Gen Z faces a double disruption: AI-driven technological change and institutional instability Three distinct Gen Z cohorts have emerged, each with different relationships to digital reality A version of the barbell strategy is splitting career paths between "safety seekers" and "digital gamblers" Our fiscal reality is quite stark right now, and that is shaping how young people see opportunities

When I talk to young people from New York or Louisiana or Tennessee or California or DC or Indiana or Massachusetts about their futures, they're not just worried about finding jobs, they're worried about whether or not the whole concept of a "career" as we know it will exist in five years.

When a main path to financial security comes through the algorithmic gods rather than institutional advancement (like when a single viral TikTok can generate more income than a year of professional work) it fundamentally changes how people view everything from education to social structures to political systems that they’re apart of.

Gen Z 1.0: The Bridge Generation: This group watched the digital transformation happen in real-time, experiencing both the analog and internet worlds during formative years. They might view technology as a tool rather than an environment. They're young enough to navigate digital spaces fluently but old enough to remember alternatives. They (myself included) entered the workforce during Covid and might have severe workplace interaction gaps because they missed out on formative time during their early years. Gen Z 1.5: The Covid Cohort: This group hit major life milestones during a global pandemic. They entered college under Trump but graduated under Biden. This group has a particularly complex relationship with institutions. They watched traditional systems bend and break in real-time during Covid, while simultaneously seeing how digital infrastructure kept society functioning. Gen Z 2.0: The Digital Natives: This is the first group that will be graduate into the new digital economy. This group has never known a world without smartphones. To them, social media could be another layer of reality. Their understanding of economic opportunity is completely different from their older peers.

Gen Z 2.0 doesn't just use digital tools differently, they understand reality through a digital-first lens. Their identity formation happens through and with technology.

Technology enables new forms of value exchange, which creates new economic possibilities so people build identities around these possibilities and these identities drive development of new technologies and the cycle continues.

different generations don’t just use different tools, they operate in different economic realities and form identity through fundamentally different processes. Technology is accelerating differentiation. Economic paths are becoming more extreme. Identity formation is becoming more fluid.

I wrote a very long piece about why Trump won that focused on uncertainty, structural affordability, and fear - and that’s what the younger Gen Z’s are facing. Add AI into this mix, and the rocky path gets rockier. Traditional professional paths that once promised stability and maybe the ability to buy a house one day might not even exist in two years. Couple this with increased zero sum thinking, a lack of trust in institutions and subsequent institutional dismantling, and the whole attention economy thing, and you’ve got a group of young people who are going to be trying to find their footing in a whole new world. Of course you vote for the person promising to dismantle it and save you.

His worlds can be isolated, smothering, grating, haunting, bleak, warm, familiar, alien, all at once. They are never dull and they are never someone else’s. Never sacrificing his weirdness, his staunch outlooks on life, or his vision, you can feel his fingerprints on everything he made, because nobody else possibly could have. Sometimes annoying with how opaquely abstract they can be, but never in a cynical way. He had a laser precise understanding of his control over an audience, and explored all the extremes that come with that. He wove dark, brutal, sometimes cruel tapestries of our own psyches and displayed them back to us with white glove care.

Despite being viewed as abstract or avant garde, there is an inescapable Americana to his work, with all of its horrific blemishes and stunning beauty, hand in hand just like the country itself.

Lynch’s art is uncomfortable, uncompromising, but never uncaring. Frigid surreality that could only be a product of warm humanity. Darkness will always coupled with light. After all, nightmares are still dreams.

I would argue that the core tenets of the average American consumer mindset in 2025, the perfect encapsulations of the noxious attitudes that led us to where we are now, come in the form of two particular phrases that have been parroted ad nauseam the last few years.

The first of which is the classic, “Let people enjoy things.” Deconstructing it, it really defines the entire first half of the decade in more ways than one. An invisible straw-man evil big Other that somehow controls whether or not people can “have fun”, a childish temper tantrum thrown by people still getting what they want caused by having to face any form of critical thinking for doing so, a shrieking demand for more pacification, it really has it all. Is it fine for people to have hobbies and interests and passions that don’t align with yours? Absolutely.

