What happened to youth culture?
A collection of thoughts on Zoomers and Zooming.
Summary: The essay explores why youth culture in the early 2020s has become defined by diffuse radicalism and resentment politics rather than unified ideology. The author argues that Generation Z, unlike previous generations, lacks cohesive cultural identity but shares deep skepticism toward established systems, viewing the world as fundamentally ruined by 80 years of elite consensus around postwar policies. Rather than targeting specific villains, Zoomer radicalism spirals into conspiracy and fragmented political positions united only by emotional anger. The author warns that as these young people assume power, society faces outcomes ranging from 1970s-style upheaval to Weimar-like instability, necessitating serious material and spiritual reform to restore legitimacy.
For the first time in my life I’m beginning to feel the end of my youth. At 27, the majority of culture, in all its celebration of health and consumerism, is fully centered around my tastes, so the arrival of the phenomenon that was the Minecraft movie back in April of this year took myself and other people my age totally by surprise.
It was only after high schoolers started to throw bags of popcorn in the air and bring chickens into the theater that I even began to think about the movie as something a person might genuinely enjoy. In response, my wife, some friends, and I went and saw the movie in theaters; it was fine, and I could have seen myself really enjoying it as a kid — everything feels original if you’ve seen nothing. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to shake the realization that it represented an aspect of our society that was both “cool” and which I was too old to fully appreciate.
It is normal to age out of being hip, and if I was still trying to keep in touch with the younglings as a man in my late 40s, I would be deeply disappointed in how I had turned out. No, I'll be posting about how music has been in decline since the release of Stick Season like all good middle-aged men in the 2040s.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted - Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
However, I also feel like I stand at a unique moment in my life right now. I am still a young man who can understand the basic emotional reality of my peers, but I also have enough context to see our shared experience with some (italics) distance. So in the twilight of my 20s, I wanted to try and catch the zeitgeist of my generation and discourse a little on what happened to youth culture in the early 2020s and where I think it is headed.
Because I sincerely believe that Zoomers represent a profound cultural change to this country, a change I don’t think older people fully realize. In no small part because, unlike the Boomers or Millennials who largely existed as a single unified cultural force, Zoomers do not. You can cherry-pick the data to show young people have every possible political composition (uniquely liberal, uniquely conservative, fascist, communistic, pro-Hamas, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-abortion — in short, a complete clusterfuck of positions), and you will not be wrong. The only real shared trait is a disgust with society and an unsustainable degree of epistemic uncertainty.
In youth spaces, there is zero love lost for the system. Uncertainty about how the world ought to work should not be confused with ambivalence about how it currently does.
No, you would be hard-pressed to find a young person who doesn’t walk around with a seething rage towards at least one of the large cohorts of this society. It could be Jews or MAGA or Muslims or Whites or Public Sector Unions or Women or Men, but resentment politics is everywhere for those with eyes to see. This is the unifying narrative of our times, that the world has been ruined.
But why?
Why are young people so upset at the world, at least in America?
I think the easiest way to understand the young radical is as an emotional reaction to 80 years of cultural, economic, and demographic change. Since the change was the result of an elite consensus around the causes of WW1 and WW2 combined with changing modes of production, it lacks clear “movers” to blame.
Over and over again, we are told by authority figures that the problems which obviously exist — not enough housing, environmental degradation, crime in the inner cities, declining educational quality — are impossible to fix and can at best be tweaked around the system. Because power is diffusely held and mostly vested in career technocrats and dead legal text, you cannot even really express discontent at the voting booth.
The result is youth radicalism just spirals into whatever conspiracy is fun that week because everything is suspect.
For politicians, this diffuse blame sometimes crystallizes around figures like Hillary Clinton, since they are symbolic of the late 20th-century consensus, which is seen ultimately as the source of social ills.
In many ways, Zoomer culture reminds me of the post-WW1 West, or much of the post-colonial world in the 20th century; it feels like the ruling ideology is dead, but the multiplicity of alternative systems is such that no one can really logically consider what should be next, and all that exists is tightly wound hatred towards a government which is seen to have ruined the country, environment, and world.
We can smile at this as foolish if we want, but eventually these young men will be running things. Right now, radicalism has intense emotional energy, and it seems to me like the spectrum of outcomes is somewhere between 1970s violent disappointment and the Weimar Republic.
Where Zoomer radicalism differs from Millennial “radicalism” (if you can even call it that) is that the Millennials were calling out hypocrisy between what they were taught and what existed. Zoomer radicals hate both the outcomes and the aspirational visions. Leftists focus on capitalism and rightists focus on migration, but they are both fundamentally a hatred of “liberalism.”
Now, I’m not sure exactly what will come next, but eventually everything comes to an end. I just wrote that I think we live in a Golden Age, and I still think this is true. Our problems are fundamentally spiritual ones, but solving the material source of the resentment — changing government transfers so they explicitly benefit Zoomers and bringing down the cost of housing — would do a lot to right the ship, so to speak.
I began this article by saying that our society worships youth. This is true in many ways, but one twisted form I feel it takes is a fear of facing the implications of our mortality square in its unblinking eyes. Eventually, the people in power today will all be dead, and new people who have yet to even be born will control this world. Laws and rules only exist in the minds of men, and they do not self-enforce without the consent of the living. If you want anything to persist beyond your life, it has to be replicated in the minds of the youth. Our society has failed to convincingly argue that THIS is what should remain, and I fear we are slowly slinking to anarchic ruin like that which defined the middle of the 20th century.
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