If you’re over 25, you’re probably wrong about Generation Z. They’re the best crop of teenagers America has ever produced.
Is there an age at which, like hair graying, menstruation halting, and skin elasticity declining, it’s inevitable, no matter how hard we fight it, that we come to misunderstand the priorities and skill sets of people younger than ourselves?
I entered the workforce in 2007 with a bookish vocabulary that made me seem much older than my nineteen years. As a result, I was, and am, invited into many vitriolic workplace conversations about the deficiencies of Millennials. Now, I’m seeing Millennials bash Gen-Z. We’ve already forgotten how it felt when our first managers dropped lines like, “I know your generation doesn’t believe in it, but I expect you to be on time.”
The worst thing isn’t that we’re starting to turn into our parents. It’s that, when we knock today’s American teens, we’re wildly off-base. Gen-Zers are more informed, more creative, more connected, more thoughtful, and more effective in their activism than we ever were. Walk with me for a few hundred words, and I’ll convince you.
We’re watching the most diverse American generation of all time reach adulthood.
According to Magid Generational Strategies, a research firm specializing in “generational trends,” Gen-Z is…
America’s last generation with a Caucasian majority, the most positive about America becoming ethnically diverse, and existing in the most diverse social circles.
You might already know that teens today are more likely to have a racially diverse social circle, but this trend goes deeper. Gen-Zers are also more likely to be connected to Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and even to the “very wealthy” than any previous American generation. While Boomer politicians engage in histrionic talk about the death of ideological diversity on liberal college campuses, unbothered American teens are out socializing with friends who look and think differently from themselves.
They aren’t waiting for permission, and they aren’t waiting to be perfect.
Millennials, driven by much-lampooned everybody-gets-a-trophy Boomer parenting, tend to be motivated by external validation. We were raised on standardized tests, percentile scoring, and positive reinforcement. We’re big on “running things by” friends and family for approval before showing them to the wider world.
Exceptional teenagers today aren’t terribly interested in adult approval. Tavi Gevinson jokes that her parents didn’t notice her fashion blog until she asked her father for permission to be interviewed by the New York Times. Teen music journalist Djali Brown-Cepeda believes that she chose her parents, not the other way around. Even the favorite target of Gen-Z haters, a famously weird NYT interview with the Smith kids, is an expression of Gen-Z’s drive to create for themselves, not for others.
Honestly, we’re just trying to make music that we think is cool. We don’t think a lot of the music out there is that cool. So we make our own music. We don’t have any song that we like to listen to on the P.C.H. by any other artist, you know?
It’s not that Gen-Zers don’t understand that early, awkward attempts at pursuing their passions may live forever online. It’s that everyone is in the same position now, so they’re not worried. In an interview with Tavi Gevinson, 17-year-old feminist icon & actress Amandla Stenberg said:
I think the internet forces you to be okay with your mistakes, and the things you’ve done in the past, especially when you’re in the media. Personally, that helps me to stop self-editing or being self-conscious, and instead realise that my previous mistakes have allowed me to grow.
Gen-Z grew up with technical skills and a veil of anonymity that lets them pass as peers in any group. If you’ve ever used Reddit, you’ve been bested in debate by a 13-year-old, whether you know it or not. Teens have figured out that there’s nothing fundamentally less capable about a teenage brain than an adult one. Inexperience and immaturity are real, of course, but neither attribute should necessarily prevent someone from starting a movement, founding a company, or creating art.
They don’t just use social media. They use it to hack adult culture.
The Art Hoe Collective is perhaps my very favorite thing Gen-Z has produced. Tired of “fine art” where they couldn’t see themselves, queer teens of color began creating self-reflexive imagery, superimposing their own images on old paintings and photographs. Tackling intersectional issues of race and representation through relentless creation, the Art Hoe movement has expanded into performance art, spoken word, film, and music. Their social commentary now explores electoral politics, mental health, support for small businesses in minority communities, and more.
I’m a strong believer in the personal as political. The collective is host to submissions of immense emotion and varied experiences. I don’t think all art needs to be made with the intention of having a social conscience, but inevitably art made from truth manifests contain such conscience. So is there really such thing as apolitical art?
— Art Hoe Collective co-creator Sage Adams, in an Oyster interview.
I’ve noticed about Gen-Z’s teen artists that they’re not ruthless about technical craft, the way older artists can be. They hold space for themselves and their peers to grow through making. Their wastebasket of unfinished or second-rate work lives on an anonymous Tumblr, not in literal wastebaskets. They find value in seeing one another, as the unfinished and still-growing creatures we all are, not only in finished, perfectly edited creative product. It’s everything good about the first year of art school, played out live on social media, without all the bad stuff or the student loans.
A canvas. Paint. A microphone.
— Willow Smith’s answer to “What are things worth having?”
Any criticism you can come up with for them, they’re already discussing, unpacking, and resolving.
Gen-Z is full of bullies? Yep. (Older generations were, too.) But Gen-Z is also full of passionate essayists, artists, and activists dedicated to combating bullying. Witness EmilyAnne Rigal founding an anti-bullying nonprofit; gold medalist Gabby Douglas speaking out about her own experiences at great personal risk; and the Cupertino teens who coded an anti-bullying app that lets bullying victims easily alert school authorities.
Gen-Z is all activist talk and too little action? Try again. Three Georgia siblings built the Five-O police-rating app with the ambition of tracking patterns of law enforcement bias and violence. Young business owner and Alexis Ohanian protegé Maya Penn upcycles and sells items that would otherwise become landfill fodder, then donates a share of her profits to environmental stewardship.
Gen-Z is suffering from unrealistic beauty standards that drive them to grow up early? Indeed — that’s why two of the newest entrants into the beauty product market are teen-founded, driven by entrepreneurial girls’ frustration with the gap between their Chapstick years and an age where a full face of luxe cosmetics feels appropriate. Willa is mostly about sun protection — crucial in a world with ever-rising skin cancer rates — and allows girls to sell products, Avon-style, to their friends. Nudestix, founded by teen sisters, is for girls who don’t want to wear much makeup or spend too much time.
Even in political satire, teens’ ambitions are bigger today. The 15-year-old presidential candidate “Deez Nuts” is a peculiar Dadaist prankster, who entered his pseudonym into the North Carolina presidential race with a formal Federal Election Commission filing because:
The fact that if I can fill out a form so vague that it doesn’t include your age, or the fact that all get accepted even if they’re only partially filled, anyone can run.
Yes, they’re mocking us.
Just like we mocked Gen-Z and the Boomers when we were teens — but they’ve leveraged new technology at their disposal and their sense of empowerment to make the mockery stick, and even to make us participate in it. After all, plenty of adults supported Deez Nuts.
Postscripts:
- Tavi Gevinson was born in the last year of the Millennial generation — 1996 — and has been called “queen of the Millennials.” However, today her RookieMag is mostly read and written by Gen-Z, and Tavi’s life story and characteristics are much more Gen-Z than Millennial, so I’ve used her repeatedly as an example throughout this article. Yes, I’m kinda obsessed. Fight me.
- This Medium article talks mostly/exclusively about American teens because it’s the American Generation Z that’s getting so much flack online, and because I’m more qualified to talk about American teen issues than to speak for global youth. Teens around the world are amazing.