There is a large, crucial difference between “letting someone” enjoy something, and negligently allowing something toxic to fester and gradually spread untreated like ignored black mold. Our modern narcissism and individualism have made people so entrenched in their demands for consumption, that it’s hard to imagine who even is not letting people enjoy things at this point.

The all-but-hedonistic behavior of our modern day certainly doesn’t reflect a culture of people not being allowed to enjoy things, but rather one that wants to be able to enjoy things without having to think about it. Any sort of opposing belief, or conscious step back from the raging maw of consumption is met with complete indignation, as if their right to slop is being infringed upon.

Alternatively, chances for maturation or growth get flippantly put off for some other time that never comes, a complete refusal to actually analyze our relationship to the way we operate.

This brings us to the second defining phrase of the times that I’d like to break down, one that is constantly coupled with the former, the oft-repeated, aggressively vapid, “It’s not that deep.”

Part reaction to the supposed “intellectualism” and woke-ism of the 2010s, part rejection of personal responsibility for one’s own habits and actions, it most succinctly sums up the prevailing attitudes that have dictated the course of the Biden and now Trump 2.0 years. If our beautiful and twisted history has taught us anything, it’s that things are usually always that deep, but somehow we’ve began plugging our ears to that fact. It is a frankly dangerous indicator of the median population’s attitude towards growth or challenging oneself in any way.

In the realm of media, this rejection of the inherent depth of things has completely altered people’s understanding about those things. If one’s own scope of something is minimized, anything outside of that scope is easier to be written off as antagonistic, foreign, pretentious, or any other label that leads to dismissal. Valid, formal criticism, (sometimes even from a place of love!), gets brushed off as “hating” because the idea that someone thought about something in a deeper way and wasn’t pleased with what they found is abrasive to those unwilling to explore that same level of depth.

Additionally, this phrase has been the perfect excuse as evil rhetorics are unconsciously spread through seemingly innocuous or lighthearted means. “It’s just a meme, it’s not that deep.” quickly turns to “How did this propaganda spread so fast?”. Through the first 5 years of our decade, we have gradually let it become defined by half gestures and “meh” reactions, a drab grey monocultural sludge, and then have the audacity to wonder how it got that way. We let it slip away ourselves through embracing memetic psyops, “gotta hand it to ‘em”s and "letting people have fun”. Well now they’re having their fun, the question is, do you think they’ll return that favor to you?

Giant swaths of the population have both figuratively and literally thrown their masks away, and are perfectly dumbed down and pacified to be absolutely steamrolled by a whole new wave of regression and recession.

At the time of writing this, Tiktok has been banned and subsequently hours later unbanned, all with Donald Trump’s name fully plastered over the entire ordeal, in what can only come across as a very obvious ploy to swing more gullible idiots into supporting him. The problem with this blatant grab to try and become a hero of a ban that he initially pushed for however, is that it’s working scarily well. The tectonic shift that has been building steadily throughout the course of the failure of the Biden era has finally come for its biggest payoff yet. Capitalizing on people’s COVID fried, goldfish sized memories in order to continue to innocuously shift people right into submission.

The biggest takeaway from the election and gradual Vibe Shift is the powers that be realizing they had more numbers than they thought, that the middle of the bell curve is infinitely more manipulatable than expected. Either directly through propaganda, or indirectly through desensitization via prolonged exposure to the most concentrated, hallucinogenic stupidity available.

If a gun were being pointed in our face, why would we argue that it’s only harmful if someone pulled the trigger.

Another noticeable symptom of this mode of behavior we have fallen into is the warping of what used to be considered “playing devil’s advocate”, and how it has impacted the way we digest and talk about art.

Similar to the attitudes surrounding fast fashion, somewhere along the line people stopped caring about trying to be better than the Mall, even going so far as to fight on the Mall’s behalf out of pure, empty contrarianism. Popularity took the reins as the de-facto measurement of quality, the belief was planted that the mainstream has our artistic best interests in mind, and people militantly ride for that belief despite decades of proof of the opposite. Not knowing nor caring that they’re secretly advocating for overall worse quality of experiences for themselves.

