Gen Z
Gen Z, Inadvertent Humor
Suzy Weiss complains on behalf of an entire hapless generation.
In a week or so I will have left my twenties behind for, I’m told, my thirties. I’m not much of a birthday celebrater, but I have been reflecting on the past decade, and marveling at how little I seemed to have learned during it. Sure, I managed to pay my taxes, and apply for a couple of apartments. I can hold a job. Well, I can hold a job where the boss is my sister.
But I can’t do a lot of things. I don’t really drive. I’m too scared to cook most meats. I’ve never ironed anything—I do a poor man’s steam, which is when you hang your garment in the bathroom while you shower and hope the heat gets the wrinkles out. The other day I called my dad to ask how many thousands are in a million. (It’s a thousand!) …
In an airy, wood-accented event space in Brooklyn, a few dozen adults gathered to talk about their next phases of life. …
“Remember,” Alex Simon, the facilitator of this workshop, called out to the room, “Listen deeply. No fixing, no problem solving.” The class, Life Transitions: Crisis and Change, is part of a series she started. It’s called Lifeshop. Simon, 29, started teaching it to undergraduates at Yale two years ago, then adapted it into a three-month course open to the public in New York. It began in March, and since then, she estimates that 900 to 1,000 people have come through the doors.
“It’s all the things that I wish I learned in college but never did,” said Simon.
Those things include: how to listen, how to fight with someone you love, how to apologize, and how to deal with a friendship breakup, as well as navigating big life transitions. You know, those things that every single person has to do but which make most of us feel completely unprepared.
“At every single workshop, people say, ‘I had no idea it wasn’t just me,’ whether it’s navigating an inner critic or feeling like their life is up in flames,” Simon told me. “We have this habit of taking things that are kind of universal and making them a proof of our own brokenness, or inadequacy. The beauty of doing it in a group is that we realize it’s not just us.”
It’s easy to make fun of young people who find it hard to be adults. They’re eons behind where their parents were at their age. Young people today have fewer kids, no houses, and finance everything from clothes to concerts with layaway plans. A new Gallup poll of Gen Z found that fewer than 44 percent of them report feeling prepared for the future.
Gen Z has to be this f***** up because so many Baby Boomers were left-wing douchebags.
