On the June day that Hannah Zilke, a 19-year-old university student, is explaining why she doesn’t want to have children, the answer wafts outside her bedroom window in Calgary: a haze of smoke lingering from forest fires still burning out of control hundreds of kilometres away.
As a group, they worry a lot about their financial security; in interviews, they often mentioned rising rent and grocery store costs. Nearly three-quarters disagreed that, as a generation, they would surpass their parents. These concerns no doubt contribute to their mental health issues: In the survey, more than half said they find it hard to sleep at night because of stress.
But these looming existential threats, she says, are emotionally draining. That’s the risk, one already showing up in the mental health struggles of Gen Z: it’s hard to sustain youthful optimism and creative energy when a generation feels overwhelmed by a mess they didn’t make.Anastasia Kartadinata, 17, is in first year at the University of Calgary.
They knew – thanks to YouTube and TikTok and family dinner conversations – that rent is rising, that the price of a home is outpacing salaries, and that, without solutions, a devastated environment will forever alter the way of life in Canada. In the survey, about “Not only will we risk losing the optimism and dynamism of youth,” says Bobby Duffy, director of The Policy Institute at King’s College London, “but when people think progress has stopped, they start to question the value of the whole system.”Young people skateboard in a Calgary lot. For demographic purposes, Gen Z refers to people born from 1997 to 2012, and are now aged 11 to 26.Gen Z is already a cohort of skeptics, according to The Globe’s survey results.
This negative view of leaders, businesses and people in general showed up in several questions in the survey. Respondents were significantly more likely to see people as untrustworthy than say they can be counted on to do the right thing. Roughly 70 per cent either strongly or somewhat agreed that “the internet brings out the worst in people.”
Maybe it seems like young people have always been distrustful, but as U.S. sociologist Jean Twenge writes in her new book,, this was not always the case. Dr. Twenge points to the Silent Generation – the great-grandparents of Gen Z – as that last truly trusting cohort,