Gen Z Isn't Powerless Against Technology

And we shouldn't tell them they are.

Gen Z has little familiarity with "any sense of community," writer Freya India said in a teary-eyed rant recently.

"Attention hijacking is the thing I worry most about on a long term basis for humanity's thriving," wrote Jackson Dahl. "Techno-capitalism is slowly but surely turning us into something non-human. Attention is upstream of everything: presence, agency, love."

Laments like these are everywhere online. Every week, new laments from or about Gen Z seem to go viral, spewing desperate and desolate pronunciations about technology.

The doom is pushed by some actual members of Gen Z and even more by the press and pundits eager to fret over kids these days and to moralize about technology. And the big idea undergirding it seems to be that young people are absolutely powerless to resist being lonely, degraded zombies—phone always in hand, unable to connect with fellow human beings, addicted to the dopamine hits they attain from social media likes and content slop.

But who are we helping by shilling the Doomed Zoomer narrative? It's certainly not young people who are being served by it.

And older adults owe it to younger generations to stop enabling their disempowerment and stop pushing the lie that we have no agency when it comes to technology.

Community Is Yours for the Taking

When I look at the world around me, I see endless opportunities for community. Book clubs. Churches. Volunteer opportunities. Arts events. Political groups. Mom's meetups. Programs aimed at young people. Programs aimed at old people. Classes. Lectures. Local sports. Comic cons. Community markets. Quiz nights at neighborhood bars. Charity walks. Not to mention all the events taking place on college campuses.

And the internet actually helps us to see, more than ever before, how much is taking place off the internet, in a way that simply wasn't possible when I was very young.

In India's comments about the lack of community, she mentions the fact that young people can have food delivered or check out in stores without ever talking to anyone. It's the kind of complaint that alarmists eat up, because it is a big difference that is enabled by technology. But big doesn't mean profound. How many of us would really say that interacting with grocery-store checkout clerks helps us feel more connected to our communities? I certainly wouldn't.

In any event, there's nothing stopping most members of Gen Z from using a checkout counter in a grocery store or leaving the house to get restaurant food if they think this will help them.

And there's nothing stopping them from going out and joining in some sort of community event or group activity.

People will say that phones are stopping them. And video games. And streaming services. But embracing these diversions to the exclusion of other activities is a choice.

If we believe in revealed preference, we might assume that while some folks say they want more community, they actually prefer solitary or at-home pursuits. I think this is somewhat true. When it comes to young people, however, I think some of it might just be ingrained—they have always had these diversions to turn to, so they haven't necessarily learned to flex other muscles. And with so many people telling them they can't—that the allure of tech is too strong—well, why even try?

You Can Put Down the Phone (With Effort) 

Nonetheless, I look around me and I see plenty of people—older millennials (like me), younger millennials, members of Gen Z—who have perfectly healthy relationships with their phones and with technology.

I know for many people my age, this has been a process—a gradual lessening of dependency on the dopamine provided by social media, or the fear of missing something vital if one isn't always on it. The withdrawal sometimes comes as a natural result of growing responsibilities at work or at home. It sometimes comes as one notices a declining return on investment. Often, both.

Personally, I probably spent too much time on Twitter and other online platforms for many years. Now, I'm barely on them. In part, this is due to having small kids and preferring them to the people on my phone. But my disillusionment with social media actually started before having kids, as I realized that the kinds of online controversies and content that had delighted me for so long had started to grow predictable and boring. I also realized that social media itself had changed, in a way that made it much less about community building or conversation. And I increasingly missed the things—like reading fiction—that social media had replaced for me.

But the journey from "this is not serving me" to actually spending a lot less time on the internet was not effortless. I had become accustomed to reaching for my phone whenever I was bored, or just whenever I had a moment of free time. I had become accustomed to thinking every passing observation, every social event, every potentially witty comment needed to be documented in real time. I may not have had social media as a teenager, like many kids today do, but I was on Facebook since 2004, Twitter since 2007, and Instagram since 2011. By 2021, when I started pulling back, I had more than a decade and a half of training my brain to work in this way.

Changing these habits and patterns of thinking required conscious effort for a time; now, I have to sometimes remind myself to check in on X or Bluesky. (It is, after all, still my job to stay on top of certain news and trends.) At night on the couch, I reach for a book rather than my phone.

This is how habits work. To build them or change them requires conscious effort. You do actually need to train your brain to fire in a different way. It won't feel natural at first, but it's kind of a "fake it until you make it" situation. And you can make it! I am far from some sort of paragon of willpower, and I can assure you that neither are my friends who are using social media less these days. It takes an effort, but it is not necessarily difficult —though your mileage, of course, may vary.

