“Not in employment, education, or training,” that is those who are doing absolutely nothing with their lives, neither productively working nor preparing for their future. After two decades of being told all they could not do, the spark of life has gone out, drowned by those who believe failure is our birthright.
Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2010, has barely come of age yet and already find themselves adrift in political, cultural, and economic tides they cannot control or even fully understand. Videos of Gen Zers ranting against the world have already gone viral over and over again, posted to places like TikTok where older generations don’t generally go. “I work five days out of the week, 40 hours a week,” one young person insisted earlier this year. “I do not make enough to live on my own. I do not make enough to pay rent, water, electric, and eat. All by myself I would not be capable of doing that.” “Twenty years ago when you were getting started, you could live on your own,” she continued to insist. “Twenty years ago when you first started, you were able to do everything that I am now struggling to do,” she repeated again as if every generation before her was guaranteed a living wage and no one had ever struggled simply to pay the bills, especially in the early days of their career. The mental health statistics are even more dire if that can be believed. According to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “mental health among students overall continues to worsen, with more than 40% of high school students feeling so sad or hopeless that they could not engage in their regular activities for at least two weeks during the previous year—a possible indication of the experience of depressive symptoms. We also saw significant increases in the percentage of youth who seriously considered suicide, made a suicide plan, and attempted suicide.” Essentially, there has not been a single mental health trend that has moved in a positive direction over the past 10 years. This includes 42% of high school students who “experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” in 2021, up from 28% in 2011. 22% who “seriously considered attempting suicide,” up from 16% percent. 18% actually made a suicide plan, up from 13%, and 10% continued that plan into an attempt, up from 8%. Young women and the LGBTQ+ community appear to be suffering the most, with some 57% and 69% respectively reporting sadness and hopelessness in 2021. The figure for young women represents an almost 60% increase over 2011 while boys were up 38%. Overall, the “percentage of students across every racial and ethnic group who felt persistently sad or hopeless increased.”
As a likely result of these and other equally daunting trends, a new acronym has been coined to describe the detachment of some young people from society over all. “Not in employment, education, or training,” NEETs, that is those who are doing absolutely nothing with their lives, neither productively working nor preparing for their future. According to the International Labour Organization, about 20% of young people worldwide are NEETs. The statistics on this cohort in the United States are sparse, but elsewhere in the Western World, about half a million 15-24 years olds in Spain are not working or pursuing education or training, and almost 3 million Gen Zers in the United Kingdom are classified as “economically inactive,” up by almost 400,000 since the start of the pandemic alone. These young people are presumably still living with their parents or perhaps eking out a meager existence on government subsidies, a situation that is not likely to change given their completely unproductive existence so far. To be sure, Gen Zers can face financial challenges that potentially, at least, put them in a worse position than previous generations. A 20-something in the current economy takes home approximately $5,352 less per year on average than a millennial at the same point when adjusted for inflation, which needless to say is its own burden. While it might be easy to blame the rapid increase over just the last few years, home prices, for example, have been rising twice as fast as income for more than two decades now, and show no signs of slowing down; college prices tell much the same story. Gen Zers also have more debt and are more delinquent with that debt than previous generations both from college and otherwise. Many began their careers or were graduating from college when the world was locked down during the pandemic, leaving them more isolated than any previous generation with little prospect of employment and even in the aftermath, far less likely to work in an office setting conducive to engaging inexperienced workers. At least for those who work in an office in the first place. According to Fortune Magazine, Gen Z prefers not to hustle, choosing “stress-free jobs” without “big responsibilities or regular overtime.” As Yahoo News put it, “Even those who do want to work, don’t want a career. Instead, many Gen Zers are eyeing up easygoing jobs that don’t require regular overtime, antisocial working hours, or substantial responsibilities like managing a large team.” For those who do want a career, teaching is the profession of choice because of the “weeks of vacation,” and even for those who do actually work in an office or otherwise, sick time appears to be an issue. “Youth worklessness due to ill health is a real and growing trend; it is worrying that young people in their early 20s, just embarking on their adult life, are more likely to be out of work due to ill health than those in their early 40s,” researchers at Resolution Foundation told Fortune Magazine.
