Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, has a unique economic, political, and cultural identity. In the 2024 election, Gen Z shifted strongly to the right. They are less likely than any previous generation to expect they’ll achieve the American Dream. Most of Gen Z graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years.They have record-high rates of anxiety. They use their phone ... a lot. Defined by the forces of scarcity, phone-driven media, and global crisis, they are different. And their differences will drive the future of U.S. economics, politics, and culture. Today’s guest Kyla Scanlon is 27 years old, making her an older Gen Z representative. As a financial commentator on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack, she’s coined several terms—like the vibecession—that have made their way into the New York Times and federal economic reports. For a long time, I wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn’t make me subject to a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Buscemi holding the skateboard asking, “how do you do, fellow kids?” I wanted to get somebody smart, who was a member of Gen Z, and who also had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z. I’m very honored to have Kyla tell me about how young people today think and what they want. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kyla Scanlon Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Gen Z's perspective on adulthood and the American Dream?
What does Gen Z want? In December of last year, The Wall Street Journal's Rachel Wolf published a wonderful essay that was entitled, What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up? Wolf reported that American 20-somethings and 30-somethings today are bypassing the traditional milestones of adulthood. Dating, marrying, having a kid, buying a home.
They're less likely in many cases to be doing any of this. This delay of adulthood, or the delay of these adulthood markers, let's say, begins quite early. Teens in the 2020s are now less likely to date than previous generations. 20-somethings are more likely to live with their parents. 30-somethings are less likely to be married, and 40-somethings less likely to have kids.
Something seems to be happening that is pushing off what we've historically thought of as the definition of this state that we call adulthood. I think understanding this phenomenon of delayed adulthood requires us first understanding the shifting realities and psychological preferences of America's young people. Generation Z.
which was born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, are less likely than previous generations to say they'll achieve the American dream. They have record high rates of anxiety. They often graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years. Defined by forces of scarcity and phone-driven media and global crisis, this generation is different.
And for a long time, I've wanted to understand how different, Today's guest is Kyla Scanlon. She's 27 years old, but that's the least important thing about her. As an older Gen Z representative, she is also quite brilliant.
As a financial commentator on TikTok and Instagram and Substack, she's coined several terms like vibe session that have made their way into the cultural lexicon, the New York Times, and even federal economic reports.
For a while, I've wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn't make me the subject of a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Buscemi holding the skateboard above his head, asking how do you do, fellow kids.
I wanted to talk to somebody smart who was a member of Gen Z and who had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z. And I'm very honored to have Kyla tell me how young people today think and what they want and what that means for America writ large. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Kyla Scanlon, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me.
You have published several essays recently on how Gen Z thinks about the world that I think are pretty exceptional. And they really cover just about everything. Young people's relationship to finance, media, politics, romance, dating, work, psychology. And we're going to try, try to run through all of that with the upfront proviso that
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Chapter 2: How does technology shape different segments of Gen Z?
That is to say, all teenagers 13 and up and most 20-somethings today are in this category of Gen Z. You write that the best way to see Gen Z clearly is to divide this generation into three subgroups that you call Gen Z 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. Break that down for us.
Yes. So this list was inspired by a graphic that I saw from Rachel Gianfazza. And she broke Gen Z down into Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. So basically graduating high school pre-COVID and then graduating high school post-COVID. And I was like, okay, I think COVID definitely has something to do with the splitting of the generations.
But I also think technology had a really big part to do with it, like the digital reality. And so in the piece, I talk about Gen Z 1.0 being this bridge generation. And so I'm part of that generation. I'm an ancient Gen Z. I just turned 27. And for me, I grew up in a world where I remember where there were flip phones, but I graduated into the pandemic.
And so my first interaction with work was entirely online. And it's been that way ever since. And so... And summarizing that segment of the population, I talk a little bit about how they view technology as a tool rather than an environment because they're able to navigate digital spaces fluently, but it doesn't dictate their whole reality.
And then there's Gen Z one and a half, which is the COVID cohort. And so that was the group that was in maybe high school or college during COVID. And that completely shaped how they think about technology.
technology because they had to do learning online for a lot of them it created a pretty complex relationship with institutions but they were able to see sort of the powerful nature of digital infrastructure and how that sort of kept society functioning and then the final generation is gen z 2.0 which is the first group that will graduate into this new digital economy like
how AI, you know, is going to shape them. And they've never really known a world without smartphones and social media to them could just be like another layer of reality.
Like there, it's really difficult, I think, for that group, just based on my travels and talking with them for them to kind of separate, it's not their fault, but for them to separate, you know, what happens on the internet versus what happens in real life.
