Generation Z

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Generation Z, the cohort born roughly from 1997 to 2012, is the first social generation to grow up with the internet not as a novelty but as an ordinary fact of life. By 2019, according to Bloomberg's analysis of United Nations data, they numbered 2.47 billion people worldwide, making them the largest living generation on earth at that time. They outnumbered even the Millennials, who reached 2.43 billion. The generation spans wildly different worlds: from Niger, where the median age of the entire country sat at 15.2 years in 2020, to the aging cities of northern Europe, where Gen Z is a shrinking demographic in a sea of older faces. What holds them together is not geography or politics. It is something subtler: a common childhood defined by YouTube, smartphones, and a creeping sense that the world they inherited is more precarious than the one their parents were promised. Who are they really? Are they the anxious, over-diagnosed, screen-addicted kids of popular imagination, or something more complicated? The answers cut across every continent, and they rarely agree.

• 2. What Is In a Name

  ›

  Psychologist and author Jean Twenge originally intended "Generation Z" as the title of a 2006 book about Millennials, but her publisher pushed her to change it to Generation Me. She returned to the term in her 2017 book iGen, applying it to the cohort that followed. In 2019, the Pew Research Center surveyed competing labels on Google Trends and found that in the United States, Generation Z was by far the most popular choice. Other candidates had their advocates: iGeneration, Homeland Generation, Digital Natives, Centennials, and Pluralists all circulated at various points. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, creators of the Strauss-Howe generational theory, held a naming contest in 2005 and settled on Homeland Generation, a reference to children entering childhood after the September 11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The informal label Zoomer has its own peculiar origin story. It burst into wide use in 2018 via a meme on 4chan that used a Wojak caricature to mock Gen Z adolescents. Merriam-Webster's records trace the word in its current sense back to at least 2016; it was formally added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in October 2021 and to Dictionary.com in January 2020. Whatever they are called, both Merriam-Webster and Oxford now carry official entries for the generation, a small but telling sign of how firmly the category has lodged itself in the language.

• 3. A Generation Divided by Geography

  ›

  In 2018, Generation Z comprised the majority of the population of Africa. Sixty percent of the 1.2 billion people living on that continent were under the age of 25 in 2017. South Africa alone counted 27.5 million Gen Z members in 2019, about 46% of its population. The contrast with East Asia is stark. In 2018, there were 112 Chinese males for every hundred females aged 15 to 29, according to United Nations figures; India showed a similar imbalance of 111 males per hundred females. China's total excess of males reached 34 million and India's 37 million, a combined surplus of 50 million males under the age of 20, a demographic distortion that has fueled loneliness, human trafficking from Cambodia and Vietnam, and other social crises. In Europe the picture shifts again. Out of the approximately 66.8 million people in the United Kingdom in 2019, roughly 12.6 million, about 18.8%, fell within the Gen Z window. European Gen Z is notably diverse: 13.9% of those aged 14 and under in 2019 were born in another EU member state, and 6.6% outside the EU entirely. Luxembourg stood at the extreme end, with 20.5% of its young people born abroad. Eastern Europe told a different story: in Croatia, only 0.7% of those under 14 were foreign-born. In Canada, data published in 2017 showed Generation Z at 17.6% of the national population. In the United States, as of 2015, the generation made up roughly a quarter of the country. A 2021 Gallup survey found that 20.8% of American Gen Z members, about one in five, identified as LGBTQ+.

• 4. The Mental Health Crisis

  ›

  A 2025 survey found that 46% of American Generation Z members had been diagnosed with a mental health condition. That figure sits against a broader pattern: data from the World Health Organization and the PISA program show that while teenage mental-health reports remained roughly stable during the 2000s, they climbed steadily through the 2010s. 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 globally. Sleep deprivation is part of the picture. A Glasgow University study found that the share of Scottish schoolchildren reporting sleep difficulties rose from 23% in 2014 to 30% in 2018. In that same study, 37% of teenagers were found to have low mood, and 14% were deemed at risk of depression. Canadian teenagers were sleeping between 6.5 and 7.5 hours per night on average, well below the 10 hours recommended by the Canadian Paediatric Society. In Ontario, the number of teenagers treated for self-harm doubled in 2019 compared to a decade earlier. Among girls specifically, hospitalizations for self-harm in England doubled between 1997 and 2018, according to National Health Service data, with no comparable rise observed among boys. The sources are multiple and overlapping: social media, perfectionism, financial anxiety, housing insecurity, climate anxiety, and over-parenting all appear in the research. The Canadian Mental Health Association found that only one out of five children who needed mental health services actually received them.

