In 1993, the classic Britpop band Blur closed “For Tomorrow” with a spoken aside: modern life, as far as their narrator was concerned, was rubbish. It became the title of the album and, eventually, shorthand for a certain flavor of Gen X disillusionment—bored, unwilling to take the world’s dysfunction too seriously because taking it seriously wouldn’t change anything.
Three decades later, the generation that Gen X largely raised has inherited the sentiment, minus the irony. The evidence is stacking up across polls, surveys and countless anecdotes that Gen Z isn’t the problem, it’s just that modern life is a bit rubbish. Or, as global advertising firm Ogilvy puts it in its new Gen Z Pulse report: “Gen Z isn’t contradictory. Modern life is.”
The Harris Poll, in a separate survey of 4,100 American adults conducted in late May and early June, found a harsh set of economic conditions that conspire to leave half of the generation lonely every weekend: and that’s because they can’t afford to go out. Nearly three-quarters spend their weekend time at home, and according to the pollster who ran the numbers, the connection between them isn’t psychological, it’s a “spending hangover.”
“We call it placing financial regret over FOMO,” Libby Rodney, Chief Strategy Officer at The Harris Poll, said in an interview with Fortune about the firm’s new Gen Z Weekend Report. “It isn’t the physical connection of things [that Gen Z is trying to avoid], it’s just financial.”
