Gen Z Quotes

“In an era of fake news, and the filter bubble, [Gen Z is] also more likely to be able to push through the noise. . . Not only are they able to consume more information than any group before, they have also become accustomed to cutting through it. They are perhaps the most brand-critical, bullshit-repellent, questioning group around and will call out any behavior they dislike on social media. (Little wonder brands are quaking in their boots.)”
― Lucie Greene

“Reality is chaos, and we’ve created an algorithm that keeps us informed of as much of that chaos as possible, from the second we wake up to the second we go to bed, and then we wonder why we’re anxious.”
― Matty Healy

“We are physical, embodied creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions, and head movements as communication channels, responding in real time to the similar movements of our partners. Gen Z is learning to pick emojis instead.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“You remember your pre-internet brain, and you remember doing those things, but you don’t really remember how it felt. You don’t really remember how time felt. There’s that guy who wrote that book, I can’t remember what it’s called, fuckin’ genius guy. But he’s saying that the world has always been informed by people who read books, and not necessarily academically, but the concept of a narrative is very important to people’s lives. Those people grew up with not necessarily a sense of purpose, but a sense that your life is leading somewhere. That’s the way I relate to my music, because I see The 1975 as this story. But as we go into the future, the world is gonna start being informed by people who didn’t grow up with that narrative — who grew up with more of a sense of immediacy. And we start to feel more like a unit amongst other units, and everything becomes a lot more compartmentalized. So when we talk about Twitter, we know that we were happy before, but we can’t remember how it felt, so we won’t take the risk to leave it. The generation after us now, they don’t have that weird nostalgia or sense that something’s wrong: ‘I didn’t used to do this. I didn’t used to need this.”
― Matty Healy

“When I was 17, all the cultural ideas that I was sold were about the future. Being 17 now must be terrifying. You must look at the state of the economy and the world and you don’t know if there’s going to be a future. If I was 17 now and I was having to deal with the things that young people are expected to deal with — you need to be informed on racial issues, how economies work, all this stuff … When I was 17, I was getting stoned, and there was no one shouting at me on the internet that I wasn’t doing my part. It felt like the apocalypse anyway, because of some girl or a lack of weed or something like that. It wasn’t like trying to understand these huge ideas and being expected to have this pre-signed-off opinion on anything.”
― Matty Healy

“When text messaging first came about, it was still a one-to-one negotiation: I propose an idea or something to you, you exchange back to me. When you get to 2010/2011, this new model of communication that exists is that you put something out there into the world and then you wait for a reaction. Now, if you look at the depression rates amongst young men, the correlation between these two things is very measurably concise, and amongst young women it’s insane. I’m not necessarily an empiricist, I believe in nuance and subtext and context, but I think that if there’s evidence like that, I mean — I’m sure we could really map depression on to the sale of avocados, too — but I do feel like that’s got something to do with it and it kind of freaks me out.”
― Matty Healy

“I have anger in me.”
― Nick Oliveri, Becoming the Conjurer

“I meet twenty-three-year-olds who need to watch a ten-second video on their phones to figure out how much milk to put in their coffee.”
― Natasha Leggero, The World Deserves My Children

“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and- as I will show-unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness-perpetually-to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“Prestige-based social media platforms have hacked one of the most important learning mechanisms for adolescents, diverting their time, attention, and copying behavior away from a variety of role models with whom they could develop a mentoring relationship that would help them succeed in their real-world communities. Instead, beginning in the early 2010s, millions of Gen Z girls collectively aimed their most powerful learning systems at a small number of young women whose main excellence seems to be amassing followers to influence. At the same time, many Gen Z boys aimed their social learning systems at popular male influencers who offered them visions of masculinity that were also quite extreme and potentially inapplicable to their daily lives.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“Of course, a smartphone opens up worlds of new possible experiences, including video games (which are forms of play) and virtual long-distance friendships. But this happens at the cost of reducing the kinds of experiences humans evolved for and that they must have in abundance to become socially functional adults. It's as if we gave our infants iPads loaded with movies about walking, but the movies were so engrossing that kids never put in the time or effort to practice walking.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“The worship of "safety" above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“Gen Z is the first generation to have gone through puberty hunched over smartphones and tablets, having fewer face-to-face conversations and shoulder-to-shoulder adventures with their friends.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“Cuando digo que hay demasiados libros, quiero decir que ay demasiados para cada individuo. Con el fin de alcanzar la categoría de ciudadano del mundo contemporáneo bien informado y actualizado, un hombre debe leer tantos libros que es casi imposible que pueda haber leído alguno de ellos apropiadamente.”
― Aldous Huxley, Si mi biblioteca ardiera esta noche. Ensayos sobre arte, música, literatura y otras drogas

