Optimism, Even Now

Wake up. Brush your teeth. Go to school. Go to [insert generic club]. Come home. Do homework. Eat dinner. Go to sleep. But before you're ready to do it all again, you question this monotonous cycle and the future of your insignificant life making you shudder, resulting in you walking to your living room to turn on the TV in an attempt to learn about how to help. Yet the TV makes it worse. Raging wildfires in Los Angeles illuminate the screen in a fiery red hue, then coverage switches to the wars in Ukraine and Israel, unfathomable executive orders, and finally to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) application that could replace another human task. Sighing, you shove it all back down, turn off the TV and go to bed.

Gen Z has a chip on our shoulder. Given the raging forest fires, nuclear armageddon, and the oncoming AI apocalypse, when we actually take a step away from our day-to-day lives the hurdles our generation has to overcome seem so daunting and unsolvable. In fact, according to the Barna Group, 39 percent of Gen Zers feel anxious about their future. As a result, Statesman wishes to step away from our impending madness. And it's not just the scope of these issues, given their vast potential in reaching constituencies across the globe, but also the powerlessness of how people feel when looking to support systems to cope.

Even when we look at the one institution that is supposed to save us, the federal government, which we would expect to enact change as it is one of the strongest institutions that can do so, it seems to be dysfunctional under the Trump Administration. According to a 2023 Gallup Poll,  at least half of Gen Z holds very little trust in our government . Without help from a central governing body to resolve these issues it erodes our trust resulting in us pushing these institutions away.

Worse, older generations often reprimand us, exclaiming we are dependent on our screens and oblivious to our surroundings compared to the hardwork and perseverance of their own youth. They proceed to call us lazy and go on about how when they were kids, a prosperous time in American history where housing was cheaper, wages were higher, and college was less expensive. Often, they pressure us to do something about these issues without lamenting their impact in creating the burden of being tasked with impossibilities. In the past, they failed to prevent issues that were way more manageable back then, such as climate change and obesity. As a result, these issues were brushed off then for them to enjoy their lives at Gen Z’s expense. Today, Statesman underscores that we live in a world where economic conditions are worse, college tuition is soaring into the six digits, and democracy seems on the cusp of destruction.

So, instead of actively facing these issues, we brush it off. We make a sly joke, pretending not to care, when in reality, we do. Often, this leads to a destigmatization and mocking of large-scale and sometimes catastrophic events, which further disconnect us from societal issues. Today, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), on average, American youth witness 2,000 acts of violence on television by the age of 18. While such atrocities occur elsewhere, our environment of Stevenson High School, which fosters a highly challenging academic ambiance around us at all times, squeezes us into staying focused on a tunnel vision of the future instead of a broader scope of our world. So without space to think about these issues, we push them out of our head which creates feelings of apathy, and eventually satirization of rapidly worsening issues.

And while that cowardice towards issues today may seem surprising, we cope in so many unintentional ways. From endlessly scrolling on our phones to putting our heads down to focus on the present, we try to shove these seemingly “future” issues all down. We want to live our lives in a bubble because that’s easy. 

According to a New Morning Consult Pro poll, nearly 53 percent of Gen Zers doomscroll - a term describing relentlessly scrolling on short-form content in social media. In a 2023 Gallup Poll, nearly half of Gen Z felt often or always anxious, a symptom of being held down by the cargo of our collective future. 

These statistics aren’t just simple numbers on a page, they represent a pattern of discontent, mental illness, and breakdown from the level of stress incurred from these issues. Clearly, we aren’t okay, though we may appear visually so. 

Worse, every day we fail to take action is a day another school is shot up, another climate change causing natural disaster killing hundreds, their names appearing for just a fraction of a second on our phone screen before they are forgotten. All because we don't want to face our issues and fight for our future. 

But is this a bad thing? Do we have an obligation to fix these issues that previous generations have created? 

We argue that in order to best shape the future of ours and younger generations, we should focus on what we can control - which is working to fix these global issues in the present else we risk the downfall of our society as we know it.

Firstly, we need to learn about these issues. HSDA suggests we avoid procrastinating on our problems and start taking action with smaller steps. Viewing it as a less daunting task, and instead, simply trying to read the news a little every day, bringing to light new solutions, and creating public discourse can go a long way in creating a more prepared generation in what may be the fierce battle of our lifetimes.

Then start advocating. Don’t just repost a simple message on your Instagram story. Being an activist means being “active” so we need to do so through pushing our opinions out there. So, go out there and talk to local officials to create change, write articles on what needs to be done to solve these issues, and speak out at social events to bring awareness and change. Collective local change creates national change.  

Finally, we must unite and act. As we grow older, go to college, and eventually join the workforce, we become the primary generation and therefore need to be at the forefront of fighting these issues. From advocates in our current youth, we need to transform ourselves into efficient solution makers that can swiftly implement legislation that is statistically supported and hits the core of these issues: reversing oil drilling, national gun policy, and AI regulation frameworks, to name a few. 

Lastly, to bridge the gap between generations, we need to work together to utilize our current blueprints in solving these issues. For some of these problems, proposals are already in play - we just need to implement it with accuracy and precision. But for others problems, it is way easier to follow the four step process: Learn, Advocate, Act, Unite. Start in your community. Look around, don’t just mindlessly repeat your daily routine. Have the mental freedom to actively search for solutions on the local level and find ways to bring attention to those solutions.

In the context of our status quo, completing these steps solves other rampant issues with our generation. We may be too reliant on social media for information: according to a survey by New Morning Consult Pro, 63 percent of Gen Zers claim they turn to social media once  a week for news. Or, the constant firehose of misinformation that we consume without thought. Implementing these steps can help indirectly combat these issues too. From there, we can turn discourse into solutions, which creates solutions instead of moving our lives along without change. We can prevent politicians from lining the pockets of oil executives, we can build guardrails for AI instead of letting it spiral off uncontrollably, and we can work to fix the budget issues for expensive welfare programs. And while the Republican-controlled government seems bleak, our mindset and attitude dictates the progress they can make. 

Though cliche, nothing about our situation is a façade. We may have been dealt a worse deck, but in reality, we are the dealers of our future. So, don’t fold; Go all in - to make sure the cards can still exist for our future.