KIDS THESE DAYS

In touch with their emotions and extremely online—how the youngest are coming of age

by ROBERTA KATZ , SARAH OGILVIE , JANE SHAW & LINDA WOODHEAD

Gen Zers, also called postmillennials, Zoomers, or iGen-ers, are the first generation never to know the world without the internet. The oldest Gen Zers, now in their mid-20s, were born around the time the World Wide Web made its public debut in 1995. They are therefore the first cohort to have grown up only knowing the world with the endless information and infinite connectivity of the digital age. So who are they and how do they think?

All four of us work at universities, and over a conversation one afternoon we found ourselves sharing anecdotes about our experiences of postmillennial students. We had all noticed that, in recent years, incoming students were strikingly different from those from a few years before. They had a new vocabulary for talking about their identities and their places of belonging; they were hardworking but also placed an emphasis on their wellbeing and self-care, and they engaged in activism in a distinctively non-hierarchical, collaborative manner. By the end of that conversation, curious about the distinctly different ways in which postmillennials express themselves, we decided to engage in our own collaborative work. We would use the combined methods of our fields of anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology and religious studies to devise a study that would collect data, establish facts and shed light on the broader historical context to understand better just what was going on with “kids these days.”

We then immersed ourselves in the worlds of 18- to 25-year-olds through interviews and surveys in both the US and UK. We also, with the help of machine learning, created a 70m-word collection of the language used by Gen Z.

We looked at the distinctive ways of being, values and worldviews that are shared by many Gen Zers, exploring who they are and how they go about their daily lives. Gen Zers encounter the world in a radically different way from those who know what life was like before the internet. They have had to navigate the new digital world largely without the guidance of their elders, and this has led to distinctive behaviours—though ones increasingly adopted by others, a trend that was accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when so many more aspects of everyone’s lives went online.

The experience of Gen Zers is often paradoxical, even contradictory. They have more “voice” than ever before (a meme or a YouTube or TikTok video can reach millions), but they also have a sense of diminished agency “in real life” (institutions and political and economic systems seem locked, inaccessible to them, and wrongheaded). They are often optimistic about their own generation but deeply pessimistic about the problems they have inherited: climate change, police violence, racial and gender injustice, failures of the political system, the fact they have little chance of owning a home or doing better than their parents. Gen Zers navigate these paradoxes using the new—usually digital— tools that they have at hand. We have tried to observe their methods of addressing those problems and to listen with critical respect to their solutions.

We asked how Gen Zers have gone beyond navigating this new world to harnessing it to achieve a workable coherence of beliefs and values, identity and belonging. We explored the values they have forged to guide them in this new and uncharted territory, and how important those values are to maintaining the stability and security they seek. We investigated their preferences for new ways of acting when authority has seemingly become dispensable and the distinction between offline and online has become obscured. And we discussed the tensions and pressures that Gen Zers are experiencing as they move through this world in transition, along with their hopes and fears about the future.