A Personal Perspective: Zoomers’ apocalyptic anxieties.
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 (also called 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 26 years old. What worries me about Gen Z is that they seem to see themselves as a doomed generation.
Gen Z are reporting much higher levels of depression than previous generations. 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 oldest Gen Zs are now 26. Their lives 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’, while they play the Zombie game ‘The Last of Us’. Their musical icon, Billie Eilish, has songs saturated with themes of depression, suicidal ideation and apocalyptic imagery. In ‘All the Good Girls Go To Hell,’ she’s a fallen angel in a burning world.
In the Zoomer hit movie ‘Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (2022)’ a black hole is destroying the universe as the characters debate the meaninglessness of life, while one of the most popular Gen Z TV shows, Euphoria, delves deep into nihilism.
In ‘I know the End’ pop star Phoebe Bridgers has sung about the end-of-the-world in almost affectionate terms.
Zoomer culture seems caught in a feedback loop of fatalistic feelings of doom.
Why So Down, Zoomer?
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.’
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