2 weeks Ago By Sophie Butcher
If you were to read the headlines about my generation – Generation Z – you would think we’re a right bunch of boring bastards. Our uptight ways are apparently responsible for killing off everything from shopping to casual sex to a good old-fashioned office romance. We’re all shirking from home – that is if we’re working at all – and you definitely won’t catch us at the pub after work.
As you may be able to tell from my sardonic tone, I have never felt like most of these stereotypes apply to me – or most of my friends for that matter. For a while I wondered if there was something unique to me and my circle. I work in an industry where work from home culture didn’t take root as strongly as others.
I pay a lot of money to live in the same city as my workplace which also happens to have world-class nightlife.Yet on any technical measure, I am firmly Gen Z. A commonly invoked rule of thumb to determine if you’re a millennial or Gen Z is if you can remember the 9/11 attacks happening – I’d have been 18 months old so I most definitely can’t.
Almost everyone in my year at school had a smartphone when starting secondary school. And I once horrified some millennial colleagues by saying that using GIFs on Slack was “cheugy”.if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }But still, when speaking to younger members of my generation it feels, as succinctly put by one friend, “like I’m talking to a TikTok”.
At a recent Taylor Swift club night I attended (don’t judge me, please), I saw lots of younger attendees constantly filming meticulous TikTok dance routines – instead of letting loose (you know, the point of clubbing...
). I also don’t recall seeing a queue for the bar the entire night.#color-context-related-article-3578879 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square ZING TSJENG Boomers are actually just as lazy as Gen ZRead MoreBut last week, the penny finally dropped as to why I felt like this.
A survey by the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies found that American Gen Z voters aged 21 and younger lean Republican by 11.7 percentage points; whilst older Gen Z (those aged 22 to 29) vote Democrat by 6.4 points.
Generations have historically been thought of as having distinct political identities, but this data shows a dramatic split amongst the youngest generation of voters. Similarly, in the UK, among 16- to 17-year-olds, Reform was the second most popular party – among the 18-24 group who could actually vote, it was the fourth most popular. Thirty-five per cent of 16- to 17-year-old boys would have voted for Reform in the last election if they could – three times the proportion of 18- to 24-year-old men who voted Reform.
Why are Gen Z so divided?Maybe we’ve been using the wrong historic event to distinguish the generations. This political split with the Yale data correlates almost perfectly with when a voter would’ve graduated high school. Those aged 22-29 were 17 or older when Covid hit, and had largely finished with school.
if(window.adverts) { window.adverts.
addToArray({"pos": "mpu_mobile_l1"}); }if(window.adverts) { window.adverts.
addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }Those 21 and under, however, didn’t finish school until after the end of widespread Covid restrictions. This means many of their key social milestones (house parties, prom, going to the pub) were delayed or simply didn’t happen. It’s a tired cliché to blame “those damn phones” for younger generations’ exposure to right-wing content online and subsequent adoption of these views.
But surely it’s in many ways logical that this would follow from them losing formative years of their education and social development.As an older Gen Z, I also lost some of the best years of my life. Covid was declared a pandemic on my 20th birthday and the final restrictions didn’t lift until two weeks before I handed in my last uni assignment.
However, I hadn’t lost the key rites of passage transitioning from teenage-dom to adulthood in the same way as younger Gen Z did.Considering it was quite literally illegal to party for a large chunk of their teenage years, it is unsurprising younger Gen Z are reluctant to embrace drinking culture – even now. I had been inducted into that world with big life occasions like freshers’ week and 18th birthday parties years before the pandemic.
So, when pubs and clubs reopened after lockdown, it was simply back to business as usual.#color-context-related-article-3617059 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square SOPHIE BUTCHER I finally joined the exclusive dating app Raya - and learned its real purposeRead MoreFor younger Gen Z, I can’t imagine how alien it would be been to experience a sticky-floored nightclub or dingy pub for the first time as anything other than an impressionable 18-year-old with a heady dose of pack mentality and peer pressure. And speaking to younger friends still at university, the general silliness of this time seems to have been lost to self care, “grindset” and “grandma eras”.
Similarly, my political opinions were formed in an entirely different era to younger Gen Zs, as movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter took over social media. I watched on in a sixth form classroom horrified as Hilary Clinton lost to Donald Trump – and sat my final GCSE exam minutes after David Cameron resigned in light of the UK voting to leave the EU.As such, I am appalled by the rise of Andrew Tate and other “red-pill influencers”.
It is lazy to assume all younger Gen Z hold extreme misogynistic views. But anecdotally from younger friends, the world “feminist” is used a pejorative – and attitudes towards casual sex in particular have rowed back.This is quite a sharp demarcation between my politics – which I’ll admit older generations would probably describe as “a bit woke” – and those only three or four years younger than me, which should be a wake-up call.
Sweeping generalisations about Gen Z are contributing to how disillusioned many of our generation feel – regardless of which side of the Covid split we’re on. We need to stop dismissing an entire generation as prudish, work-shy and antisocial if we’re to get to the root of why the youngest Gen Z have embraced reactionary right-wing politics in a way their immediate predecessors have not..
