Generation Z

Generation Z (or Gen Z for short), colloquially also known as zoomers, is the demographic cohort succeeding Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha. Typically defined as people born from 1997 to 2012. Most members of Generation Z are children of Generation X.

Quotes

• Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.
  • Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)

• What of the pandemic's impacts on the generational imbalances that had grown so intolerable in many societies by 2020? Was COVID-19 sent by Freya, the goddess of youth, to emancipate millennials and Generation Z from bearing the fiscal burden of an excessive number of elderly people? It is tempting to marvel at this ageist virus. No previous pandemic was so discriminating against the elderly and in favor of the young. But in truth, the impact of COVID-19 in terms of excess mortality will probably not be great enough to balance the intergenerational accounts. In the short run, the majority of old people will remain retired; relatively few will die prematurely―hardly any in the most elderly of countries, Japan. The young, meanwhile, will be the ones struggling to find jobs (other than Amazon) and struggling almost as much to have fun. An economy without crowds is not a "new normal." It may be more like the new anomie, to borrow Émile Durkheim's term for the sense of disconnectedness he associated with modernity. For most young people, the word "fun" is almost synonymous with "crowd." The era of distancing will be a time of depression in the psychological as well as the economic sense. The gloom will be especially deep for Generation Z, whose university social lives―half the point of college, if not more―have been wrecked. They will spend yet more time on electronic devices―perhaps an hour a day more than before the pandemic. It will not make them happier.
  • Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021), p. 382

• History is complicated and Gen Z reasoning is not. They think that they are pure, but they are really just simplistic.
  • Bill Maher, New Rule: Patriotic Privilege

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Generation Z on Wikipedia