Why we actually should worry about Gen Z

Gen Z is accused of a lot of things.

We’re soft, too woke, and emotional snowflakes. We can’t order drinks at the bar, we’re not partying, and we can’t make small talk. So it’s no wonder why I tend to find myself standing in as my generation’s lead defense attorney at the dinner table with family, particularly during this season of giving.

But what if there’s some truth to all this? Could Gen Z’s ethical codes and moral values really be diverging from previous generations? And what does it mean for society if it turns out that young people really are more individualistic and — gasp — maybe even “coddled”?

To answer these questions — and determine if it should matter that Gen Z doesn’t want to drink or have tough conversations — I spoke with Daniel A. Cox, the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, where he focuses his research on Gen Z and American families.

“Whether you’re talking about educational institutions, political institutions, or religious institutions,” he told me, “we need people to come into these places and not think that they’re the most important person in the room.” Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You have a new report out that dives into the moral and ethical views that young Americans hold today. What’s the upshot?

There’s an individualistic orientation cutting across so many domains of life: education, religious life, family life, and views on marriage, and Americans seem to be judging everything in life by how well they meet our individual needs. Institutions and relationships only have purpose in helping us meet our own goals. That’s been a fundamental shift. Now you’re seeing it in basically every aspect of American life, and it’s particularly dramatic for young people.

Young people want personal flexibility. And it has percolated around in various sorts of cultural trends that you may have seen or heard of, like the idea of going “no contact” with friends, parents, siblings, or partners and separating yourself from “toxic” people. The idea is that if these relationships are not serving your immediate needs well, the correct approach is to end them, instead of seeing that there is value in messy relationships and tending to them.

Wait, so we’re essentially raising a generation of coddled narcissists and yappers who think they’re main characters? (Kids these days!)

That might not be how I would characterize it, but there is a fundamental truth in that when you tell young people and kids that they’re the most important thing, that they can be everything, that we kind of inculcate these values of personal achievement and betterment and improving yourself and knowing yourself — it’s so much focused on these individual metrics as opposed to broader social needs.

And your research backed this up?

Yes. This generation has grown up understanding that their needs are different and need to take priority over anything else. It’s the Lake Wobegon question. We asked people to what extent their parents thought that they were average or not when they were growing up.

For older Americans, most of them said that they thought their parents viewed them as average. But the youngest generation rejects this view. They’re far more likely to think they are special, above average. Part of what’s going on there is that parents today are investing so many more resources in their kids. They have smaller families. And so young people as children are getting so much more parental attention and resources. It’s not as if this generation came out of the womb more narcissistic — it’s that they are being raised in homes where their needs are often put above those of the family more broadly. And so that really shifts both the function of family life, [and] how individual members see themselves in it.

But how does that result in changing morals? What specifically are young people valuing differently?

It creates an imperative for self-help and self-improvement: that there is so much happening out there, that it’s a really tough world, and that I need an edge, I need to put all my resources, all my focus, into improving myself.

You see this in the dating context: whether they’re manosphere-adjacent types or not, but influential voices arguing for healthy eating, working out, focusing on yourself. All these things are about sort of self-improvement for the point of dating, but none of them focus on building out a more robust social network, helping your friends, seeing what you can do to be of service to your community. And those things are actually really important for well-being.

Young people are also focused on a concept of cultural curation, that we want to curate our own experiences and our own ways of being. And that leads to there being no “right” way to be, so you can be anything, as opposed to sort of traditionally when we said, “No, there are institutions that will guide you and help form your conscience and help you live a good life.”

How does that affect young people’s views of sex, gender, and socializing?

What’s really interesting is to compare millennials and Gen Z. For millennials, there was a growing openness to different ways of living, different sexual identities, and when you think about sexual ethics, it was a sort of stark change from the baby boomer generation. Premarital sex, sex between people of the same gender, were all more acceptable for millennials. Some people thought that this would just continue with Gen Z, that we are seeing this long time trend towards growing acceptability of a variety of different personal behaviors, a variety of different sexual behaviors.

But there’s a problem when you don’t have any limits like that. Some of the most hedonistic, self-serving, and destructive behavior that ought probably to be judged as inappropriate or harmful gets caught up in the same ethos of, well, we need to be accepting of people who make different decisions. And so part of what Gen Z’s wrestling with now is where to draw some of those lines.

The desire for “traditional” lifestyles or living is really a reflection of this: wanting to draw some firmer lines about what’s right and what’s wrong. The difference is that a lot of this negotiating is happening online, since institutions are playing a far smaller role in laying out acceptable versus unacceptable behavior.