Too many people want to play devil’s advocate but don’t possess the depth of knowledge, the insight, or nuance to do so, so they wind up just playing devil instead, blindly defending degradation rather than express a bit of concern for the way things are going.

It has brought us to where we are now, a legion of people ready to die on the hill of slop, so as not to make any ripples, without even wanting to know if there can be anything better than the lowest common denominator what was shoved down their throats. Taking the sides of the rich people and giant brands that want to give the consumer nothing above mediocrity. These people and places don’t deserve our benefit of the doubt, because they’ve already won.

Vehemently and vocally rejecting that mainstream and embracing what we know to actually be cool. The time for passivity is over, because this continued sliding by the mainstream is active. We know we can be smarter, more conscious consumers, aware of what’s better than the mall or the radio or the pointed propagandized memes on tiktok. We know there’s more rich experiences to be had, art to discover, statements to make, ways to expand our thought that will not be presented to us on a silver platter by giant corporations or industry machines. We can speak with our eyes, ears, voices, and most importantly wallets. If something sucks, say it and stand on it, because it is far too easy now to succumb to the “well everybody’s doing it” mentality.

My tolerance for bad faith devil’s advocate arguments that only contribute to spin the wheels of progress in place is gone. We have only a short amount of time on this earth and I don’t intend to waste it watching that window of opportunity be pissed away by someone else.

Every time you open your mouth is an opportunity to say something new, something of worth, and I do not want to waste even one moment. It’s time to get serious and realize yes it is that deep. It always has been. I can’t say for certain exactly what this counter-culture will manifest as or even look like specifically, but I do have faith that something can and will emerge. There is far too much talent, energy, emotion, conviction, and spirit out there to not.

Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.

in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.

What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.

the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.

The surrogates Trump assembled were able to appeal to the "frat bro or finance bro culture," says Janfaza, because "to them, many of these men who have built these companies, ecosystems and media platforms, show them a version of success to work toward." "The way that Trump was able to include many of these male figures in his cohort was very impactful," she added. "And while yes, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Beyonce also have massive, massive audiences, we have to understand that the way young people are consuming their media and entertainment just looks drastically different than it did for prior generations."

While readings like those that might come from an aura photographer had previously been done by assigning meanings to specific colors, a point system has emerged from teenagers on TikTok, where real-life interactions are gamified into gaining or losing “aura points.” There are celebrity compilations of “the worst aura moments of all time” and people posting concerns about losing aura because their boyfriend wants space. Taking care of your skin and taping your mouth while you sleep will gain you aura points. Same goes for developing an aesthetic, sitting in nature, making eye contact with women, using wired headphones, doing pull-ups, not speaking, and finding other friends with aura. While the aura math online is inconsistent and subjective (people usually debate the points in the comments), the general rule is you gain hundreds or thousands of points by doing something impressive, intriguing, charismatic, or authentic.

While learning how to auramaxx by preparing for conversations as an introvert and eating breakfast and working out in the morning may help some young men navigate life, and the mostly amusing aura point system may seem harmless, Derek Beres, author and co-host of Conspirituality, a podcast dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis, points out that auramaxxing content online is rife with misogyny. This comes as little surprise seeing as, according to Beres, wellness content online often has right-wing overlap, and looksmaxxing has roots within incel message boards. Aside from the obvious potential for harm toward women, Beres says that the pursuit of auramaxxing can also inevitably lead to guilt and shame for young men.

“Woke” vs. “Anti-woke” is a horribly exhausted and pointless framework, one which suggests binary simplicity where there is only boundless complexity, but beyond that, there was never any chance that there was going to be some clear victory for one or the other. What will emerge will be some synthesis of the two impulses.

I think there's gathering dissatisfaction with a common set of tropes regarding personal agency and mental health. In particular, I think that the dominance of the therapeutic assumption in American life, and the role of affirmation within it, will be challenged. Currently, an inescapable American cultural mode, particularly among the educated, is one of mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation.

Of course I want us to present people with alternative ways to feel about themselves and their mental health, but it can’t become just another catechism, a different checklist. There’s got to be an understanding that the human tools for confronting life are limited and contextual, some of them come from art and not from therapy, and that ultimately we’re all left to blunder along on our own paths, trying to achieve stability and self-ownership - but we’re not guaranteed to get either. So I would hope that this counter-movement would remain a matter of skeptical inquiry and not just another set of gurus.