• 5. Screens, Bodies, and Allergies

  ›

  A 2015 study found that nearsightedness had doubled in the United Kingdom within the preceding 50 years. Ophthalmologist Steve Schallhorn, chairman of the Optical Express International Medical Advisory Board, pointed to a link between the regular use of handheld electronic devices and eyestrain. The American Optometric Association described digital eyestrain as "rampant" as devices shrank and proliferated. Physically, this generation is also contending with a surge in food allergies. Research from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota found that food allergies have grown increasingly common since the early 2000s; one in twelve American children now has a food allergy. Nut allergies quadrupled between 2004 and 2019, and shellfish allergies rose by 40% in the same period. About 36% of American children have some kind of allergy. By comparison, among the Amish in Indiana, the figure is 7%. In the United Kingdom, the number of children hospitalized for allergic reactions rose by a factor of five between 1990 and the late 2010s. The obesity trend runs in a similar direction. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that 46% of Australians aged 18 to 24 were overweight in 2017 and 2018, up from 39% in 2014 and 2015. One thread connecting these trends is puberty. A 2019 meta-analysis drawing on research from all inhabited continents found that between 1977 and 2013, the average age of pubertal onset among girls fell by almost three months per decade. By the early 21st century, the average onset age for girls in Europe and the United States had dropped to around 13, compared to about 16 a hundred years earlier. Triggers include obesity, stress, exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals like Bisphenol A (found in some plastics) and dichlorobenzene (used in mothballs), and the banned but persistent pesticide DDT.

• 6. Nostalgia for Pasts They Never Lived

  ›

  Spotify consumer data from 2022 suggested that Generation Z is most nostalgic for the 1980s. The Netflix series Stranger Things, which ran from 2016 to 2025, helped drive that sentiment by reviving American aesthetics from the decade when their parents, Generation X, were young. Kate Bush's 1985 song "Running Up That Hill" became a TikTok fixture after its appearance in Stranger Things soundtracks. The preference for the past extends across cultures. In Japan, Gen Z listeners have gravitated toward the Showa-era music of Akina Nakamori, Seiko Matsuda, and Yoko Oginome, as well as artists from the 1970s and 1980s such as Mariya Takeuchi and Masayoshi Takanaka. Psychologists have identified a phenomenon called anemoia, the sensation of longing for a past one has never personally experienced. Beyond music, the generation has revived hobbies long associated with older people: baking, knitting, birdwatching, and cruise vacations have all returned to fashion. The cottagecore aesthetic, named in 2018, became a full subculture on social media during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Vintage fashion, including floral patterns and cardigans, has been growing in popularity among younger consumers. The Oxford English Dictionary's choice of "brain rot" as its word of the year for 2024 captured something of the era: a generation acutely aware of being oversaturated by the very media it cannot stop consuming. What is notable, researchers observe, is that nostalgia, once associated primarily with the elderly, has become a defining emotional register for people who are still in their teens and twenties.

• 7. Politics, Protest, and the Gender Divide

  ›

  Swedish activist Greta Thunberg anchored the School Strike for Climate of the late 2010s, a movement that drew millions of young people worldwide to skip school in protest. That moment represented an early instance of Generation Z as a political force, but the political terrain has since shifted. In Iran in 2022, protesters, most of them women, took to the streets after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in morality police custody, having been arrested for allegedly violating the state's Islamic dress code. In Bangladesh, students toppled the autocratic government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the July Revolution of 2024, opposing what they saw as an unfair quota system and a massacre. In Kenya in 2024, young people protested tax hikes imposed by President William Ruto. These movements show a generation willing to act. But within that generation, a significant political gender gap has been widening since the mid-2010s. Across the Western world, young women have been trending left while young men have been drifting right. In Australia and South Korea, anti-feminist circles known as the manosphere have attracted substantial numbers of Gen-Z men. A majority of male Gen-Z voters in the United States backed Donald Trump in 2024, while young women were more evenly split. In Europe, young voters who favored the Greens in the 2019 European Parliament elections swung toward parties of the far right by 2024. In Canada in 2025, voters under 30 favored the Conservatives by a sizeable margin, driven primarily by concerns about housing costs and crime. Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus argued that the old assumption of youth as a reliably progressive force was simply outdated: living in what they perceive as a volatile world, young people crave security above idealism. In the 2025 Australian federal election, for the first time, Millennials and Generation Z together outnumbered Baby Boomers as voters.

• 8. Work, Education, and the Road Ahead

  ›

  In May 2023, the youth unemployment rate for Americans aged 16 to 24 stood at 7.5%, the lowest in 70 years. American employers were offering high-school graduates generous bonuses and apprenticeship programs to fill an ongoing labor shortage. In Canada, by contrast, people aged 15 to 24 faced an unemployment rate of 12.2% as of 2025, more than twice the rate for prime working-age adults and the highest since the Great Recession. In China by June 2023, unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 was about one in five. East Asian and Singaporean students consistently topped the OECD's PISA tests in reading and mathematics through the 2010s and 2020s, while once high-performing European countries like Iceland, Sweden, and Finland continued a years-long decline. In 2010, China unveiled a decade-long National Talent Development Plan to identify able students and guide them into STEM careers. That same year, England dismantled its National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth and redirected those funds toward helping low-scoring students gain entry to elite universities. Across the developed world, young women now outnumber men in higher education, reversing a trend that held for generations. At the same time, the number of men in their twenties who are neither in education, employment, nor training has been rising; in France and the United Kingdom, that figure has now surpassed the equivalent figure for women. In the United States, Generation Z as a group is projected to be wealthier than previous generations at the same age, benefiting from stronger wage growth and significant inheritance from parents and grandparents. Whether that projection holds will depend on how the generation navigates a labor market already being reshaped by industrial automation and trade conflicts, challenges that no prior generation faced at quite the same scale.