Short answers, pulled from the story.
Generation Z is most commonly defined as people born from 1997 to 2012. The Pew Research Center established 1997 as the starting year based on the distinct formative experiences of this cohort, and used 2012 as a tentative endpoint in its 2019 report. The United States Library of Congress and Statistics Canada both use the 1997 to 2012 range, citing Pew Research.
The term Zoomer combines the shorthand Boomer, referring to Baby Boomers, with the Z from Generation Z. It entered its current usage in 2018 when it appeared in a meme on 4chan mocking Gen Z adolescents via a Wojak caricature. Merriam-Webster traces the term in its current sense to at least 2016 and officially added it to the dictionary in October 2021.
Bloomberg's analysis of United Nations data predicted that in 2019, Generation Z numbered approximately 2.47 billion people, representing 32% of the world's 7.7 billion inhabitants. That made them the largest living generation at the time, narrowly surpassing Millennials at 2.43 billion.
A 2025 survey found that 46% of American Generation Z members had been diagnosed with a mental health condition. A 2021 UNICEF report stated that 13% of ten- to nineteen-year-olds worldwide had a diagnosed mental health disorder and that suicide was the fourth leading cause of death among fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds. Sleep deprivation, social media use, economic anxiety, and the COVID-19 pandemic have all been identified as contributing factors.
Generation Z in Western countries began the 2020s broadly left-leaning but has been moving toward the right, particularly among young men. In Europe, young voters who favored the Greens in the 2019 European Parliament elections swung to parties of the far right by 2024. In the United States, a majority of male Gen-Z voters backed Donald Trump in 2024, while in Canada, voters under 30 favored the Conservatives by a sizeable margin in 2025.
Spotify consumer data from 2022 identified the 1980s as the decade Generation Z feels most nostalgic about. The Netflix series Stranger Things, which ran from 2016 to 2025, revived interest in American aesthetics from that era, and Kate Bush's 1985 song "Running Up That Hill" became widely popular after appearing in the show's soundtrack and circulating on TikTok. Psychologists link this broader nostalgia trend to the phenomenon of anemoia, a longing for a simpler past the generation never actually experienced.