re: What the hell happened in the last 20 years to young adults?

1. Zero tolerance bullying policies: schools punish kids for standing up to bullies just as heavily as they punish bullies. The big difference is that the kids being bullied actually care about school, so the consequences mean so much more to them.

2. Social media: makes escaping bullying impossible. Social media becomes the gatekeeper to all social interactions and belonging. Social taboos are retroactive and ever changing while the internet is forever.

3. Helicopter parenting: parents protect their kids from failure at any point in life where the consequences aren’t a big deal. Kids are so highly supervised that they never get to know themselves, make their own choices, or try anything out. This leads to kids who either have extreme anxiety because they have no experience running their own lives or extreme entitlement because their parents remove any and all consequences but also any and all agency.

4. Karenism: it’s been socially unacceptable for children to exist unattended since the early 2000’s at the latest. Karens will call the cops or CPS on kids playing in their own front yards. As a result, kids can’t play outside. Kids don’t get to explore independently. They mostly don’t walk to school or after school activities. Parents feel pressured to be helicopter parents (or ipad parents) because it is now illegal to let kids do anything on their own. As a result, kids know no experiences without their parents as the gatekeeper.

5. Ipad parents: these are the opposite of the helicopter parent. The ipad parent doesn’t have time for the kid and pawns them off on the internet to keep them distracted so that the parent can work or do their own things. In the past, this would have been the parent who made their kids play outside all day until the streetlights turned on. However, they’ve not allowed to do that anymore. So, they use the ipad as a buffer. They have to be physically present, but they’re not going to be emotionally present. As a result, kids have constant access to extreme violence, porn, and mind-numbing tedium that protects them from boredom or their imaginations.

6. The pandemic: lockdowns stunted emotional growth. Prolonged masking inhibited kids from learning to read facial expressions and social cues.

7. The economy: pay has been stagnant while basic costs of living have steadily increased. Young people today have FAR less disposable income than previous generations did at the same ages despite gen Z actually working more hours on average. They’re exceedingly poor, and that causes them to behave in this weird combination of risk aversion and yolo binge splurging. They can’t afford to go out and socialize every night at the dwindling number of third places, so they only can afford a few curated experiences that MUST deliver or else. Picture it like you’re cooking for your family on a budget. If you screw up and an ingredient spoils or you burn the dish, you have to throw it out and order pizza. Now, imagine you can’t afford to replace what you waste. You just don’t get those meals. So, you plan only to cook meals you cannot f$&k up with ingredients that will not spoil because you can’t afford to miss too many meals. That’s gen z’s mentality in a nutshell.