The backlash twd this article is interesting and largely ill-conceived. Lots of people saying Gen Z (the dog sitting in a burning home saying “this is fine” generation) need to stop complaining because people on the Oregon Trail starved to death. (1) https://twitter.com/ryanbrooks/status/1252310042759565314

Like, ignoring the fact that some of the biggest threats posed by climate change are food scarcity and technological retrogression caused by environmental devastation and that not every member of Gen Z in the US is privileged enough not to go hungry... (2)

The thing that’s exceptional about Gen Z is not that it’s the worst situated generation in the history of ever. It’s that Baby Boomers were historically anomalous in the degree of material prosperity they experienced from their formative years. (3)

They (as a cohort) inherited a booming American economy with the underpinnings of social democracy below it. They came of age along with and spearheaded the civil rights movement, anti war activism, women’s lib, etc. (4)

But like... sometime later, a small group of capitalist elites, including some Boomers and older generations alike but a majority of neither, started robbing everyone and fucking things up, and the burdens of that fell to Boomers’ Gen X kid siblings and Millennial children. (5)

Since the 1970s, Boomers and every generation after them are as a whole living in increasingly precarious conditions, their lives compounded by more and more successive crises than the last. (6)

All this article is really contending insofar as what I’m talking about in this thread is that Gen Z have been alive less than every other demo cohort, and the America they grew up in is closer to the America of today than any other generation by definition. (7)

Any other adult generation* lol since there are kids who aren’t Gen Z. So like of course Gen Z doesn’t have it as bad as people who way before them. They never had to deal with potato blight or Spanish flu or Blitzkrieg. But neither did anyone else alive today! (8)