“I see nothing for the future.” The young man is not impressed by empty platitudes about the greatness of America?
Take one young Pittsburgh man I met in a recent focus group. A college graduate working part-time as a bartender, he felt weighed down by hopelessness, adrift in a country where rising costs, stagnant wages and lack of affordable housing have made even the modest ambitions of other generations feel out of reach for him. “Hope is great,” he told me, “but I see nothing for the future.”
The young man’s experience reflects a broader crisis of confidence and purpose, rooted in economic insecurity and social disconnection. The Covid pandemic exacerbated the alienation, with many first-time voters spending thousands of hours isolated and online in their formative years.
While these struggles affect the whole country, they weigh especially on young men of all educational, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z men report feeling regularly stressed by an uncertain future, stirring painful memories of the Great Recession they witnessed as children. These feelings erode self-esteem and diminish their interest in personal relationships and long-term planning, leading many to describe their future as “bleak,” “unclear” and “scary.”
Today’s young men are lonelier than ever and have inherited a world rife with skepticism toward the institutions designed to promote and defend American ideals. Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their same age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. They have higher rates of suicide and are less likely than their female peers to receive treatment for mental health maladies. Most young men in my polling say they fear for our country’s future, and nearly half doubt their cohort’s ability to meet our nation’s coming challenges.
The rest of the article is garbage. It makes it seem that it was easy for Trump to be a Pied Piper. And the text entirely ignores the bipartisan failure to address the issues of younger voters. I wonder why the writer would have that POV and ignore the democrats’ failure?..
By John Della Volpe
Mr. Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. He runs a research firm that conducted polls for a PAC supporting the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns.
Here’s a suggestion by the brain genius.
To reignite the hope of the emerging generation, Ms. Harris should make a sweeping national call to both military and civilian service — name it the Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America. Such a plan would offer a sense of identity, community and patriotism, while providing economic stability and skill-building — things many young men feel they are missing.
Comments are off because of course they are.
I think he lost of young people today by saying working at McDonald’s is easy (I mean of course his watered down version he can leave after an hour is easy lmao it’s not the same conditions the actual employees face and he knows he can leave after his tiny stunt.)
Most young people today are poor, they’ve worked in a service job before, or they are currently in one. A lot of them have PTSD from how fucking abused they were/are at work.
Soon Trump is only going to have ghoulish business owners and landlords voting for him, and that isn’t a large portion of the population.
Not that any of it matters in the long run. Both parties are gonna sell the people out to capital whoever wins
Retail jobs are literally horrifying.
The same goes for anybody who has dealt with understaffing, constantly moving goalposts, and/or a hectic work environment, but when you add the general public on top of that it’s so much worse.
I almost feel like I need to CW this for myself, fuck capitalism.
I have worked so many service and retail jobs. I have so many horror stories about vindictive management and customers too.
What people don’t understand is that it is stressful as fuck and you’re always working, but it’s also incredibly mundane, samey work. As someone with ADHD, it literally started making me incredibly depressed and physically sick. So much so that I decided to go back to University because anything is better than feeling your brain literally turn to mush.
It took ages for my morning alarm to not make me break out into a sweat.
My hatred for
comes from thousands of hostile encounters with them at work.
Retail also depends on the store’s target customer base and the area it’s in. Considering you were surrounded by tech money, that must have made the customers absolutely intolerable. For me it’s the vets who wear their little “I killed for empire” hats around the store, always unnerving to see.
That is a different experience.
Yeah, I got millennial “scene kids” (they were younger back then) being obnoxious and comically privileged, assholish junior boomer Gen X codebros too, but the actual boomers, the ones that threw a hundred dollar bill at their millennial scene kid brats to fuck off for a few hours, were often even worse.
Clopening
Oh god I know what that is. My [retail name withheld] store has a few of those, but it’s really only the part-timers who get pushed around like that, and only if they allow those hours.
I had several jobs with clopening, and it was used as a passive-aggressive punishment. For example, if I told the manager that adding double the OSHA-regulation amount of bleach to a cleaning solution would not “clean twice as well” then I’d get clopening.
I worked at a McDonald’s in highschool and it was the hardest and most unpleasant work I’ve ever done. Other food service wasn’t much better and call centers are a weird mix where you trade the physical labor with the dehumanizing factor of the customer not seeing your face. One of them once told a coworker that they hoped everyone in her call center would get pancreatitic cancer.
The racism you hear in a call center is also crazy.
CW racism
spoiler
Ton of “thank God finally a (white) English speaker” type shit. Plus, it’s the only setting where I as a very visibly white dude have ever been called a racial slur (not like “cracker” a real one).
Retail and restaurant jobs are both brutal and the hardest jobs I’ve ever done. Teaching, while challenging, was by far more bearable even with its own problems and injustices. When I started teaching, I was so used to retail/restaurant work that it felt like I was somehow doing it wrong because I didn’t feel utterly beaten down every day and yet I was still getting paid.
Anyone that says otherwise is living in a bubble world of privilege, especially asshole computer touchers that sneer about “lazy” people with “not real jobs” and then wonder why they are lonely and waiting for a sufficiently impressive chatbot to call them senpai.