Gen Z, A Gutless Generation

By Rola Elnaggar

For the past few months, I have been spending a lot of time with an older generation of women,

the age of my grandmother, and by listening to their stories and watching them interact, I realized something: we, Gen Zers, aren’t really living.

Those women told stories about their youth, when risks were taken, and nothing was too serious

or too embarrassing, with the kind of confidence you earn when you truly know who you are.

They filled their lives to the brim with adventures and experiences that left them no time to

ruminate and create doubt, as we do. And I’m sure their lives were hard, but they had a lively

reaction to everything, and they never took themselves seriously, not back then, not now. They

spoke of traumatic events and barely acknowledged them as traumas.

We, however, are in defense mode, perpetual hesitancy about almost every aspect of life. They

tell us to trust our gut, but how can we do it when half our generation doesn't even have a functioning, healthy gut to begin with?

We can never spontaneously break out into a dance in the middle of the street because we are

scared of being observed. We are scared of people pulling out their cameras and filming us, only

for it to end up as a meme or a long thread of commentary questioning our behavior, our outfits,

and our physique. And honestly, I can’t blame us.

Being a generation that grew up with one foot in and one foot out of the internet, it’s easy to feel

hesitant about the life we are leading because we know there are other ways. We have

experienced them. We are surrounded by so many options that it’s hard to choose just one, but

we also delude ourselves into thinking we know it all because of the tools at our disposal. These

tools made our lives easier by solving past generations’ problems (lack of communication,

logistical and traffic delays, workload capacity), which gave us a lot of time on our hands and no

issues to busy ourselves with, which made us shift our attention from the external to the internal,

and made us become more self-conscious.

I started asking myself whether this is a natural symptom of being a 20-year-old or a Gen Z trait

we will carry into our thirties and forties.

It could be both, but studies show that our parents were more self-actualized at our age than we

ever are. Plus, we are a generation that grew up surrounded by unjustified, irrational wars, either

waged on our behalf or against us, and it made us unable to commit to a relationship or a job

because we know we might not exist tomorrow. Same thing with AI potentially replacing us and

consequently taking away the means to feed ourselves.

The world has made us a paranoid generation who can’t trust what we read online, who can’t

even trust ourselves to make the right decision. It makes us question everything, and then it turns

around and accuses us of being too sensitive and unfit to work.

I look around my group of friends and their friends, and all I see are young people hesitant to

grow up, hesitant to love, hesitant to start a family, hesitant to stick in a job, hesitant to laugh at a

joke in case it becomes offensive later on. They can’t choose a path, and those who do are

reluctant to take further steps that might tie them to it forever. Every story in my group of friends

starts with ‘I left my old job and started a new one’ and ends with ‘I’m thinking of leaving this

new job, too.’ And it enrages me. The potential we had as a generation has been consumed and

wasted on uncertainties that go beyond our control. So, how do we assert control?

We don’t, but we try. We take care of our bodies, our looks, our emotional stability. It makes us

seem shallow and self-centered, but these are the only things we can actually control. It’s

curation, the same as posting photos of yourself online. We create an image, a visual

representation of ourselves that we can manage, so we take multiple photos until we find the one.

It’s a form of survival in a chaotic world, but it’s also too rehearsed and unnatural—especially

when you take into consideration how older generations used to do it. They grew up with old,

expensive cameras and a limited amount of film, enough to take one photo and hope for the best.

It was inconvenient, but it made the memory much more valuable.

In the end, it’s important to acknowledge that we will never be the risk-takers our grandparents

were. We are reclusive, scared individuals because everything we grew up with enables it, and

when you feel attacked, it’s natural to become defensive. I only hope for some certainties, some

guarantees that there will be a tomorrow for us in which we can live and thrive. And I hope those

uncertainties aren’t at the hands of people, but something natural we can grow and build

character through, not hide from. Only then can we heal and maybe finally unlock our real

potential.

Bio: Rola Elnaggar is a writer and a researcher. Her work has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Roe Magazine, BULL, and other publications. She is currently working on her novel as well as a Master’s degree in literature and film studies.

Instagram: @rolaelnaggar

X: @rola_naggar

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