"What of the pandemic's impacts on the generational imbalances that had grown so intolerable in many societies by 2020? Was COVID-19 sent by Freya, the goddess of youth, to emancipate millennials and Generation Z from bearing the fiscal burden of an excessive number of elderly people? It is tempting to marvel at this ageist virus. No previous pandemic was so discriminating against the elderly and in favor of the young. But in truth, the impact of COVID-19 in terms of excess mortality will probably not be great enough to balance the intergenerational accounts. In the short run, the majority of old people will remain retired; relatively few will die prematurely―hardly any in the most elderly of countries, Japan. The young, meanwhile, will be the ones struggling to find jobs (other than Amazon) and struggling almost as much to have fun. An economy without crowds is not a "new normal." It may be more like the new anomie, to borrow Émile Durkheim's term for the sense of disconnectedness he associated with modernity. For most young people, the word "fun" is almost synonymous with "crowd." The era of distancing will be a time of depression in the psychological as well as the economic sense. The gloom will be especially deep for Generation Z, whose university social lives―half the point of college, if not more―have been wrecked. They will spend yet more time on electronic devices―perhaps an hour a day more than before the pandemic. It will not make them happier."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021), p. 382
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Generation_Z
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Generation Z
3 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Generation Z →
Related Quotes
"Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess."
"History is complicated and Gen Z reasoning is not. They think that they are pure, but they are really just simplistic."
"As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship …"
"Any age can be viewed as "the wrong age" for a woman, allowing her capacity to be questioned and her fitness for lead…"
"I don't believe in any greatest generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose to extre…"
"We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's of…"
"They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinct generation, the Baby Boomers. They stayed true to t…"
"We owe the Greatest Generation a debt which we can never fully repay."
"It is, I believe, the greatest generation that any society has ever produced."
"When I was researching my book The ABC of XYZ: Understanding the Global Generations (published in 2009) it became app…"