Dear Gen Z,
In another life, I could have been mother to one of the 70 million of you now living in the United States. Knowing myself as I do, I wouldn’t have had the patience or aptitude for the two statistics say were the expectation for an American woman born before the 1990s. I’m not a fan of living on an overpopulated planet. Or being a well-behaved statistic.
I was still footloose and feral by the time your cohort began in 1997. In my thirties I still looked, felt and acted like a skinny adolescent. Childbearing was more of a definite maybe than a biological compulsion, something I might do in my forties… if I got around to it. That would have put the birthdate of the child I never had—your fellow Zoomer—in the mid aughts. He, she or they would likely have been celebrating a late teen birthday this year or maybe have just turned 20.
What I did get to do for a short time between 2014 and 2018 was meet those of you who went to the college where I used to teach. You were a diverse, open-minded group who loved your tattoos, just like us Xers. Your musical tastes knew no bounds. The alternative rock that anchored me through the 90s was as much a part of your rotation as were Neo Soul, Afrobeat, K-Pop and the indie-folk sounds of Paloma Paris. Your music was global as your sensibilities.
The main difference was that you were digital natives and we were not. I appreciated the help you offered when I wasn’t sure how to use classroom presentation software. But your addiction to cellphones, social media and 24-7 texting mystified me and went beyond anything I’d ever experienced with your millennial predecessors. I didn’t get my first smartphone until I was 51; in my twentieth century crustiness, I usually kept it at home with ringer and alerts turned off.
You were young then and still very much figuring out who you were. But one thing I could see was that as a group, you cared about things outside yourselves like the environment and social justice. You spoke out more than the people I knew in college. Our reality was shaped by the threat of nuclear holocaust and the lie of a trickle-down economics we knew would never benefit us. We took refuge in apathy and hid behind blacked-out Wayfarer sunglasses, our cool façades masking a terror and paralysis too painful to articulate except perhaps in the rage and anguish of grunge culture.
But you? When you felt safe—and I always made sure you did, at least in my classes—you were eager to talk. You didn’t like what you knew awaited too many college graduates: gig work or low-paying jobs going nowhere fast and life in a rigged system you rightly called an oligarchy. What you wanted was a society that served the people and respected the rights of all, including those Gen Zs who forced a reckoning with the meaning of gendered embodiment.
Just before COVID-19 shredded the lives of everyone and especially Zoomers, the energy I’d seen in you began to coalesce in figures like activist Greta Thunberg. In 2019 she gave an impassioned speech to the UN that warned how young people knew too well the ways in which they had been betrayed, especially regarding climate change. She was only 16 when she said this; still, she spoke truth to power despite struggles with autism, mutism and depression, a condition that afflicts more than half of you to one degree or another.
Like millennials, you know all is not right with the world, that threats to your health, safety and security exist at every level no matter where you live in the world. And that in the face of corrupt governments and corporations, you are powerless. Us Xers understood these things, too. But back then and before the turn of the century, those of us living in the West could allay our own anxieties about the decline we sensed was in progress because our world appeared a little more predictable, a little more stable. Post-9/11, Great Recession and pandemic, we can’t say that anymore.
It’s perhaps not so strange that in this current political environment, other Zoomers are stepping forward to speak not just about climate change, but about broken systems. Almost all of them are in their 20s; one in particular, lawyer-turned-journalist Aaron Parnas, has shown an especially profound dedication to the speaking truth outside a compromised legacy media system. He’s even been unafraid to say that the work he loves has also caused him to go into therapy.
Overshadowed and outnumbered by Boomers who shouted everyone else down, we Xers became the quiet stoics who took what we could get while opting out of a system we believed we could not change. We can’t do this anymore, not if we want to survive as a civilization and a species. Growing numbers of us are learning how to fight back thanks what you are showing us: courage, authenticity and the vulnerability Xers choked off in the name of toughness and disengagement.
You are inheriting a mess that will take decades—if not the rest of this century—to clean up. My generation did not make that mess, but we were complicit in its entrenchment because we stood apart. Because we did less than we could have to change things. But there’s still time left. As the prime-aged adults in the room, we see what needs to be done because you’ve lit the way forward. The future is more yours than ours to envision and build; but at least we, along with ascendant members of Gen Y, can lead you out of the mess and help you lay a foundation for something more sustainable and more just.
With more love than you know,
The Gen X mom who wasn’t