Today’s Not-so-Lost Generation
Disillusioned generations of the past shed light on what will become of Gen Z
“In the first place, I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, ’way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically foolproof…”
You could be forgiven for thinking this was written by one of my Gen Z peers in 2026, but you’d be 100 years late. That excerpt comes from a 1920 Atlantic article titled “These Wild Young People.”
The author, a recent Yale graduate named John F. Carter Jr., continued:
Now my generation is disillusionized, and, I think, to a certain extent, brutalized, by the cataclysm which their complacent folly engendered. The acceleration of life for us has been so great that into the last few years have been crowded the experiences and the ideas of a normal lifetime. We have in our unregenerate youth learned the practicality and the cynicism that is safe only in unregenerate old age. We have been forced to become realists overnight, instead of idealists, as was our birthright.
An articulate 24-year-old could write the same thing today. After all, in my 24 years, my peers and I have experienced a global pandemic, been thrust into a world of online dating and socializing, faced historic levels of inflation and housing unaffordability, and struggled to enter a job market that seems poised for AI to swallow it (and us) whole.
Now, I write this not to complain that we’ve had it harder than one generation or another. I wouldn’t trade these problems for those from 100 years ago. Rather, I write to highlight the causes of a generation’s feelings of hopelessness, disillusionment, and nihilism.
So where to look for guidance?
For eons, humans’ natural instinct has been to look back at the older living generations – their elders – for wisdom. Today, though, their wisdom, their so-called advice, no longer works: In 2026, firm handshakes are not the only factor in getting a job; renting is not inherently worse than buying a home; and whatever your grandfather tells you about how to meet a woman is more likely to get you on a sex offender list than a girlfriend.
Our elders often rub salt on our wounds, too. Rather than accept that times have changed and that their advice may no longer be relevant, they blame us for our woes. Time and again, my generation is told that we are soft, lazy, entitled, disrespectful, anti-social addicts.
Yet, I’ve found that if we go further back than today’s living elders, there is a generation that understands our plight; that can guide us without judgement. They, perhaps like us, were a Lost Generation.
Editor’s Note
What do you think? Is Gen Z more lost than other generations? Send us your thoughts here or leave a comment below.
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Great piece. I think sociology and generational changes and similarities are fascinating! I'm Gen-X myself and remember well our generation's disaffection and cynicism, living through the 80s recession, Challenger explosion, Apartheid (albeit from far away), and other aspects of technology that were changing rapidly at the time much more than the past - PC's and proto-Internet, CDs, etc. Latch key kids playing on their home consoles, watching cable tv for hours, financial booms and busts, all within 10 or so years. When I look back on it, it was a lot.
That's not to say my heart doesn't go out to Gen-Z. I have a 20-year-old daughter and know the challenges of her generation quite well. I don't think Gen-Z is lazy, entitled, or disrespectful any more than we were at that time. They are a lot smarter than we were simply due to the incredible wealth of information online, but that information is a double-edged sword because there's a lot of bad with the good. So some in Gen-Z have a lot of bad info, some have a lot of good info, but I suspect it wasn't that different from us, just more of it.
As any generation who has to deal with new stuff, there is often a lot of adoption by youth, and Gen-Z is particular in this sense in their rejection of a lot of it. I think part of this is that at least initially they were allowed easy access to social media and saw how bad the downsides could be, and this made them much more skeptical in general. For Gen-X, or at least me, because everything was so new and my parents were pretty clueless technologically speaking, I didn't see any downsides, just cool technology. AI has thrust itself into our world without ANY of our consent, and to me it feels inescapable. I'm forced to use it at work. But if I were Gen-Z I think I would be just as bitter about it, given that it's stealing our future. Much of my life has been lived already, and so I'm fortunate that I'm towards the end of my career vs. the beginning. So I don't blame Gen-Z in any way. Even the adherence to social media seems to be ebbing, and is something they were given access to at such a young age that it makes it extremely difficult to disassociate from - like cigarettes maybe? But I see a lot of "kids" doing just that, at least to a certain extent, which must be incredibly challenging. It's been challenging for me as a 50-something!
Leave it to a Gen Z’er to compare their struggles to those of a generation ravished by the deadliest war of all times, the deadliest pandemic in centuries and the great depression. Get over yourself. Gen X’er here