I'm afraid, however, that any sort of effort will start to seem pointless to young people who are constantly being told that it's all hopeless—that techno-capitalists have hijacked their brains, community is dead, and so on. That the only way to refocus their attention is with chemical intervention. That their problems—with motivation, with finding a relationship, with giving up bad habits, with whatever is difficult in life—stem from unstoppable, all-powerful forces beyond your control. That everyone in your generation is miserable, so you might as well be, too.

It's Not True

There are, in fact, wide swaths of young Americans out there enjoying their lives and being optimistic about the future and having healthy relationships with technology. You can probably see it around you, if you exist outside of certain well-off, hyperintellectual or hyperanxious circles. Even if you don't, you can see it in polls. For instance, the 2024 Voices of Gen Z survey.

In that poll, some 79 percent of the Gen Z survey participants said they feel optimistic about the future. And just 7 percent of the 12- to 27-year-oldsin the survey described their mental health as "poor."

A Harvard Public Opinion Project poll from this past spring, which looked at Americans ages 18 to 29, found only 18 percent "do not feel a strong sense of community anywhere"—about the same percentage as those saying they are "deeply connected to at least one community." The largest percentage—26 percent—said they feel "somewhat" connected to a community, while 24 percent weren't sure.

Pew Research found this year that most teens do not think that social media is a net negative for them personally—only 14 percent said their own social media experiences were "mostly negative."

Meanwhile, 28 percent said their own experiences with social media were "mostly positive," and a majority (58 percent) said it was a mix.

Teens were, however, much more likely to tell Pew that social media is "mostly negative" for their peers. Perhaps they're just reflecting what they see among their friends or classmates, though it would seem a little weird to consider your own experience mostly positive if everyone near you was miserable.

I suspect that the discrepancy between how teens think of their own experiences online and how it's affecting their generation might come down to the fact that they're constantly being told it's bad for their generation. Commentary in the media, from academics, and from politicians is constantly telling young people that social media is relentlessly bad for them, which might make them echo this sentiment even when it doesn't conform to their own experiences.

It's Not Helping

Look, I understand why millennials and older adults engage in this sort of doomsaying. Both Big Tech and capitalism are entities that many people love to hate. Calling for controls on social media companies is easier—and more politically palatable these days—than asking people to take responsibility for themselves. And generations immemorial have worried that younger people are being ruined by the media, entertainment, or technology habits of their day. We've been through this before with novels, radio, TV, video games, every new form of popular music, early eras of social media, and so on. The idea that every other time was overblown but this time it's not seems just a bit too neat.

I also get why the doomsaying messages on this front seem so omnipresent. Who is going to publish (or read) an article from someone saying, "I have a healthy relationship with technology. I have a robust community of friends and family and colleagues in my life. I don't feel like my phone is preventing me from self-actualization. It's all good." There's no drama there. No newsworthiness. Nothing to gawk at or stress over. There's simply no audience for that sort of thing. As in so many areas, we're getting a skewed picture because that picture sells.

And I think I understand why members of Gen Z might feel powerless to define their relationship to technology in a different way too. For one thing, they've got the bulk of the adult world and all sorts of fancy institutions telling them they are powerless.

For another, they do not know a life before current technologies.

This is something India mentions, and she thinks this leaves Gen Z especially vulnerable to tech's degradation. Maybe so.

But this also leaves them ignorant of what life was like in the Before Times, and this, in turn, overbiases them against the present. In my experiences talking with younger people, many seem to be under the false impression that the things they're struggling with now—relationships, sex, motivation, meaning, attention—were somehow easy before our modern digital age. Having lived through supposedly simpler times, I can assure them that, for millennials at least, this was not true. We struggled just as mightily with all of these things. And consuming media from past eras will tell you that we were far from the first generation to do so.

Relationships are hard. Figuring out how to live is hard. Being in one's 20s is hard.

I'm not suggesting that there are no new challenges for young people today, or that the old challenges might not take on slightly different hues. But most of the despair about Gen Z that I see is just despair about the same old stuff, with technology now being used as both a culprit and an excuse for not making a change.

Enabling this feeling of learned helplessness in young people isn't empowering or kind.

Older generations—especially those of us still young enough to have grown up with apps and social media—owe it to Gen Z and the generations coming after them to take young people's concerns about tech seriously while also maintaining some perspective and modeling some good sense. We are not slaves to algorithms. We have agency. We can change habits that aren't serving us, no matter what year we were born. It just won't happen if we abrogate all responsibility.

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Today's Image

Las Vegas | 2020 (ENB/Reason)