Not getting what you want is a default and healthy status, not a tragedy, though you are perfectly within your rights to be unhappy about it, and people who do not give you everything you want are not inherently “toxic,” though you’re perfectly within your rights to be unhappy with them

Sick people have as much responsibility to manage their disorders as society has to give them the tools to manage them; you cannot ask others to give you accommodation for your disability if you refuse to take accountability for it yourself

If you want to be good to yourself, I suggest that you stop expecting society to be your therapist and go see licensed medical professionals in private to address the issues in your life that are appropriately treated that way. And if you want to be good to your society, I suggest you help to defeat the medicalization of everything, the casualization of the concept of trauma, the celebration of mental disorders, the assumption that everything that makes us unhappy is an injustice, the insistence that all conflict is abuse, and the infantilization of the human animal

Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, you just hate your job. Sometimes your boss isn’t a sociopath, he’s just correctly identified you as unqualified for a leadership position. Sometimes you really do have schizophrenia, only there’s nothing glamorous or exciting or romantic about it, and now you’re fat from meds and trying to hold down a steady job and going to support group to drink grainy coffee and hear people tell the same stories over and over again. And sometimes you’re just in pain because the world didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’re trying to scratch out a life you can live with, and you get overwhelmed with your mundane unhappiness on the subway home from work, and you think to yourself that it must be true that your suffering is something grander, something that calls out for medical attention and reasonable accommodation, something more that makes it easier.

There’s a fatal near-sightedness to the script: It may be possible to puzzle out the characters’ motivations in any given scene, but there’s no guarantee those motives will continue into the next one, and in fact they probably won’t. This lends the show an overall incoherence. There are sharp, funny, and even poignant moments, and it’s certainly beautifully shot, but it’s so impressed with the sheer abundance of its own ideas that it fails to commit to a genuine artistic perspective. Instead, it’s pure provocation. The show wants to shock viewers with its violent imagery and moral ambiguity, but provocation without perspective is just spectacle.

we have And Just Like That, a show whose first failure is its name. While the second season is currently dropping week by week without too much fanfare, the first season garnered almost as much attention as The Idol. Everyone was wondering how HBO could possibly reanimate the glittering albeit “problematic“ New York of Sex and the City in 2021, and they were right to wonder. The overly self-conscious reboot has been ridiculed mercilessly for trying to right the wrongs of the original series with a heavy hand—and at huge narrative costs: jammed-in “diversity” in the style of high-school science textbook covers, story lines that seem constructed solely to demonstrate the characters’ awareness of social issues. A friend recently described it to me as “Sesame Street for adults,” which made me laugh. (Of course I continue to watch.)

To describe the plot of And Just Like That would be impossible, because there are anywhere between six and 10 subplots happening at any given time. This is an almost poetic consequence of the creators trying to say too much—and please too many people—at once. A peek: Carrie’s husband has died (trauma plot), she’s navigating the world of podcasts (age plot) and pronouns (pride plot), grappling with her willingness to say vagina on air (sex plot), developing a friendship with Seema, her girlboss Indian real estate agent (new friend-of-color plot—each original cast member gets one), whose Birkin was just stolen (tough-on-crime plot?). This covers about 1% of it and leaves me with no time to introduce the other eight main characters. Whatever sense of curiosity and spirit propelled the original series is revived here only in rare glimpses. The rest is reheated Twitter discourse.

Both The Idol and And Just Like That are fueled by internet-sourced neuroticism. Each is overly focused on audience reception as it manifests online, only with different aims: one hopes to shock, the other to appease. These goals aren’t surprising—they merely demonstrate the inevitable result of mistaking a marketing strategy for an artistic one.

a global pandemic struck, markets crashed, and the possibility of a democratic socialist presidency in America started to fade. Much of our work with clients has been about how to address new audiences in a time of massive fragmentation and the collapse of consensus reality.