So you see a lot of young people who are wrestling with questions of morality and ethics in places like Reddit — the “Am I the Asshole?” subreddit, for example. Young people are essentially crowdsourcing morals. But there’s a tension there: The idea that we just all want to live completely unconstrained lives of personal freedom is running into young people seeing there are real downsides to it.

In what other areas is Gen Z different?

One aspect is free expression and free speech. We found that young women are most likely to say that you should feel free to express yourself, even if it makes other people around you uncomfortable. Again, it’s this idea that my individual needs trump any kind of social consequence.

There’s also a decline in drinking among Gen Z and the youngest adults. We’ve been aware of that trend for some time, but it turns out there’s a moral dimension to this. So many young men view drinking alcohol as morally wrong. We found some 27 percent of young men ages 18 to 29 held that view, compared to 14 percent of seniors (65+).

It might be tied up with the more health-conscious sort of lifestyle and experiences of young people. They view that there are businesses out there whose sole purpose is to sell products that aren’t good for you. But it’s also tied to the fact that alcohol has historically been a social lubricant, and this generation is also socializing less and differently than previous generations.

It might also be that drinking alcohol is viewed as less of a social activity at all among this generation. When I was growing up, going drinking meant always hanging out with your friends. It wasn’t an activity you did by yourself, even if you were at a pre-party or whatever you were doing. It was at its heart something that was communal. That may not be how Gen Z is understanding it. They don’t necessarily see the social benefits of drinking and alcohol consumption.

So I hear that often from Zoomers who are younger than me, but then I hear the rebuttal that this trend is tied to economic anxiety: it’s too expensive to go out, it’s too expensive to buy drinks, etc. But it seems there’s a moral dimension underlying it.

I get frustrated a little bit about some of the national discourse around this stuff because we, especially, but not just pollsters and social scientists, like to think that every generation is sort of having novel experiences: that whether it’s due to technology or changes in culture or society, that this new generation has things entirely different. But most generations of young people who, when they got their first job, were financially strapped, or were eking it by, have socialized like this. So I don’t think it’s a strong argument to sort of say, “Well, we can’t go out because it’s too expensive.” What is actually happening is people don’t want to go out because there’s this sort of pronounced feeling of risk aversion.

I’ve heard a lot about a so-called rise in religious belief, in prayer, in spirituality among young people. It was one of the big claims the right was making over the last year, to show a cultural swing. You’ve also done some research and thinking on this, and you’re critical — is it more about making an aesthetic out of religion?

Yes, and like an identity marker. And again, I don’t want to in any way diminish the meaning of these activities. So if you download a prayer app on your phone, or a meditation app, these may be things that are important to you and your well-being, but they are in every sense individual.

Most people are not doing these activities in group settings. They’re not going out and thinking about how they can be of service to their community or other members of their church or place of worship. They’re not necessarily volunteering or wanting to engage in educative activities. It’s in service of their own well-being or personal growth.

And so that is their defining feature. And it’s kind of an outgrowth, the newest iteration, of self-help culture of the ’90s. And it becomes very difficult, once you have ingrained that this is how things should be, to change your view of how prayer and religion should work.

Did you find any ways to prove this difference?

We asked a question in the survey; we asked about prayer. Not just frequency of prayer — we know young people pray less than older folks — but we asked, among those who do pray, “Are you praying for yourself? Are you praying for someone else?” And one of the biggest generation gaps that we see in this survey was when it came to people praying for others. Only 46 percent of young women who prayed said that they prayed on behalf of someone else compared to 72 percent of senior women. And that’s just a huge gap. We do see gaps among younger and older men, but we see huge gaps among women.

But aren’t older people more likely to have more and deeper bonds and relationships, and want to pray for other people?

I think it’s partly cultural. If you were raised in a church, you sort of realize and understand that you go in there, you’re not the most important person there. The experience is to be outward-focused, to focus on the needs of, and the commitment you have to, the faith, to your religious leaders, to God, depending on your faith. In the case of prayer, you can certainly pray for a family member, an aunt and uncle, a grandparent, you don’t need to be married, you don’t need to have kids. But I think you do need to have the experiences of learning and seeing this modeled in ways that make sense.

So how does this all translate to young people’s politics, political identities, their views of life going forward?

It explains why so many young people want to call themselves independents and are distrustful of political parties. The rise of individualism and the decline in institutional trust are the engines of populism. It really becomes difficult to govern when people are so mistrusting. It gets really difficult to assemble coalitions. You have this experience of either political party, once they attain power, it becomes very difficult to keep it, because people are just always dissatisfied and always distrustful.

And you see it in views of political parties: The group that is most likely to say that they have an unfavorable opinion of both political parties is young men. So you have this political disaffection that becomes a hallmark of the politics of young people, again, especially young men, because they’re growing up in a time of political polarization, deep distrust, and individualism.