“Estamos en peligro de sacrificar la calidad de la lectura a la cantidad, en peligro de leer demasiado y demasiado rápido como para estar en posición de juzgar lo que leemos.”
― Aldous Huxley, Si mi biblioteca ardiera esta noche. Ensayos sobre arte, música, literatura y otras drogas

“La cultura no deriva de la lectura de libros, sino de la lectura exhaustiva e intensa de buenos libros.”
― Aldous Huxley, Si mi biblioteca ardiera esta noche. Ensayos sobre arte, música, literatura y otras drogas

“... Gen Z has a global perspective. Gen Z will graduate into a recession on account of the 2009 financial crisis and the global pandemic of 2020. These economic stressors will undermine this generation's ability to be independent and self-reliant. Gen Z were born into an era of increased gun violence, terrorism and war.”
― Gaiti Rabbani, Curious About Culture: Refocus your lens on culture to cultivate cross cultural understanding

“We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for "a very long time."

Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history -- which is no doubt true -- but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.

That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. The party's over, folks.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“This is is why so many algospeak euphemisms are specific to the online domain of use. Words like “sewerslide” and “seggs” are understood as shared vernacular in the algospace. To use them is to recognize that they are pieces of the social media sociolect and culture. The “brainrot” genre, especially,
relies on shared folklore. Each word is only funny when it refers back to the running history of other brainrot words. Memes are necessarily understood in the context of other memes; terms like “skibidi” are popularized as postironic nods to the very culture that spawned the overuse of niche comedic references.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Resilience is not about enduring everything—it is about choosing what is worth sustaining.”
― Sylas Greymont, BEYOND LABELS: Gen Z and the Reconfiguration of the Future

“The future is not a distant territory—it is being built right now, on screens, in the streets, and through the invisible connections that link young people across the globe.”
― Sylas Greymont, BEYOND LABELS: Gen Z and the Reconfiguration of the Future

“Gen Z creativity is a knife and a flower: it breaks the silence where there is no voice—and blooms where everything seemed ruined.”
― Sylas Greymont, BEYOND LABELS: Gen Z and the Reconfiguration of the Future

“Politicians always tell me, "Keep up the good work; your generation is going to save the world!"

They are both so right and so unbelievably wrong at the same time.

As young people, we do have great power to move the political needle toward change, and we have done it countless times in history before. But there are also so many things not in our power, and it is unacceptable for leaders to put the burden of the problems they created and have the power to fix on our shoulders. Climate disaster is the perfect example of this. If we wait until Generation Z is old enough to be in power, it will be far too late to address this crisis.”
― Jamie Margolin, Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It

“Work has shifted from a noun (somewhere we go) to a verb (something we do).”
― Amanda Schneider, Work for What's Next: Why Workplace Culture is Failing and How the Next Generation Can Fix It

“Gen Z is not a disruption to be managed. They are a prototype to be studied.”
― Amanda Schneider, Work for What's Next: Why Workplace Culture is Failing and How the Next Generation Can Fix It

“Mental toughness isn't about feeling nothing. It's about feeling everything and moving anyway.”
― Remmy Henninger

“Because many of us are looking back through our hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts and Snapchat Stories and TikToks not with fondness that we filmed these moments but with regret that we didn't fully feel them. Now the push to post looks more like a marketing strategy. We were told it was about sharing our lives with our friends and family, when really it was about sharing our data with companies so they could target us better.”
― Freya India, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything

“When girls feel anxious and unsure of themselves, industries rush to sell them someone else to be. Only instead of occasional billboards on buildings, or ads in beauty magazines, today these messages are transmitted all day, every day, through a never-ending stream of precisely targeted Instagram posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, Snapchat Stories, and sponsored ads telling girls how to be prettier, happier, sexier, more popular, more productive, each personalized by algorithms to play on their inner most fears and insecurities. It is an onslaught; it is advertising on a scale no previous generation has faced.”
― Freya India, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything

“My generation never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never got to experience a first kiss or hold hands with a boy before watching Pornhub. We never knew flirting before it became sending Instagram DMs or reacting to Snapchat Stores with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it meant keeping up Snapstreaks and using each other like props to look popular online. And freedom - we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily, to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear they would be posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while, without the pressure of read receipts and active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.”
― Freya India, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything