“The kids these days are so lazy! What has the world come to?” For generations, adults have expressed this sentiment towards the younger crowd. Especially towards millennials— we’ve all seen the articles titled “Millennials are Killing the Diamond Industry!” Diamonds, real estate, bar soap, golf, department stores— if you can think of it, millennials are destroying it. Although no student at MHS is a millennial, as the cutoff is around 1996, growing up and witnessing the endless attacks on our prior generation is slightly intimidating. Even now, the articles on our age group, the “Gen-Z’s,” are beginning. Most of us are still mere children, but according to crabby forty-year-olds, we have been causing problems.
We’re addicted to our phones and computers, staring into blue artificial light and scrolling for hours on end. However, the generations before us— specifically Generation X, most of our parents— spend equal or even more time on social media than those a little younger than them. Millennials spend around six hours per week on social media, while Gen X spends nearly seven. However, it is certainly true that Gen-Z, often called the “iGeneration,” blows both of these statistics out of the water, with around two hours and forty-five minutes of social media usage per day. But is this as apocalyptic as previously thought? Is society doomed to become mobs of mindless, screen-hungry monsters? The answer is no. If one uses the Internet to their full advantage, they can gain knowledge in mere seconds that would take a library trip and hours of reading to find fifty years ago. We as a generation are exposed to current events the instant they happen thanks to our rapid-fire Instagram feeds, although “fake news” is certainly a menace that needs to be combatted. What needs to happen now is for us to not just repost a video, but to research what’s behind it and do something that really makes a difference.
Perhaps the scariest thing to older generations about Generation Z is that we are willing and motivated to change. Did any of our parents stand up in front of the United Nations at the age of fifteen to combat climate change, like Greta Thunberg of Sweden? No, probably not. Did any of them have to watch and hide in terror as their schoolmates were massacred, again and again, month after month? Again, no. Maybe the reason kids are trying to make a difference is because the issues that are prevalent right now will affect us the most in the future. Climate change is a small concern to most middle-aged people— its major effects will barely come to fruition within their lifetimes. School shootings? The people deciding on those matters graduated college long, long ago. The reason we are so passionate about these matters is that the outcome will affect us drastically, for better or for worse.