These Wild Young People—Asterisk

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These Wild Young People

Tessa Augsberger<br>Elan Kluger<br>Rufus Knuppel

Gen Z are a bunch of cowards…or are they risking it all on crypto? The editors of The New Critic report on their generation’s Risk-geist.

A schism has emerged among members of the commentariat: Some pronounce Gen Z the biggest bunch of degenerate risk-takers in history (tales of the apathetic youth with nothing to lose abound), while others, thick with worry, proclaim Gen Z to be wholly risk-averse (shut-ins all, unwilling to talk on the phone, ask people out, or drink even a sip of alcohol).<br>As the editors of the Gen Z magazine The New Critic, our inbox is full of a certain kind of pitch, one that decries a crumbling economy, metaphysical malaise, and institutional collapse. These essays speak of a polycrisis and Gen Z’s uniquely unstable future, with uncertainty as their crowning abstraction. In the face of such an unparseable future, young people face a dilemma: Which risks should we take, if any at all?<br>If pressed on why our generation faces a future of such unyielding confusion, writers’ responses vary: The ecological threat posed by climate change makes our future unpredictable, they say. The economy is so unsteady that it is hard for our generation to expect what to want from life. AI models are redefining how we conceive of our own humanity, and such changes induce existential dread. When questioned further — on why AI poses more of a total threat to Gen Z than, say, the Great War once did for the Lost Generation — answers stall and often cease altogether. I guess existential threats cannot be quantified. Maybe the risks of childbirth, or linear warfare, or famine, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the absence of antibiotics might have been pretty existential if I’d been born back then, too.<br>Our peers are even uncertain about their uncertainty. One interviewee put it frankly: “I don’t know. I can’t say we face more uncertainty when I don’t know what it was like to be my age 20 years ago.”<br>Everyone faces the unknown at one point or another. Life is uncertain — or rather, one thing is certain, and it isn’t life. Young adults, especially, are prone to this feeling: We do not yet know what part of society we will fold ourselves into; we do not yet have families, husbands, wives, of our own. For the volatile young person, the problems of the contemporary are like volcanic craters threatening to swallow everything in ash. Every generation fights their battles.<br>This unrootedness, of course, is also what makes youth so exciting. As anyone who has performed on stage has likely been told, nervousness is the same feeling as excitement. Both states derive from anticipating the unknown, and they dissipate once the curtains are parted; overcoming uncertainty necessarily involves walking on stage and taking a risk, any risk!<br>To probe our peers’ attitudes toward risk-taking, we forwent statistics about aggregate alcohol consumption or job preferences. Instead, we looked for the anecdotal, rang up some witnesses, and delved into the heart of the Risk-Geist.

At one end of the risk barometer is Steve, 22, who avoids risks of all kinds. He has never smoked or vaped because his grandmother died of lung cancer. He drinks, but only in moderation and with friends. He avoids drugs of all kinds. He does not gamble, he thinks the Kalshi craze is for degenerates only, and he has the strong suspicion that his peers’ desire to seek out risk is the prevailing cause of their unhappiness.<br>Steve believes the social rat-race leads to lower overall well-being, and it’s this competition that drives his peers toward what he calls “costly things,” or “things that are very time-intensive or things that are risky — like starting a business, maybe they’re going to space, or taking up an artsy career that they’re not passionate about — just so they can tell other people that they’re doing this cool thing.”<br>Steve dryly notes he recently took a gamble by foregoing investment banking interviews in favor of a career in consulting; he starts at McKinsey next year. Steve avoids even the risks that are expected of youth, like traveling to new places, asking women out, or talking to strangers. When asked if he would travel to space, he says he would not: “It scares me.”<br>Similarly, Dean, 20, thinks inane risk-takers ought to be punished. Why seek out risk for the sake of it? A recent college graduate, Dean says he has experience with life-threatening danger and that we oughtn’t waste the good fortune of being born to an age in which life expectancy is unprecedentedly high. As he tells it:

I had a friend who went to [the state of] Georgia after high school, and the ATM ate his credit card right at the beginning of the trip, so he had no money. He joined this little gang of beggars in the cities and then also traveled around the countryside, sort of mooching off people. Then, near the end of his trip, he’s, like, literally sleeping on the...