When I was a teenager, I remember my 80-year-old grandfather bemoaning what had become of the current generation. He took one look at the long hair, the supreme lack of motivation to do anything, the vacant, drug-addled expressions on their faces, and he pronounced the end of human civilization.
I suppose every parent or grandparent who listens to hip-hop, sees the (lack of) clothing on their female children, or reads the abbreviation-filled missives of their kids on X fears for the future of our planet. Long before climate change, pollution, overpopulation, or an alien invasion destroys the Earth, Gen Z will have made a total and final mess of the planet.
At the very least, we know they will impoverish the next generation. We know this because Gen Z is the first generation of Americans to well and truly hate — and I mean "hate" — capitalism.
If that were the only problem, we might be able to pass it off as a transient fad, something that they'll "grow out of." Not a chance.
In "a recent Pew poll, only 40 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds had a positive view of capitalism, while 44 percent viewed socialism positively. In another poll, 34 percent of young people reported a favorable view of communism," reports Reason.com's Emma Camp.
Check out this TikTok video from a popular "influencer," "Therapyjeff."
"Do you feel horrible? That's capitalism, baby!" he claims. "Is your self-worth based on who you are or what you do? If it's what you do and the value you create, that's internalized capitalism."
I don't think this jamoke understands anything about capitalism. The dummy got 50,000 likes for that bit of "wisdom."
Online, "capitalism" has become a shorthand for just about every disliked cultural trend, no matter how universal or eternal. Unrealistic beauty standards? Capitalism. Monogamy? Capitalism. People not wanting to give you a ride to the airport? Capitalism.
Capitalism gets conflated with everything from consumerism and government corruption to the concept of work itself. Online anticapitalism is not so much a reaction against economic reality as a reaction against, well, reality. It's the all-purpose villain ruining everything that should be good about modern life.
That Pew poll notwithstanding, capitalism is not the problem that's ailing these admittedly moronic young people. "Blaming capitalism is a fantasy, a rhetorical escape, that allows people to shift the blame from their own choices to a powerful external force outside their control," writes Camp. It's become shorthand for a whole panoply of generational ills, including loneliness, alienation, and lack of meaning in life. And despite the ubiquity of social media, Gen Z makes few social connections.
It's tempting to blame social media for this state of affairs. But that's too easy, too simple. This is an existential crisis that a large number of young adults share. Anti-capitalism is only a symptom.
"By arguing that capitalism is the cause of your dissatisfaction, you deny your own agency," writes Camp. "Your problems become both unsolvable and someone else's fault. And because they're unsolvable, you don't have to do anything about it."
In the discourse of internet anticapitalism, this feeling—that adulthood should somehow just be more fun—comes up time and time again. It's often paired with a general aversion to having a standard nine-to-five job at all, even one that pays well.
So it's no wonder that many young people seem to share a politically left-leaning sense that just about anything is better than the American middle-class standard, whether that's Europe, communist Cuba, or even prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes. You might remind one of these creators that Spain's youth unemployment rate is over 25 percent, that 10 percent of Cuba's population fled the country in 2022–2023, and that Stone Age life was no lovefest, but you probably won't convince them to extoll the virtues of free markets and the dramatic reduction in poverty wrought by global capitalism.
Do these young adults want to live a life of "fun"? Or are they confusing "fun" with "happiness"?
More than anything else, all of this — dissatisfaction, loneliness, feelings of being lost and forgotten — shows what I believe to be a lack of maturity. They haven't grown up yet. They haven't figured out that you make your own fun in life, you make your own connections, you put yourself in a position to fall in love, get a good job, and be fulfilled.
Happiness is something you have to work at. It might not be "fun" all the time, but it will take care of most of the rest of your angst-ridden lives and bring you something you should genuinely be striving for: satisfaction.
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