I love this distinction between the smartphone as a tool and the smartphone as an environment. The air you breathe, something as invisible and boring as just like oxygen. How does that distinction, even within Gen Z, shift the relationship they have to their phones?
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Chapter 3: Why are young people drawn to high-risk investments?
I think this ties into one of my favorite Kyla coinages, which you've described as the emergence of Fafonomics, F-A-F-O, Fafo being an acronym for fuck around and find out. What is Fafonomics by your definition? And what makes it a particularly Gen Z phenomenon?
Yeah. So Fafnomics is that I, you know, I figure out and finding out it's like essentially chaos is the strategy. So you're just going to throw everything at the wall, see what sticks and, you know, perhaps make some mistakes, but you're just going to find out. And we're seeing that at the governance level, too, with like Elon Musk's Doge.
But for young people, I definitely think when you look at the crypto universe, when you look at sports gambling and And a lot of people have written on this idea of financial nihilism, but there's a truth to that where people are just effing around because it doesn't feel like that predictable progress path is there. And of course, for every generation, there's been significant headwinds.
But I think this is the first time where we've seen political creative destruction happening at the same time as technological creative destruction. And so young people are taking all of that into account and... Indeed, effing around and finding out, especially young men who have had all sorts of economic headwinds over the past couple of years.
What if someone comes along and says, look, I look at the statistics of real income growth, not over the last four years where inflation has definitely warped the picture, but over the last few decades, America's richer than it used to be. Young people are richer by various measures than they used to be. Where does this sense of, or possibly reality of financial nihilism come from?
It's housing. I think it's, yeah, it's like such a boring answer, but that's really, you know, in these conversations that I've had in the policymakers that I've talked to, everybody is like, yeah, nobody can afford housing. And so it does create like that is a foundational way to interact with the economy, right? Like,
being able to afford rent or being able to buy a house, if you can't solve for that problem in your economic equation, it's going to be a real uphill battle. And so I think a lot of young people are looking around and the returns on education are much... They're not as predictable as they once were.
So it never was a guarantee that you'd have a job out of college, but now it really doesn't feel like... you will at all in some instances. And of course, I'm generalizing. Housing is a big thing. Career progression is a big thing. Like you just don't stay at a company for 40 years anymore.
And so I think young people are looking at what used to be this, you know, relatively predictable path where things sort of smoothed out to one layer over time. And like, You could kind of figure out where you were going. And it just doesn't feel like that exists anymore. And of course, it could smooth out for young people in the long run.
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Chapter 4: What does Mr. Beast's memo reveal about Gen Z work culture?
They're going to be kind of like this weird crossover between reality TV and a game show, because that's just what our brains kind of like. We like the spinning numbers. And so I think it's very, very sad. And it makes a lot of sense to me that that was what he said. But I think it could be quite dark if we don't work on that as a society.
And I don't even think that Mr. Beast is a bad person or that this memo is somehow unusually demonic in some kind of way. I am more interested in it as an artifact of Gen Z work psychology. Like, what do you think we learn about the forces acting on this generation by reading this memo and taking it seriously?
I mean, I think you can really get into the attention stuff and how people are very co-opted by that. In the article that I wrote about the memo, I get into that the younger generation is going to be more focused on work quality over work quantity, something that Mr. Beast does talk about. Boomers slash Gen X are very focused on putting in the hours, being at the office.
Gen Z, there was that whole quiet quitting thing that happened back when the economy was booming. And And I think for Mr. Beast, too, there was a focus on flattening the hierarchy. He was very informal in his language throughout the document, which is great. At my first job, I got trained in how to send emails because there was a certain style of communication.
And so I think for Mr. Beast, like it was very much like, look, we have technology. We know what we're doing. We don't have to work all the time on it because essentially what we're doing is we're playing into a system that already exists. There's nothing to creatively stretch here. Just do your job and go home.
Um, and so I think that's, uh, definitely what you see in some of Jen's ears, not all, of course we're, we're generalizing, but, uh, that is definitely, I think what we've seen and how they work and how they choose to approach certain issues.
That answer pulls together a lot of ideas for me that I hope I'm able to communicate in this response. Um, I think one of the obvious but sneakily profound facts of the internet is that it makes outcomes clear. We know how many people a tweet reaches or a post reaches. We know how many people upvote our Reddit comments. And it's impossible to forget these positive and negative feedback loops.
We are shaped by them in ways that we haven't been so explicitly shaped by a numerate feedback system in previous generations. And it seems to me that this makes people who are participating in the online attention economy more explicitly outcome-oriented, less focused on process, and more focused on what are the numbers.
And there's a way in which this approach deadens art, I think, because it fixes our attention solely on the final question of how many people clicked on this link and how many seconds did they remain on the browser tab. But there's actually, I think in your answer, a really smart way
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