Needless to say, many reasons have been posited for this alarming trend, from cell phones to social media, but perhaps no one put it better than a member of Gen Z themselves. “I’m just focusing on the present because the future is depressing.” For whatever reason, this is the first generation raised on a steady diet of dread practically since the day they were born, coupled with the insidious belief that their countries of origin – indeed the entire Western World – are hopelessly irredeemable, either racist or classist to the core, probably both. The combination of the two, clearly to me at least, has resulted in significant numbers of young people who do not believe they are capable of rising to whatever challenge is at hand, and if recent experience is any indication, I’m not entirely sure I can blame them. The pandemic, even taken in isolation, encapsulates the notion that you can hide from challenges rather than confront them, that life can literally be stopped and started for safety at best, simple convenience at worst. Is it any wonder that those who were told to lock themselves in their homes or dorms for more than a year in some places, do not believe we can successfully confront climate change, immigration, economic insecurity, global unrest, and the rest of the laundry list of horrors that seem to define the world circa 2024? To them, these challenges are both entirely new and too daunting to face, but only the too daunting part is actually new from a historical perspective. Every generation before this one has faced its own challenges, both on an individual and a societal level, many on a scale that are almost impossible to believe by modern standards. The 20th century, before many in Gen Z were born, was by almost every measure more brutal and bloody. We can’t even say with any surety how many people died in wars alone – estimates range from 110 million all the way to 231 million, averaging over a million per year even at the lowest possible end. This is one reason that the life expectancy in the United States was 58.1 years for men and 61.5 years for women a hundred years ago compared to 78.93 years today. Economically speaking, the hardships were equally more intense with periods of significantly higher unemployment and inflation throughout the century. Unemployment hit almost 25% during the Great Depression, while inflation was over 15% in 1919 and 1920, over 14% in 1947, and over 13% in 1980.
The environment fared little better. For all the talk of global warming being a threat to the future of humanity today, the devastation wrought by industrialization in the lead up to the 20th century almost defies description. In 1901, President Teddy Roosevelt, widely regarded as one of the first leading conservationists, traveled by train through Pennsyvannia on his way the White House after his predecessor had been assassinated by a radical gunman. Biographer, Edmund Morris, described what he saw. “Valley after valley, as the train snaked through, disclosed communities as squalid as any of these people could have fled in Europe [most of the residents at the time were from Slavic countries]. Thousands of sooty stacks on stilts, with pigs tied below; gutters buzzing with garbage; mules clopping to the mineheads, hock deep in fine gray dust. Beneath that dust, men were scrabbling in wet, gassy gloom, earning about a dollar and change for every ton of coal they hacked…As a group, they aged and ailed faster than any workers in American industry…These boys began their careers at eight or nine, picking splinters of slate out of the coal breakers until their hands were scarred for life. These men worked coal ten hours a day, six days a week. They ate coal dust in their bread and drank it in their milk; they breathed it and coughed it. At forty or forty five, most were so ravaged by black-lung disease that they had to return to the breakers to pick slate with their grandchildren, contracting fresh black scars until the day they die.” After emerging from the coal mines, the President’s train moved into logging country. “The Allegheny Forest receded on both sides, leaving only stumps. Soon there was nothing but a fringe of trees on the highest ridges, beyond reach of any saw. Stumps, stumps, and more stumps perforated the landscape, like arrows snapped off in death agony. Most were blackened. Local lumberjacks wanted white pines only – less profitable trees could be burned like weeds. With billions more trees beyond the horizon, replanting was a waste of time. Descent via Emporium Junction and Driftwood revealed even worse devastation. Roosevelt had foreseen just such sterility when Governor of New York: ‘Unrestrained greed means the ruin of great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.’ These hillsides, which for centuries had absorbed foliage-filtered rainfall, were now bare, gullied by direct precipitation. The courses running off them were choked with mud and dead fish.”
Less than fifty years later, society would be plagued by the threat of nuclear war and the resulting fall out, but somehow all of these generations, and their predecessors who faced, at times, even harsher challenges in a wild and untamed world, looked to the future with optimism and hope, believing that human ingenuity and hard work could surmount even the most difficult obstacles. This was coupled with an inherent belief in the greatness of America in particular and the Western World in general, trusting that our unique combination of freedoms, respect for the individual, and adherence to the rule of law, provided the foundation for our ultimate success in any and all endeavors. As Roosevelt himself put it, tempering his enthusiasm for the greatness of America with hard-nosed reality, we “must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to foolish optimism, nor succumb to timid and ignoble pessimism.” In 1894 he wrote, “At no period in the world’s history, has life been so full of interest, and of possibilities of excitement and enjoyment.” If a person was observant, “he notes all around him the play of vaster forces than have ever before been exerted, working, half blindly, half under control, to bring about immeasurable results.” The same is true today, save that we have succumbed to the virulent form of ignoble pessimism that Roosevelt, who was born sickly and suffered from asthma only to make himself into one of the toughest people the world has ever known, could scarcely imagine. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be an easy answer. After two decades of being told all they could not do, the spark of life – the fire to succeed, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield as Alfred Lord Tennyson so memorably put it – has gone out, drowned by those who believe failure is our birthright. It’s impossible to say how it might be lit again, except that more of the same will only lead to more of the same depressing detachment. The world doesn’t need “NEETs,” it needs those driven to succeed no matter the odds.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 