I began this essay in October 2022, but life intervened, and I never finished it. Looking at it with a fresh eye, I think it’s still worth publishing. Though my teens and their close friends are doing well in 2024, I suspect many are still struggling and will be for a long time.
To be the mother of a teenager in 2022 is to regard all members of Gen Z, born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, with some measure of pity and compassion. However badly they behave, however ill-equipped they seem for civil discourse, however bizarre their beliefs, you know it’s not their fault, and there but for the grace of God goes your own child.
Take Anna, 20, and Phoebe, 21, who recently paid a visit to London’s National Gallery, positioned themselves in front of Van Gogh’s 1888 painting “Sunflowers,” and shrugged off their coats to reveal matching t-shirts with giant skulls on the back. They emptied two cans of tomato soup on “Sunflowers” and, having gotten everyone’s attention, performed a synchronized routine completely lacking in beauty or charm, as if the Nothing from The Neverending Story had chomped through the Ziegfeld Follies, leaving a void of indescribable dreariness in its wake.
Both girls rummaged through their clothes to locate tubes of glue. Crouching in a puddle of orange soup, they applied glue to their left palms and affixed them to the gray wall behind them. The pink-haired girl launched into a memorized speech: “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of the planet and its people? . . . Millions of cold, hungry families can’t even afford to heat a tin of soup!”
Wait, was this true? Where were these families, eating cold soup from the tin? At any rate, it gave the pink-haired girl’s actions some thematic unity. She brandished her empty soup can at the audience, shaking with emotion, as orange soup dripped down the painting. Then security showed up.
What happened to these girls? Why were they so miserable and angry? Barely out of childhood, they were already convinced that they were living in a rotten society on a doomed planet.
In fact, Gen Z is the unhappiest cohort in living memory. According to a recent survey of 18-to-24-year-olds, 42% have a diagnosed mental health condition and almost 1 in 4 reported having more bad days than good. Most said their mental health worsened during the Covid-19 lockdown, when a year-plus of fearful isolation replaced the milestone experiences of youth. Adolescent suicide attempts shot up during the lockdown, as did their reports of self-harm: Teens flooded into the ER for mental symptoms while their risk of hospitalization from the virus remained miniscule. In a 2021 series about Europe’s Gen Z, The Guardian called them “a sacrificed generation” and found that many had been “radicalized” by 2020, which revealed to them that “society is run by the old, for the old.”
In my neck of the woods, suburban California, the pink-haired girl from the Van Gogh souping would not be out of place. For years, I’ve watched her mini-mes trudge into middle school in drab, shapeless clothes: unhealthy-looking kids who already seem weary and burnt out. All of them have smartphones; all of them wore cloth masks for a year; all of them have had it drilled into them since kindergarten that they must “solve” climate change or expect global devastation. Most were informed in 2022 that, actually, cloth masks make no difference, but it’s still good they were forced to wear one seven hours a day, including during outdoor recess and sports, because it showed they cared about others. Most no longer have the open, sensitive faces of children. By age 12, many of them appear shut down and cynical: worker ants marching into the factory, resigned to carrying out random directives no one expects to last long, or be inherently rewarding, or make sense.
Every morning of the Year Of Child Masks, I’d sit in the car at school drop-off and think: These poor kids. When I try to imagine the mental world they inhabit, my mind boggles. As a young person, my life was radically simpler than it is for Gen Z, who labor under adult expectations both crushing and incoherent.
Quaint as it seems, my generation (Gen X) grew up with the understanding that the society we lived in was stable and basically good. Popular movies were good-natured and often comic, featuring scrappy individualists who bucked authority but whose hearts were in the right place. Protagonists were pro-NYC (Ghostbusters), pro-Chicago (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), pro-women (Nine to Five), pro-racial harmony (The Blues Brothers), and pro-human (The Terminator). Most teen pop songs were catchy paeans to romantic love. Everyone watched family sitcoms (The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Full House) amid a general sense that having children was desirable and normal. Even if you lacked a strong religious or cultural identity, or had no relatives nearby, or your parents were divorced (all true for me), the ambient culture kept you afloat and optimistic. America seemed full of possibilities for love, work, and adventure, and your job was to set off like a hero in a fairytale and seek your fortune.
Not till college were you somberly informed that America was oppressive and in dire need of overhaul. But by then, your personality had been formed for two decades. When my Feminist Studies professor made us watch The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and write about our lives’ similarity to the dystopia onscreen, this struck me as a crock of shit. My life was nothing at all like The Handmaid’s Tale. My worldview had been shaped by Ferris Bueller, smartass, who didn’t like “-isms” and whose idea of a good time was skipping school.
2024 update:
Climate Activists Throw Soup on the Mona Lisa (Jan. 29, 2024)
Texting to my own teenagers for discussion fodder
I think a lot about the concept of agency and what needs to be done in a larger context to remind people that whereas the world will always have problems, you will always have the ability to make it better in your own way. This is true even existentially.