptionally troubled by economic metrics, they are by some social ones. Relative to past generations, zoomers spend less time socializing with friends, have less sex, and are less likely to live with a romantic partner. They also report higher levels of loneliness. Such social isolation could darken zoomers’ perceptions of all aspects of their lives, including their economic circumstances.

In sum, zoomers aren’t doing worse economically than past generations; they’re just more likely to be sexless, alone, status-anxious, perpetually doomscrolling, and — eventually — condemned to permanent unemployment by superintelligent robots.

It’s conceivable that these conditions partly explain antisemitism’s popularity among young Republican staffers. Perhaps, when you read too many alarmist articles about AI — while having too little sex — you’re inevitably overcome by the urge to google how many Jews work at the Federal Reserve.

But, I suspect the causes of the young right’s neo-Nazi problem are more complex.