Gen Z is beyond saving
The modern world has finally succeeded in manufacturing a generation entirely devoid of the standard human machinery required for survival, let alone rebellion. We've arrived at Gen Z, a demographic cohort so thoroughly wrapped in the cotton wool of therapeutic language and digital delusion that they're quite beyond saving.
It used to be that the young would riot over actual grievances, such as the price of beer or the conscription laws. Today they organise digital tribunals because someone used an unapproved adjective in a lecture hall. They do not fight the system. They simply ask the system to provide them with a larger, softer cushion and a permanent supply of trigger warnings.
The primary engine of this catastrophe is the glowing glass rectangle they clutch like an umbilical cord. They live in a state of perpetual, hyper-connected isolation. They have traded the glorious, chaotic mess of real human interaction for a highly curated online existence where every minor personal quirk is rebranded as a profound psychological condition. One does not simply feel a bit awkward at a party anymore. One has a diagnosed social anxiety disorder that requires total societal accommodation.
This total collapse of resilience has created a comedy of manners that would be amusing if it were not so utterly pathetic. They're a generation terrified of the telephone. They'll happily broadcast their most intimate secrets to millions of strangers on the internet but will suffer a minor nervous breakdown if required to ring the plumber to fix a leaking pipe.
The universities, which were once hotbeds of genuine radical thought and robust debate, have capitulated entirely to this collective fragility. The institutions have become expensive nurseries. The staff spend their days tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of undergraduates who believe that encountering an opposing viewpoint constitutes a form of literal violence.
We have raised them to believe they're entirely unique and infinitely precious. In doing so, we've stripped them of the very armour needed to face a world that is inherently indifferent to their feelings. They do not want freedom. They want absolute supervision. They're beyond saving because they have fallen in love with their own simulated victimhood, and no amount of old-fashioned common sense is ever going to pull them out of it.