Sorry Gen Z

Dorothy Parker said, “London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

In the wake of a universal pandemic with close to 27 million confirmed cases, including hundreds of thousands of New Yorker's, and on the eve of the 19th anniversary of 9/11, I wanted to take a moment to apologize to Generation Z.

You see kids, I’m a baby of the 80s, and grew up in the 90s. It was a simpler time filled with riding bikes, manhunt, and Ouija boards. A time where the best piece of technology we had was a disposable camera — the ones you had to wind up before using, and pray to the Kodak Gods that you actually captured the moment and not your own finger by accident.

We did silly kid things that no one will ever know about because the internet, if you were lucky to even have it, consisted of a dial-up modem that sometimes connected to good old America Online (AOL).

Our high school years were spent playing snake on our Nokia’s and later waiting for the “doo doot” of our Nextel’s. We learned to type an extreme number of words per minute because getting your point across on AIM took skill, and Facebook was a new and exciting place for drunk college kids to meet fellow drunk college kids.

Advertisements were restricted to television commercials and magazines, and although we thought the golden age of marketing died with Don Draper, no one dreamed that the worst was yet to come. But more so than the increasingly invasive ads and political nature of the internet, I’m sorry that the world has become so desensitized, so foreign, and so fake.

We plaster our happy moments on Instagram, set the world ablaze with our gender reveals, and watch in awe as the illustrious boomers and forgotten Gen X’ers spread fake news like wildfire. My generation, the dreaded Millennials, are often described as lazy and entitled, but mostly we are bitter, and disenchanted with the social construct. We left high school hoping to change the world only to find that the world was closed. We missed our chance.

Millennials are a tough bunch, though. We didn’t go to war as teens with guns blazing like our grandfathers and uncles, but we went through a different kind of trauma. We watched the world stop as the twin towers fell, and collectively shed tears before we could vote. The economy tanked right before our impressionable eyes during the Great Recession, unemployment skyrocketed, and the housing bubble burst. And then we graduated college with the highly regarded degree we were told we needed to get ahead in life, along with more student loan debt than any previous generation — yes, we’re still paying it off, thank you very much. With the job market in ruin, we took our fancy degree, hung it in the attic, and grabbed whatever job we could find. Some people worked their way up the corporate ladder, and a few landed on their feet, but many of us job-hopped, with boomers looking down their reading glasses at the idea of having more than one position on our resumes. We came of age on a sinking ship and learned how to swim along the way. For us, Covid-19 is just a pinhole in our already deflated life-jackets. We will put our thumbs over it and continue to swim.

But you, Gen Z, are digital natives — born with computers in your laps and iPhones in your faces. Information has always been at your fingertips, and the economy has always been promising. You won participation medals and were raised in an environment of inclusion. You are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other generation. You’re reinventing the social network and what it means to be a “kid.” You are entrepreneurs and inventors. And, like Millennials, you’re ready to abolish outdated views and stereotypes.

I imagine that every generation has its own turning point; an event that changes the course of history, that uproots life as you know it, and forces you to grow up.

I hope that when Covid-19 is over, when we’ve found a vaccine or when the spread has stopped, it will be a lot like the days that immediately followed 9/11. You probably don’t remember, or perhaps weren’t even born yet, but on September 12, 2001, the air had changed. For the first time ever, New Yorker's were kind. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “Remember the hours after September 11 when we came together as one. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us.”

On the days that followed 9/11, people hugged their families a little tighter, and they enjoyed the simple things. There was no black or white, there was only “New Yorker.” I hope on Day 2 of a vaccine, we’ll be excited to visit a store and buy Lysol, to hug our extended family, to return to school without masks, and to take a much needed vacation without quarantining for 14 days. We’ll remember to wash our hands for 20 full seconds and we’ll tip our bartenders and waiters a bit extra. We will vow to never forget. Then slowly but surely we will forget. We won’t be as grateful, or as kind. We’ll rinse our hands quickly to get back to our bustling little lives, and we’ll sweat the small stuff once again.

If Covid is your 9/11, then I am deeply and desperately sorry. Not because more precious lives have been lost — something we never dreamed possible after the tragedy that was 2001 — but because thus far, you haven’t seen what can happen after the dust settles. You have yet to witness what life is like when people build each other up instead of tearing each other apart. Although you escaped the tragedies that my own cohort experienced you also missed the extraordinary heroes, the unbreakable spirit and soul of America, and the innate “ability to mourn people we’ve never met.”

I’m sorry for the world we’re leaving to you, but I have faith. I know you can do better. I know you will end the various societal and actual wars — we so wanted to, but there’s just too many people ahead of us in power with antiquated values and not enough heart. We will not be that roadblock for you. I know you will stop at nothing to end poverty and hunger, and injustice, and heck maybe even slam the damn wage gap shut once and for all. You will separate church and state, redefine media and news, and create jobs and a way of life we have yet to fathom. You will do all the things Millennials couldn’t do because of the deck we were handed.

I’m sorry, Gen Z, to put all of this pressure on you, but much like the New York that Dorothy Parker knew, and the one that I witnessed on September 12, 2001, I am hopeful; I believe something good is about to come off, and we must hurry up to meet it.