I was reminded of the TikTok that’s inspired this essay by a drunken conversation I had with an old college friend of mine and his mother. Ma Dukes is a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. from India and was perhaps not so much lamenting, but expressing bewilderment, at the “state of the kids these days,” and the fact that it seems no one really wants to work or build a career for themselves.

This wasn’t your typical finger-wagging blame game that you get from Boomers talking about Gen Z. She was genuinely curious, and was surprisingly receptive to the answer I gave her:

Zoomers have a great work ethic; they just don’t see the point in applying it the way you and I did.

We’ve come a long way, in the wrong direction, since the golden age of capitalism. Pensions, union protections, wage growth, lifetime employment, affordable education, and the American Dream have given way to a second Gilded Age where workers are treated as fungible commodities. I gave Ma the now-famous example of the software engineer who, after an unheard-of SIXTEEN YEARS at Google, was not only laid off, not only laid off by email, but laid off by an automated email after having access to his computer cut off.

The upside for that guy, though, is that nearly 2 decades at Google (plus a severance) probably left him fairly well-off financially. But imagine being subject to that kind of caprice on the salary of a schoolteacher, nurse, EMT, factory worker, mechanic, or, God help you, a worker in the gig economy. Amazon workers are famously hired and fired by algorithms now.

Educating your way into higher income brackets comes with the hazard of lifelong debt slavery. And even if you avoid that by (e.g. getting certified in the right trade in the right place at the right time), the keystone of the American dream — homeownership — has turned into a casino for various classes of speculators, from serial AirBnb hosts looking to become unregulated hotel magnates to corporations gobbling up clusters of houses on spec and leaving them empty just to inflate their value on their balance sheets.

All of the above, meanwhile, is happening against a backdrop of near-constant social and political chaos. The financial crash, the real estate crash, 9/11, the Great Recession, the pandemic, the rise of the Alt-Right, the anxious wet-dream of social media, ubiquitous misinformation, the resurgence of land wars in Europe, climate change, rolling back of women’s rights, etc… as non-Zoomers, we Xers, Xennials, Millennials, and Boomers need to remember:

THIS PERVASIVE ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY AND SOCIOPOLITICAL CHAOS IS ALL GEN Z HAS EVER KNOWN.

The rest of us can at least vaguely recall the years between the Powell Memo and 9/11. Those years and the years preceding it weren’t perfect — Vietnam, stagflation, etc. — but as my mother said about the Civil Rights movement, “there’s a reason we wanted access to what [White people] had, and there’s a reason they wanted to keep us out.”

My early childhood came in the wake of Vietnam, and seemed to indicate that capitalism had truly triumphed. The Berlin Wall and Soviet Union fell, and the ladder to the American Dream seemed accessible to more people than ever before. But this was also the time when, as I explained in the video, Reaganism and Welchism started loosening the lug nuts on the wheels of the social contract. Those wheels fell off when I was in college, but I was spared mostly by coincidence: I’d majored in computer science and could’ve just been a casualty of the recently-exploded dot com bubble. Instead, I was living in the D.C. area in the wake of 9/11; Federal contractors were hiring engineers sight unseen. I graduated from an affordable public university in 7 semesters with 12 months of paid internships under my belt, $5–6K in student loans, and a job paying $60K/year with full benefits… 20 years ago.

I’d spent my formative years seeing the economy and society appearing to, for the most part, function well. Gen Z didn’t get any of this.

Instead, as one person put it, “Gen Z was born on 9/11, and then nothing ever got better.” A switch flipped in the U.S. economy. We weren’t going to create wealth by producing goods and services anymore. Instead, the strategy became to starve U.S. consumers of resources, and then lend them just enough resources to survive, with interest. This coincided with the rise of social media and digital marketing which turned people — and the information that could be extracted about them — into products.

Commentators at the onset of the industrial revolution bemoaned people being turned into mere extensions of machinery. Karl Marx wrapped an entire economic and political philosophy around the resulting “alienation” of the working class with no way of knowing that, 150 years later, the financial and digital revolutions would demote people from machinery to raw material. Today, we ourselves are what the “machines” bend, stretch, fold, and manipulate into something their owners consider useful.

This is the world Gen Z was born into, and the only one they’ve ever known. They didn’t see the sun set on the golden age of capitalism like the rest of us did. They were born in the darkness; molded by it. We, their elders, merely adopted it.

Following the go to school -> go to college -> work hard -> get ahead -> buy a home -> retire-in-comfort path is as foreign and bygone to them as the farm-the-land-with-your-dad-until-he-dies-and-you-inherit-it path is to a Boomer. Zoomers are forging their own path as best they can in the society and economy engineered by a generation that’s all but dead. Older people — especially Boomers — are having a hard time understanding why that path involves YouTube more than college and a job, but it really makes perfect sense.

Entrepreneurship is hardly more risky than the traditional career path anymore, and monetizing social media influence is, arguably, the form of entrepreneurship with the lowest barriers to entry and the highest returns. While they wait for their moment, Zoomers often work short-term low-skill jobs — Door Dash, Uber, Amazon. Why? Two reasons:

1. Gig work is relatively flexible
2. Debt-indenture is worse than simply being broke. Spending $0 to make $16/hr as an Amazon driver or warehouse worker is better than spending $80K — much of it in the form of debt — on a four-year degree to make $20/hr (especially when that $4/hr premium simply gets eaten up by interest payments)

There’s also another, sadder element at play. A lot of Zoomers simply take for granted that they’ll never be able to own a home or retire, and the combination of political instability and climate change are making them wonder if there’s even a future to look forward to. Conversations with these folks reveal an entire generation supposing it’s living on borrowed time. As a result, few of them are operating on a multi-decade timeline that requires steady growth in income potential. This seems to set up a paradox — Zoomers save money at a higher rate than any other generation despite appearing jaded about the future and having shockingly low wages, but a cursory look at their economic behavior makes sense of it immediately. They’re keeping their big ticket expenses low and buying less on credit. My Millennial peers spent scads of money on big ticket items like downtown apartment rentals and debt service on luxury cars. Zoomers, on the other hand, avoid debt like the plague and pay premiums on small-ticket items from brands that align with their social and political values.

A Millennial earning $40/hr could well be paying $2K/month in rent or mortgages and $1K/month on a car note. Meanwhile, a young Zoomer earning $16/hr is more likely to be in a suburban co-housing arrangement paying $350/month in rent and driving a used car they bought with cash. That Zoomer is doing far more with far less and is probably planning to do so in perpetuity; they may be more secure in the long run because of their savings rate. After all, this is how most of the immigrant parents of my best friends became wealthy: scrimping and saving from unremarkable wage jobs, then investing the savings into entrepreneurial ventures (buying small businesses or building their own).

This last item is why I think Boomers ought to give Zoomers a break. The latter group is the most entrepreneurial generation in history, and much of that entrepreneurship is more focused on spreading virtue into the world (even if it’s via YouTube) than simply becoming a billionaire by any means necessary. If we’re lucky, Gen Z may be able to rebuild the American social contract without an assist from a world war.

So y’all Gen Z kids… you do you. You just might save us all in the process.