My daughter stares into the screen. This is not just another TikTok moment. She is in her high school English class; this is education, COVID-19 style. Screens have taken over the classroom and in no sense has their invasion stopped there. They now mediate our connection to work, healthcare, shopping, and entertainment—not to mention our friends and loved ones.
It remains to be seen whether this or any other COVID-necessitated lifestyle change will prove enduring. But the crisis has altered life for every age group. And, to the extent that any cohort will experience lasting changes as a result, my daughter and the millions of other Americans in their late teens and early twenties are especially likely candidates.
Nearly one hundred years ago, the German sociologist Karl Mannheim theorized that our experiences in young adulthood shape how we think about the world—for life. In his reasoning, it is the shared experience of events, politics, economics, fashion, and music that imprints a worldview and defines a generation.
The Baby Boomer generation, then, would have been shaped by events including President Kennedy’s assassination, the civil rights and women’s movements, Vietnam War, space program, and Watergate. A similar process would have held for Gen X (the experience of being latchkey kids of dual-income households; events including the fall of the Berlin Wall, Three Mile Island, the Challenger disaster, and seeing parents downsized by once-trusted employers) and Millennials (9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Great Recession, rise of the Internet, LGBTQ rights movement, and more).
Not all generation-defining events touch everyone in that generation directly. Not all Baby Boomers served in the Vietnam War, for instance, nor were they all directly affected by Watergate. COVID-19 is different, touching every member of every generation.
That consistency will likely come through not in terms of a shared politics, or even a shared sense of how to solve society’s emerging problems. Rather, it may manifest in terms of certain baseline assumptions: Who to trust. When safety is real, and when it is illusory. Whether life tends to get better, or even can get better.
Today, very little appears secure or certain. At best, families hunker in quarantine; at worst, they find themselves contending with literal, mortal peril. Gen Z’ers are in the thick of it, and at the same time they’re cut off from their friends. Their daily and weekly routines have homogenized into an ongoing mush. The academic calendar—the one constant that young people could set their smartwatch to—has warped beyond recognition.
Rituals, such as graduations, have been cancelled; weddings postponed. Even high religious holidays, celebrated for thousands of years, are being skipped, or pushed online. The most ineluctable moments that have punctuated our lives for time immemorial have been ironed flat. Death and taxes remain, but even the latter has been postponed.
The standing of major institutions, too, has taken on damage. The media—itself contending with dwindling advertiser revenue—feeds us a kaleidoscopic barrage of images that would be crushing even as a work of fiction, but which is made all the worse because at least some of it must be true. Governments near and far do seem unprepared, or worse, incompetent. The mettle of public health systems has been weighed and in many cases found wanting. Experts and politicians debate, rather than know, when the pandemic will peak, or when it will be safe to go back to normal.
For Gen Z’ers, tuning in to the news doesn’t restore confidence; it only reinforces the ambient uncertainly. The oldest of them are entering the job market during an economic meltdown of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression. The on-demand economy that was a mainstay of much of their existence—including even such titans as Uber UBER and Airbnb—is under existential threat. Storied retail brands are declaring bankruptcy, and local restaurants and watering holes are shuttering. Even the happiest place on earth, Disney World, is closed.
Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials have each shown less trust in institutions than the preceding generation, and no one thesis has satisfactorily explained why. But it’s worth noting that until this point, no postwar generation ever experienced a moment when seemingly every institution came up short simultaneously. (Even following 9/11, for most, the suspension of “normal” lasted for less than month.) Generation Z is going through something entirely unprecedented.
To be sure, not everyone agrees with Mannheim’s definition of “generations” or “cohorts,” or even that such subsets of the population are useful units for analysis. However, even if you’re skeptical of this line of thinking, the sheer scope of what’s happening to people in their late teens and early twenties is worth considering. As the pandemic rages, we cannot predict at a granular level how it will affect young people, nor can we anticipate other defining events yet to shape their future attitudes and behaviors. But compared with generation-defining events of decades past, COVID-19’s effect on Gen Z may turn out to be large, remarkably extensive, and it may reverberate for a very long time.
Today, many of us find ourselves preoccupied with the present and immediate future. But consider what the present portends for the longer term. It may hold the keys to a vast generation’s lifelong relationship with (and trust in) its leaders, employers, experts, and institutions both private and public. Its willingness to plan for its own future. (The retirement planning industry should strive to be particularly engaged on this point.) Its baseline levels of fear and stress. (Especially in the case of disadvantaged populations bearing the unfair brunt of COVID’s devastation.) Its willingness to have children. Its behavior as economic consumers and producers. Its attitude toward once-rock-solid rituals that now appear to be built on shifting sand. Its disposition toward globalization: Does the larger world stand more as a community of opportunity, or an existential threat?
While experts, politicians, and pundits continue debating when the pandemic will end, the full impact of COVID-19 will not be known for decades. One thing we do know, however, is the window of opportunity we’ll have to influence that future. That time is now. How we respond to the challenges facing us today may hearten, or haunt, us for decades to come.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.