All the while, people have been eager to launch new products more focused on impressions than materiality, and “spending on experiences” has become the standard of premium consumption.

it’s time to reassess the consumer experience that came along with the neoliberal fantasy of “unlimited” movement of people, goods and ideas around the globe.

Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas. We also believe that the experience economy is dying, its key commodity (umami) has changed status, and nobody knows what’s coming next.

Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline. It was the X-factor that made a certain MA-1 worth 100x as much as its identical twin.

“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial. Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything.

What was actually happening was the enrichment of financial assets over the creation of any ‘real wealth’ along with corresponding illusions of progress. As very little of this newly minted money has been invested into building new productive capacity, infrastructure, or actually new things, money has just been sloshing around in a frothy cesspool – from WeWork to Juicero to ill-advised real estate Ponzi to DTC insanity, creating a global everything-bubble.

Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning. Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.

The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. What’s made us so gullible, and this whole process possible, was an inexhaustible appetite for umami.

eyond its synergistic effect, umami has a few other sensory effects that are relevant to our theory. For one, it creates the sense of thickness and body in food. (“Umami adds body…If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.”) For another, it’s released when foods break down into parts. (“When organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove when you cook meat, over time when you age a parmesan cheese, by fermentation as in soy sauce or under the sun as a tomato ripens. When glutamate becomes L-glutamate, that’s when things get “delicious.””) These three qualities: SYNERGY, IMPRESSION OF THICKNESS, and PARTS > WHOLE, are common to cultural umami, as well.

Umami hunting was a way for the West to consume an exotic, ethnic, global “taste” that was also invisible and up to their decoding / articulation.

when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.

strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is” “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be” “This is both too much and not enough” “I shouldn’t be here but i am” “This could be anywhere but it’s here”

Parts > Whole is just another way of saying a combination of things has emergent properties. In itself this doesn’t mean much, as almost any combination of things has emergent properties, especially in the domains of taste and culture. Coffee + vinegar is worse than its constitutive parts. A suit + sneakers is a greater kind of corny than either worn separately. Most emergence is trivial. The Umami Theory of Value centers on losing your sense of what’s trivial and what’s valuable.

If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident. Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time.

This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.

Whereas if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identities are opinions. Unfollow!

I’m the one severely triggered by statements like “Chaucer is misogynistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.” Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else

We are by now used to apocalyptic bad guys with the end of the world in mind, but it’s a long time since I went to the movies and saw an accurate representation of an ordinary sinner.

Spotting a hot young cellist, Olga, in the bathroom of her workplace, Tár later recognizes this same young woman’s shoes, peeking out from beneath those screens orchestra directors use to preserve the anonymity of “blind auditions.” Next thing we know Tár has given Olga a seat in her orchestra. Then decides to add Elgar’s Cello Concerto to the program, and to give that prestigious solo to the new girl instead of the first cello. And this move, in turn, allows her to organize a series of one-on-one rehearsals with Olga at that apartment she maintains in the city…There’s a word for this behavior: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can

Every generation makes new rules. Every generation comes up against the persistent ethical failures of the human animal. But though there may be no permanent transformations in our emotional lives, there can be genuine reframings and new language and laws created to name and/or penalize the ways we tend to hurt each other, and this is a service each generation can perform for the one before.

what stretches ahead is a banal ending that refuses to end: the slow violence of capitalism and climate change, a future of could-haves and should-haves void of capital-M meaning.

A core reason behind this genre’s popular success lies in the fact that it lacks the cloying, naïve quality so often associated with positivity. While this partially stems from the aesthetic and language employed—which, thanks to its poetic tenor, internet avant-garde style, and general high-low approach, reads as more online-experimental for those in-the-know and less cheesy iFunny reposts for Boomers—these would matter little if it weren’t for the honest realism that underpins this trend’s optimism

Unlike the deluded optimism espoused by politicians, technologists, and millionaires—which views progress as linear or believes that technology will save us from ourselves or thinks that watching celebrities sing will solve crisis—this trend, like the pessimists it responds to, recognizes that there seems to be no turning back from the precipice.

The genre positions the exercise and resilience of the “Indomitable Human Spirit” at the scale of a single life at the center of its philosophical optimism—not our ability to save the future, but rather our willingness to try and endure with grace.