Edna

Gen Z culture is learning, at a youngish age, that you just have to hide your emotions around adults because they think they’ve got it under control and seeing you react upsets them. Gen Z culture is taking matters into your own hands. Gen Z culture is having to treat adults like royalty and pander to them while they say “not now, sweetie, the adults are talking.” Gen Z culture is hopefully gonna be, at some point, saying, “Not now, Mom, we’re trying to fix the world and I don’t have time for being told that it’s stupid or that you’ve got it under control.” Gen Z culture is going numb from caring too much and blocking yourself off from the news, voluntarily (watching movies, eating mac n cheese, and ignoring it so you can heal) or involuntarily (going to camp and there aren’t any screens) and feeling less hopeless but still guilty, because you can’t not care, you have to care, it’s your job, so you try to force yourself to feel again, to fight, to not go numb and sit down and panic and cry and hope that for once, an adult tries to help rather than sitting down and telling us that they know what they’re doing or that we’re their only hope and it’s our job to fight. Gen Z is knowing that anger is a finite resource but not caring anyway because every adult out there is screaming for us to do their job for them, and you know what? You know what? We’re doing a much better job than they ever did, and if they would just step aside or help us, give us something other than thoughts or prayers, we’d be changing the world so much faster.

Take it from the biochemist who used to work with vaccines: