Have We Overburdened Gen Z With Apocalyptic Fears?
My wife was talking to my 21-year-old daughter the other day and asked, ‘Are you OK? You and your friends seem a bit lost.’
My daughter replied, ‘We’re not lost. We’re just really angry.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the World’s going to end,’ my daughter said, ‘because what’s the point of anything?’
Over the last few years, I’ve become concerned about my daughter's generation – Gen Z - the Zoomers. Gen Z were born between the mid to late 1990s and the early 2010s, mostly to Generation X parents like myself. The oldest Zoomers are now 28 years old. What worries me about Gen Z is that they really do seem to see themselves as a doomed generation.
Gen Z are reporting much higher levels of depression than previous generations. “From 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40 per cent, to more than one in three students.” With suicidal ideation rising by 44% in the same period. According to Harvard pollster John De La Volpe, nearly half of Zoomers suffer from depression requiring clinical treatment. The CDC claims that suicide is Gen Zs second-leading cause of death, with a 56% increase between 2007-2017.
I’ve asked my kids where this sense of being ‘doomed’ comes from, and I’ve realized that while they see the cause as 'the state of the world' — the real root of their problem might lie in the mindset and baggage they’ve inherited from us, their parents.
Ambient Adolescent Apocalypticism
Born between the mid 1990s and the 2010s, the lives of Gen Z have been saturated with apocalypse themed films, books, games, TV and songs made by their elders.
Their top books were YA dystopias, 'The Hunger Games' and 'Divergent'. Two of their top TV shows are ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Dark’, along with the TV adaptation of their favourite Zombie game ‘The Last of Us’. Their pop icon, Billie Eilish, has songs saturated with themes of depression, suicidal ideation and apocalyptic imagery.
They’re experiencing something darker than the usual teenage angst, rebellion and sloth. Millennials too have noted that Zoomers are surprisingly depressed and hostile in comparison to the ‘optimistic, change the world’ ethos of their own generation. Ask a Zoomer troll and they’ll tell you that they hate Millennials with their ‘phony optimism’ and ‘fake do-gooder BS’. Zoomers, may also tell you that the activism of the millennial generation failed and that ‘it’s too late now - the world is doomed.’
Zoomers seem obsessed with the apocalypse, in ways that go beyond the depressive negativity of my generation. Whereas we GenXers did this in part because we grew up under the threat of nuclear holocaust in the Cold War, the causes of Zoomers’ apocalypticism seem more complex.
In Zoomer pop culture you see apocalypse, depression and the problem of ‘a meaninglessness future’ writ large. In the Zoomer hit movie ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022)’ the existential problem is repeatedly communicated: “You don’t matter, nothing matters.” This is a film that struggles with the end of the universe, nihilism, nothingness and futility as themes, and it’s been a huge iconic hit with Gen Z. It’s ‘uplifting ending’ basically says, ‘the universe is meaningless, and life is pointless - but at least we are in this hell together.’
The most popular literary genre with Zoomers in their childhoods was also YA dystopia, as they were raised on The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Selection Series. Their top romance was Fault in Our Stars, a tale of love against the odds of terminal cancer. In the other John Green novel that Zoomers adore, Looking for Alaska, the message in the story of the teenage runaway is – ‘What is the point of taking part in society or trying to do anything?’
Zoomer Phoebe Bridgers sung about the end of the world in almost affectionate tone. In her apocalyptic hit song ‘I know the End’. In it Bridgers, concludes:
“I'm not afraid to disappear
The billboard said "The End Is Near"
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here”
The song also captures a strangely comforting sense of surrender to powerlessness that comes with total defeat. Give up, accept hopelessness, live in your pyjamas for a year (as Bridgers claims she did during Covid - her skeleton jim-jams also appear in the pop video).
The most popular Gen Z TV show, Euphoria, is a festival of empty sex and regretted hedonism, hard-drugs and self-loathing. Reviewers openly said the series expressed the sense of aimlessness and futility at the heart of Generation Z.
Sally Rooney’s books too are exploring the depression that’s sweeping through the late millennials and Generation Z but are themselves seen as ‘depressing’.
It’s like Zoomer culture is crying out, ‘we’re doomed and harming ourselves, help us!’
Why So Down, Zoomer?
What could be the systemic cause of such widespread doom-mindset and interior retreat?
As Sarah Jaquette Ray, a teacher of environmental studies, said in a 2020 article, Generation Z are ‘The Climate Generation’, and they have been ‘traumatised’ by their awareness of the issue. ‘They speak of an apocalypse on the horizon... Some students become so overwhelmed with despair and grief that they shut down.…Their sense of powerlessness, whether real or imagined, is at the root of their despair.’
Zoomer icon Greta Thunberg expresses despair and rage rather than offering solutions. Her famed U.N. speech stated, “Around the year 2030… we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.” She has repeatedly said, ‘it is already too late.’
Whether it is or not in climate science terms, such sentiments may have, against better intentions, contributed to the depressive fatalism of her generation. When you try to scare people into action the psychological mechanism that is activated is the The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis - a neuroendocrine system that regulates the body's stress response. This results in “Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn”. In activist terms only fight and fawn are useful; what we seem to have in Generation Z once subjected to future-terror is mostly Flight (run away) or Freeze (like a rabbit in the headlights). In this sense some of the climate awareness activism of the last five years may have backfired on Gen Z, leading them not to activism but to a sense of powerlessness. Against the better intentions of Thunberg’s Generation X activist parents, such terrifying predictions may have contributed to the depressive fatalism of Greta's generation. “Learned helplessness” is a direct cause of depression.
Zoomer expressions include, ‘everything we do just makes global warming worse’ and ‘there’s too many people in the world anyway’. There is also, ‘we should never even have been born.’
It’s not just climate change that Zoomers feel defeated by. They were also the first generation of youths to live through a global pandemic since 1918-19. A report on Stress in America found that “Half of young Generation Z teens have said that the pandemic has affected their outlook on their future, with a similar number saying that it’s made their futures seem downright ‘impossible.”
Zoomers had their teenage and university years and interrupted by Covid lockdowns and this has actually modified their personalities. A study from Florida Uni found that “Younger adults became moodier and more prone to stress, less co-operative and trusting, and less restrained and responsible”. Less restrained and responsible means substance abuse and failure to ‘care for the self.’
The negative predictions pile up. Futurologists tell Gen Z that by 2040, 30-40% of their jobs will be replaced by robots and AI, and adding to their problems, Zoomers are also addicted to dopamine hits from compulsive use of smartphones, social media and pornography, and these have been proven to cause anxiety and depression.
Being the first generation to have been raised with open access to free hardcore porn online has been like an unacknowledged mass human experiment. An alarming number of Zoomers, including pop icon Billy Eilish, report having been addicted to porn since childhood. Watching porn from the age of 11, ‘really destroyed my brain’ said Eilish. Her lyrics and imagery is saturated with depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation, from weeping black tears in a pop video to driving into the sea in a suicide pact in another, to being burdened by vast tarred angel wings as the world burns.
But while phones and the political apocalypse activism they were raised into might be working together to cause aimlessness, it may also be a product of a more foundational emotional destabilization. Generation Z’s obsession with the End of the World, may be a psychological retreat from an adult world that seems to much to deal with. The apocalypse is fantasized about as a psychological regression, a desire to surrender and be totally cared for in a ruined world; a refusal to ever begin ‘adulting.’
This ties in with the trend within Generation Z to ‘identify as’ mentally ill, with school yard and TikTok trends that encourage the young to believe they have serious mental disorders.
Whether we’re headed for eco or nuclear or techno-apocalypse we cannot know for sure, but as the studies of mental health in Gen Z show, living in the ‘doomed’ mindset hot-houses mental illnesses.
There are some chicken and egg issues here – what comes first - hopelessness or depression? Which is cause and which effect?
People with depression often seek out fatalistic world views and End of the World fantasies to express how they feel, but also, this sense of ‘we’re all doomed’ becomes an echo chamber that only traps them further. This seems to be the hopelessness hall-of-mirrors that the Zoomers are inhabiting right now, as they create and consume so much culture about how doomed they feel.
Even if we are heading towards eco, techno or nuclear apocalypse, having an entire generation feel hopeless, demotivated and perversely attracted to the End of the World, is not helping anyone or anything, least of all the planet.
Then there is withdrawal. It’s all doomed, the logic goes, so I am justified in withdrawing from all conflict and challenges. I will retreat and declare myself unfit for this life. Why try to do or be anything when the world is ending? In Japan the “hikikomori” are a phenomenon in young people withdraw from society and become recluses in their homes. In November 2022, a government study estimated that nearly 1.5 million young people in Japan were living hermitic lives, locking themselves into their homes.
The condition is gradually spreading to most digitally connected countries globally, including China, India, Brazil, and European countries.
Generation Z are in danger of giving-up before they even start out on life.
What Gen X Did Wrong and What We Can Do Now?
In addition to the doom-laden media and social media that we, their parents, subjected them to, it’s possible that Gen Z have been overloaded by unresolved anxieties we passed onto them, and there is some evidence that they are terrified of phenomenon that don’t even exist within their time.
One of the impending apocalypses that Generation Z are anxious about is ‘population explosion.’ ‘I don’t ever want to have kids,’ Zoomers say, ‘overpopulation is killing the planet.’
But yet, the West has actually been in population decline for the last two decades, and the entire world population is predicted to stop growing completely by the end of this century. This has even been expounded by the Club of Rome who started the population panic in the first place after WW2. This is definitely a retro-anxiety that the Zoomers inherited from their Gen X parents and Boomer elders, who grew up with the best-selling book ‘The Population Bomb’ in the 1970s and the widespread, viral, social anxiety round it. Its predictions of a total collapse of civilisation due to population explosion in the 21st century have now been widely debunked as unscientific scare-mongering.
Today, Zoomers shouldn’t be worrying about overpopulation, but they are. They should be worrying about societal damage from depopulation, but they aren’t. Not yet, anyway.
Our generation, born 1965-1980, was also traumatized by the fear of nuclear annihilation in the last decade of the Cold War. Concepts like ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ and ‘Nuclear Winter’ were fed to us along with our school milk. Many of us Gen Xers went through nuclear preparedness drills, hiding under tables with our teachers as nuclear warning sirens blared.
As a result of living under this ambient fear our generation grew up to be — like Gen Z is today — anxious of the future and more depressed and pessimistic than the previous generation, the Baby Boomers. To Boomers, Generation X seemed to be ‘negative’, ‘demotivated’, ‘slackers’; our music and films were seen as dark and self-destructive. Back in the 1990s, we too slouched around moaning, 'everything's ruined, what's the point?' Many of our cultural icons suffered from mental illness and addiction; too many succumbed to fatal substance abuse and suicide. Consider Bennington, Cobain, Winehouse, Flint, Seymour Hoffman, McQueen. In 2019, our generation was in fact reported as the generation ‘most likely to die by suicide or drug poisoning.”
It’s possible that we Generation X parents may have inadvertently passed our unresolved traumas onto our own Gen Z kids, through the catastrophizing culture we created.
Even if our worst fears about, nuclear war, climate change or population explosion seemed once well founded, even if we spread these fears to raise awareness, we may have gone beyond the tipping point in communicating these terrors to our Gen Z kids.
When young people are scared, they can go into shut-down. When they see problems as too huge to mend, they can lose all sense of agency and hope and enter “learned helplessness”. Some of that ‘laziness’ that people report about Gen Z is no doubt a state of psychological withdrawal from being overburdened with anxiety.
We’ve overburdened our Generation Z kids by piling our own historical baggage onto their shoulders, on top of their own adolescent and epochal worries.
For the sake of this generation, we might have start unburdening our children of their fears about living. We could remove a good 50% of the ambient apocalyptic anxieties that they’re carrying around, and teach them a little skepticism when it comes to this idea that a doomed future, in fact any future, is fated. We could also teach them some of the resilience that we developed over the last three decades; the courage that led us to have kids in the first place. We might try to instil hope that whatever the future is, we two generations can help each other cope.
Over and above loving care, counselling and remedies, is also the project of getting on with some purposeful activity, setting some short term and achievable goals. Starting out with small actions and discovering that your actions are not meaningless and futile, but have actual outcomes. If the world is going to end in thirty years, you might need a roof over your head till then.
Painting, caring for a dog, tending a plant. Little goals and processes of care that build up over time. Here, taking a leaf out of the book of real 100% genuine and committed apocalypticists - ‘Prepper mindset’ can help.
The Prepper is the person who prepares for disasters in advance, whether this disaster be pandemic, economic crash, war or famine. Of course some preppers are nutcase survivalists who stash years worth of food in bunkers and practice with Ak47s for the coming alien invasion, but there are also an increasing number of sensible emergency preppers, families and teenagers and even though they believe the end is nigh, they report high instances of purposefulness and even happiness.
Here I’m going to propose something a little radical:
Prepper mindset might be of help to the Zoomer generation, and the practice of disaster prepping might be a practical way out of the echo chamber of teenage hopelessness and depression.
Part of the problem we face with the super-smart and skeptical Zoomers is that trying to get them to ‘cheer up’ and ‘be more positive’ just isn’t working. They were fed ‘self-esteem’ since birth, and for them, feeling good about yourself, is just futile and selfish since the world is ending anyway. Zoomers are not going to take ‘cheer up, believe in yourself’ from anyone.
So, paradoxically, why not admit that their fears may not be entirely wrong. Yes, we may be headed for eco/nuclear/techno cataclysm, but its better for our mental health to accept that fear and to then try to do something about it, now.
I’m not talking here about activism, but something much smaller and more personal and useful. Growing your own food, getting fitter, extending your real-life local network, working out what you would do if the water supply got cut off, making emergency plans for a food shortage, farming, training.
This is not saving the planet, but it might help a few individuals in this generation save themselves from debilitating helplessness. Understanding that small acts have actual consequences can be a way to fight hopelessness and to keep ones personal apocalypse at bay.
‘What’s the point of anything?’ they say, ‘the world is going to end anyway.’
‘OK,’ you can reply, ‘we don’t know that for sure, but if it is true, we have to get out of analysis-paralysis and start preparing for it.’
The worst may never happen, but you’ll have set yourself and your Gen Z kid, a goal and a constructive daily routine, and through that you, as a by-product of constructive effort, can beat disillusionment and depression. Their feared end of the world may never come, but you and your Gen Z teen or twenty-something might just build a bunker or health diet or your own self-sustaining garden. Literally or metaphorically, you might create something together that might help you both survive the worst thing of all - and that is having nothing to live for.
This is an expanded version of article first appeared in Psychology Today.