“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.
Unironically, we do need some sort of jobs program to rehabilitate the US but 1) thatll never happen in the US. 2) It shouldnt happen under liberals
Americans are so stupid and brain warped at this point, everything is labeled as being communism anyway so you could definitely have someone do state owned enterprise and just call it state capitalism instead with nothing more than the usual pushback. Capitalism with American characteristics lol
Surprised it hasn’t been done already to be honest. They subsidize business super heavily already just in the dumbest way possible
The problem is that if dems suggested it republicans would call it communism and then dems would spend a year try8ng to “educate” them on whatcnommunism was, how.much they hated it and why thisnprogram deffinitly wasn’t that.
Where as if the dems instituted the program and then as soon as republicans started complaining about it call them lazy and weak and say they just don’t want to work it might actually take off.
Dems really need to learn how to message, they’re already full of shit they might as well bullshit for a meaningful benefit.
They wont do it, the time for that is long gone
I don’t think the federal government is actually capable of doing a jobs program any more. What would they have workers do, build IKEA furniture benches in 4’x4’ “parks” next to 500k cardboard exurb houses?
Unironically it would pribablly be installing anti homeless devices everywhere. Instead of planting rows of trees like the CCC it’ll be installing rows of anti homeless spikes on every flat surface below 6 feet.
NOT STOPPING UNTIL EVERY CITY IN US LOOK LIKE COMMORRAGH
And potentially have a homeless use one of those benches?! How could they put our community in danger like that?! The city council will be hearing about this!
Yeah that’s the solution to social alienation and bleak prospects for the young’s future: more militarism!
“I see nothing for the future.”
“Would you perk up if I handed you a flag and a gun?”
“What? No?”
Furiously scribbling.
“Whatcha writing?”
No eye contact due to more furiously scribbling. “Nothing. Just notes.”
The young guy reaches over and grabs the notebook and then reads it out loud. " ‘Lazy. Lack of initiative. Unpatriotic. Solution nat service p? Name - Generation Z Compact to…’ What the fuck is this shit?"
“A National Service Program could be called the Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America. It could help you. And could have my notebook back?”
“Two questions: will the gun be loaded and will you still be in the room when I get it?”
How stupid do they think we are?
“Oh men, is porky not hiring you? Ohh….too BAD! Guess you have no choice but to be porky’s personal attack dog!”
Called it that they would sooner or later move from “everyone should al learn trades and do absolutely nothing else! College should be for rich people only!” to “Everyone should join the military and do absolutely nothing else! College should be for rich people only!”
No doubt they’re salivating over this as a way to dispose of the “useless surplus human livestock” porky doesn’t need.
Honestly, in America, on a demographic that grew up on CoD, it would probably work. Rile them up against the yellow peril and they’ll have their monstrous purpose and opportunities for social bonding.
yeah so, the Democrats “tried” the national service program already, in their typically means tested and useless fashion.
they offered to forgive the remaining balance of student loans from 4 years of school for those of us that worked in public service for 10 years making monthly payments of 10% of our income.
I joined because I give a fuck about civic duty for some stupid reason, so I am intimately familiar with its processes. the program for tracking payments and servicing us has only been effective at taking the 10% of our income. I completed 10 years of public service and faithful, qualifying payments along side routine paperwork filing with my servicers. not to mention hours on the phone when their system routinely fucked up the count. I finished over a year ago. and I am now on my 3rd servicer because the previous two had their exclusive national contract revoked for failing to do their job. after a year in limbo, they announced I qualified and forgave half of my loans. and since late spring, everything has been halted for everyone because the Biden admin bungled it’s extremely diluted reform of student loans (remember when we were all gonna get 50k forgiven?, then 10k?, finally settling quietly on 0k) such that the courts have halted every avenue to forgiveness for everyone.
the only people who trust our institutions to keep their promises are those who are paying no attention to them.
Yeah sure, the guys who would fall for “hey, we do not give a shit about your material problems, do you want to pick up a rifle and be a murdering tool of our empire instead?” will pick fascism with lanyard cringelord aesthetics over mask-off fascism. How far does this ridiculous dork have his head up his own ass to convince himself this plan could work?
How far does this ridiculous dork have his head up his own ass to convince himself this plan could work?
He can see the inside his own ribcage.
What’s material conditions, preciousss? What’s material conditions, eh?
Makes me want a Gollum emote
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.
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.
Anybody who remembers and was not pushed left by the bailouts and Occupy Wall Street is a bozo
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Apparently the answer to the author is, “yes”. Deeply unserious examination
DragonBallZinn hate-read? DragonBallZinn hate-read.
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.”
Well dems, there you have it. Tell porky he has enough and your little guy trouble is solved. Who knew it was as easy as slapping the rich’s undeserved piles of cash out of their fat trotters?
Oh wait…there’s more to the article?
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.
Well what did you expect? You kowtowed to Wall Street and made it crystal clear that the rich can do whatever they want because “muh freedumz! Muh property rights!” This young man already told you, force these businesses to make some jobs and so much will be solved.
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.”
Not really a hate-read comment but moreso confirming. Porky’s pickiness if not outright refusal to make jobs has ruined my life. I feel like I have been infantilized by absurdly high expectations. “But it’s hard mode bro, doncha wanna prove you’re a badass?” No, I just want to survive.
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.
AND WHO’S FAULT IS THAT!?!?! It’s CHUDs AND liberal’s fault because their oh so precious corporations ain’t hiring, and also I realized what “American ideals are” pampering the pampered and violent omnicidal fascism.
Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations.
That’s not our choice, dipshit. You pigs aren’t LETTING us work. Maybe when we come to you with applications, you stop being so picky and just hire us all. Boo hoo, your business will expand.
Mr. Trump has tapped these anxieties by weaving a hypermasculine message of strength and defiance into his broader narrative that undermines confidence in democratic institutions. And it’s working. Aware that boasting about “killing” Roe v. Wade drove away young women, Mr. Trump zeroed in on capturing a larger share of the young male vote.
Yes yes, we are aware that our well-moisturized lad is doing a classic divide and conquer. Well what have you done, thumb-twiddler? Absolutely nothing. This is like stupidpol leftists. By not addressing a cultural and social issue, you’re letting the right win by default. Oh boo-hoo, they will call us unattractive and claim we have blue hair.
His playbook? A master class in bro-whispering: championing crypto, securing the endorsement of Dave Portnoy — the unapologetically offensive founder of Barstool Sports — and giving U.F.C. President Dana White, who embodies the alpha-male archetype that appeals to many young men, a prime spot at the Republican National Convention.
Hold on, dems you can capitalize off of this and if you’re feeling particularly edgy. Turn JD Vance’s Hillbilly elegy book against him by at least pointing out republicans are promoting the same self-destructive behaviors that Vance said are reasons to give up on “rednecks”. This is a self-destructive culture that is promoted among the working class to keep them in the state they’re in. I should know, I’m a “redneck” myself and right-wing cultural bullshit fools the white working-class they’re fellow elites with the rich and promoted the sabotage of any institutions to help get us out of the situation we’re in.
Is this rightward drift among young men simply a short-lived, Trump-inspired episode or a more permanent transformation? The answer lies partly in Ms. Harris’s ability to connect with and motivate young voters as the campaign nears its end.
This has always been the case. 4chan got started in 2003 and has been a digital Republican HQ since its inception. Hell, look at Reagen
But to win more votes from young men, Ms. Harris must address their fears head-on and present a bold vision that speaks to their desire for purpose and strength.
Does this mean you guys are going to pressure companies into hiring again?
Here’s one way. To reignite the hope of the emerging generation, Ms. Harris should make a sweeping national call to both military and civilian service
FUCK! YOU!
Our youth’s appetite for civic engagement is strong and growing.
We just want businesses to hire again. That’s it. Yet here you go trying to choose our jobs for us again. Who knew it would be the capitalists that are the “dig the fucking hole” crowd?
Kamala Harris can frame national service as a pathway to rebuilding America’s strength from within, addressing growing concerns about military recruitment and bridging political divides with a renewed sense of shared responsibility.
I’m not a goddamn Pokemon.
Kamala Harris can counter that narrative by listening and recognizing their fears but also by offering something more profound: a vision of hope, strength and shared purpose.
“Hey young men, is porky getting you down from his refusal to hire you? Are you upset that college and having your own place to stay are now luxuries for the rich only? Have you considered…being porky’s personal attack dog? You macho macho meatheads love kicking ass, right?”
To reignite the hope of the emerging generation, Ms. Harris should make a sweeping national call to both military and civilian service
Alas, in the long (checks notes) 0 years since the US had the world’s largest and most active military our youths have been vitiated! Where will we find conflicts to harden them back up?
Service guarantees citizenship!
I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that kids are horrified by genocide. When adults brush it off as “complicated,” it reinforces the idea that adults are full of shit.
Kids are also horrified by climate change, though this one is usually a little less front and center.
During the onset of Covid, and through the first few years of the pandemic, kids were horrified that adults took a simple thing (“try to avoid getting people sick”) and complicated it with their bullshit.
Adults don’t know what they’re doing and they’re full of shit most of the time. The main tell for that is “it’s complicated.” Kids know.
As they become adults, kids are operating under the correct assumption that we’re all doomed unless something drastically changes, and they have no idea how to participate in a doomed society.
Even the ones that don’t believe in climate change, covid pandemics and deny the genocide know that something is off, something isn’t right. Nothing is working how it’s “supposed” to work i.e. how they were taught. When the powers that be are making the world miserable and the same powers to a half-assed admittance to all these things, many don’t feel they can trust the truth and turn elsewhere for answers, look for new truths and conspiracies. Hence why Trump and other fash movements (MRA, eco-fash etc.) do gain a following.
ah yes my solution:a bush era call to total war with Iran with a massive invasion requiring us to draft all these despondent Gen Z men and give them some skills, identity, community and patriotism:
by watching three-quarters of their friends blown to pieces by suicide drones and hypersonics as they loiter in the Persian gulf, crowded together in amphibious assault ships!!
A perfect recipe for
fascismpreserving democracy among the returning veterans. Especially if the war ends in a stalemate.not looking forward to the american zoomer freikorps “2nd ‘Fighting Andrew Tates’ Battalion” surrounding my house and emptying thousands of rounds into it
what a dogshit article, whatever this person got paid for writing it should be delivered in the form of socks full of quarters being swung at them repeatedly
On the one hand it sucks all these people recognize the issue and their soluti0n is let capitalists do whatever they want more.
On the other hand that’s kind of on the dems for literally not being able to come up with a better solution than that.
A lot of chuddy brobros are still stuck in the “caring about things too much is stupid and bad” South Park (or Richard and Mortimer) mentality, and consequently, a lot of them are Trumpers because deliberately supporting the edgier guy that babbles about Hannibal Lector is le funnay, and of course triggers the liberals.
