Does Gen Z have a resilience problem?

The flattening of the happiness curve

This decline is evident in the visible flattening of the happiness curve.

In recent years, the previous hump-shaped curve in mental ill-health has become a linear decline with age, with younger U.S adults reporting more days of poor mental health and more despair than older adults. As it turns out, comfort sought through brand loyalty, mass consumerism, or international shipping has not be a sufficient substitute for financial independence, stable employment, and friendship.

Although Gen Z may be on it with bringing the therapy talk into our workspaces and amongst our peers, we’re unlikely to see a positive slope on the happiness curve whilst these systemic problems persist. That is to say, therapy talk is all well and good, but as far as being forced to live within this oppressive system of capitalism in order to merely survive – from buying groceries to having warm water goes – it doesn’t pay the bills. Nor, indeed, does it get you a workspace to bring it to if you don’t already have one.

Instead of having what previous generations might call ‘resilience’ and sticking out an unfulfilling and poorly paid job, Gen Z have developed terms like ‘bed rotting’, ‘minimum mondays’, ‘quiet quitting’, and ‘goblin mode’.

Each of these cooping mechanisms have been made easier since technology and concurrent digital platforms have developed, which has made working from home a mainstay of many office job adverts rather than a relative luxury of the digital sector.

Presented as ‘self-care’, these tactics actually espouse a devastating individualisation – and therefore significant reduction in the rate of success – of resistance. Trade unions are replaced by solo scrolling and the idea of a vocation, arguably one of the cornerstones of socialist ideology, and property ownership, has become largely inaccessible to many.

Put this way, our response to it as individuals, which tends to involve forgoing any kind of ‘work’ all together (however hyperbolically this desire is expressed) is indelibly lacking. However, as a collective generation with access to only the resources limited by previous generations who are quick to claim that the main problem is our resilience, personally, I sort of see where we’re coming from.

A couple of years ago, I had a boss who liked to tell me that ‘I’d never be able to afford a mortgage, not in this economy,’ as if his age, status, and position of authority didn’t make him a direct participant in, and product of, the generations before us who’ve made this so.

You’d think, optimistically, that this might mean that the quality of jobs available would be reactively on the rise. And sure, compared to sending children down mines or up chimneys, a minimum wage at MacDonalds or a soul-destroying yet salaried office job might not seem so bad.

But, in characteristic Gen Z fashion, I resist reducing our inability to be optimistic about our – of the world’s – future to a lack of resilience.

Resilience is only for the working classes?

From a class perspective, I do think privilege plays a large part in many people’s aversion to putting up with less than ideal situations, or even to working at all.

The idea that we can just not turn up to work one day because we might not feel like it, or that we can keep quitting jobs until we find the right one, is unrealistic for the majority of (young) people who don’t have a trust fund or an allowance.

In Norway, by contrast, Hermundur Sigmundsson, a professor of psychology at the Norwegian university of science and technology, has led a programme to increase ‘grit’ amongst young people – with positive results.

This ‘I CAN’ programme, developed by MOT (short for “Motivation”) intends to teach young people the value of effort and long-term dedication as well as a more optimistic attitude to developing skills.

Rather than creating circumstances in which people have no choice but to do something they hate in order to put food on the table, children in year 10 participating in this study were encouraged to spend time on things they liked in order to develop a passion.

Despite some of the study’s questionable and potentially stereotypically binary results, such as the suggestion that boys have a greater need for passion than girls, the emphasis on improving young people’s mental health through fostering passion and dedication in tandem is what teaching resilience should look like.

Instead of an archaic view of resilience then, perhaps what gen z needs is a revival, of the revolutionary kind. A renewed interest not just in our own future, but that of generations which will come after us. And a passion for making changes now that will positively impact the situations of the generations that came before as well.

Gen Z don’t need more resilience, or to embrace quiet quitting or bed rotting or any of the other trends that prevent us from facing the world before us head on.

What Gen Z needs is to organise ourselves, collectively, and to take matters into our own hands. We don’t need to develop more ways of hiding away from the world, of scapegoating populations, or of repackaging inaccurate and racist views about the availability of economic remuneration because change feels impossible.

Instead we need to find ways of genuinely, sustainably, and abidingly, changing the bureaucratic and capitalistic systems that have infected it.