So I was listening to some talks about Gen-Z. The main motivation was professional: this is the generation that is now entering active life, and I basically have no clue on what defines it, what makes it tick. Of course I had seen some satirical sketches on social media, some were funny, some I did not get, but those don’t really help you understand a generation beyond the stereotypes. The truth is, my kids are not Gen-Z – they are late Gen-α and I can’t say I notice generations so much at work, from my perspective, they tend to geeks first…

The first point of the presentation was that this generation is cynical, broke, a challenge for marketing. This is of course deeply ironic because this were the same terms used to define Generation-X in the beginning: a cohort that was immune to marketing and not spending enough. So it’s tempting to assign these characteristics to just marketing whining about change. It’s certainly telling that if each generation is defined by its poverty compared to the previous ones, there is a structural problem.

One point that struck me was the claim that this generation suffered more than the previous ones. Of course, the presentation focused almost entirely on the US, with the rest of the world acknowledged mostly through a mention of the UK. That said, this generation clearly got a bad deal: Covid isolation, a restricted labour market, and, in the US, what will probably define them politically, the January 6 attempted putsch, the general breakdown of public services, and the ruinous war in Iran, with enshittification and climate change in the background. Other generations shared some of that burden, but for Gen-Z this is normality.

So, Gen-Z is described as cynical, and opting out of traditional society markers: career progression, owning a house, joining a political party, restricting their activities to a small private cercle, relying on a parallel economy of gigs, and buying and selling second hands good on platforms like Depop or Vinted.

If you zoom out a bit a look outside of the USA, this sounds familiar. This looks a lot like life in the eastern block in the 80s: people who distrust the government and institutions (except maybe science), they suffer from worsening economic situation, constant surveillance, low life expectancy (≈4 years less than Western Europe), failing public services, goods of degraded quality. Their military alliance is trapped in a war of imperial overreach in a muslim country to control maritime access for oil. To cope, they retire from public life, socialise in private groups, and increasingly rely on a shadow economy with side jobs, trade second hands products.

So the vibe might be similar, but of course, there are many differences.

The biggest ones lies in the exit path. Leaving the eastern block at that time was extremely dangerous, but once you were out, you restarted on the other side. US citizens can leave easily, but are tethered to their home country, their standard of living, they try to keep their high income job remotely, continue paying taxes to Uncle Sam and honour their debts, they will keep speaking their language. One side reaches escape velocity, the other just stays in a wider orbit.

A member of Gen-Z in the US is most certainly better off than someone in the eastern block in the 8s, but that’s a pretty low bar. Surveillance and enforcement are implemented very differently, in the eastern block it was a state activity, whereas in the US it is tech-companies doing it, the sanctions are economical, not political. The Nischengesellschaft, the Második társadalom and the parallel polis have been replaced by private discord servers and closed chat channels, Depop and the gig economy are the new shadow economy, Palantir and ICE are the new Stasi.

The other big difference lies in the counter culture, in the soviet block, it was anchored in the institutions, the schools, the clubs, the church, for US Gen-Z, it is largely atomised into micro-groups and disjoint from society, and so difficult to perceive.

Is this comparison useful? Maybe. The zeitgeist is certainly very different, but it helps me understand how a generation that was dealt a bad hand would tick.