Zoomer irony isn't [that] nihilistic
there might be hope for Gen Z
This is an adaption of my article in the latest issue of ‘Traces’ magazine, which will be on sale at the New York Encounter this weekend—which you should definitely attend.
At a time when the Catholic Church in America is extremely polarized, there is nothing more remarkable—and needed—than events like this where the only agenda is to look for the hints of beauty, humanity, and God’s presence within today’s culture…and where the attendees are unironically happy!
Also, Stephen & other friends of pomo will be speaking at/attending the NYE. See the full schedule here .
It’s become a commonplace trope to characterize Baby Boomers as hardworking, Gen X as cynical latchkey kids, Millennials as insufferable narcissists, and Zoomers as lazy and apathetic. Many complain that it’s not fair to reduce each generation to simplistic stereotypes. But as the saying goes, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
As a millennial, I can confirm that many of my peers (myself included) are overly idealistic, have fragile egos, and worry too much about what others think of us. And as someone who has taught Gen Z (zoomers) for over ten years, I’ve found that they don’t exactly have the strongest work ethic, and (unlike us millennials) don’t feel the urge to hide it. Upon being confronted with my failure to meet a deadline, I have a set of excuses ready to go to explain away my lack of diligence; whereas the majority of my students are content with admitting that they just didn’t feel like doing the work. Such an attitude reveals the truth behind the more concerning accusations against zoomers: that their apathy and detached, overly-ironic sense of humor stems from a deeply nihilistic outlook. At the end of the day, nothing really matters…so why take anything seriously? Why not turn everything—from the utterly mundane to the disturbingly vulgar and violent—into a joke or a form of entertainment?
Some have posited that this attitude is the inevitable result of growing up in a society characterized by automation and atomization, where nothing is sacred and where individuals are robbed more and more of the agency to live as true protagonists in our society. And yet in my experiences, I’ve come to find that zoomer irony, despite being concerningly nihilistic, can also be a door that opens up to the rediscovery of hope.
The exponential growth of social media over the last decade has tilled the ground for the proliferation of viral memes and trends, of which zoomers were the primary consumers. Some are humorous in nature, ranging from weird and infantile to light-heartedly goofy. Take the trends of calling people in their late twenties and early thirties “unc” (poking fun at them for being old[er]), the students who “mew” in the middle of class to get a laugh out of their classmates, posting or shouting the cryptic phrase “6 7” in random situations, or the ubiquitous sight of kids recording a TikTok dance in public spaces.
But the darker side to Gen Z’s ironic sense of humor is fueled by their having been desensitized to evil and suffering, mainly by the barrage of content they are overwhelmed with on social media. I remember feeling this way the first time I saw memes making jokes about the 9/11 attacks and posts praising Osama Bin Laden. I found it even more disturbing to see the zoomers who posted that they not only watched the video of Luigi Mangione gun down United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, but that they “felt nothing” while watching it.
This attitude that “nothing really matters” has more immediate ramifications than merely causing a moral scandal: In my home state of New Jersey, TikTok influencers will post that they’ll be making an appearance at one of our state’s many shopping malls. Kids will flock—unaccompanied by adults—to see the influencer, who then incites them to start wreaking havoc by running around and even throwing things and fighting, just so that they can go viral. This has resulted in a new policy being instated in malls that requires minors to be accompanied by adults after hours—a major blow to New Jersey teens for whom going to the mall with your friends was once a right of passage and mark of your maturity and independence as a young adult.
This general apathy toward the prospect of striving toward some ideal is reflected in zoomer’s politics, or lack thereof. According to my students, including the ones who consider themselves to be quite progressive, “wokeness” and “cancel culture” are “cringe,” which is to say passé or out of fashion. Only a small minority seem to take any interest in political activism (mainly via far-right populist-nationalism that is primarily a knee-jerk reaction to excesses of millennial “wokeness”), and even fewer in making their political views known. It’s hard to take politics seriously when you believe that most politicians and activist organizations are compromised or ineffective.
This is a far cry from the earnestness and lofty idealism that characterized my peers’ politics. Millennials are the generation of all things woke: Social Justice Warriors who “checked their privilege at the door,” who created “safe spaces” free of “microagressions” and protected by “trigger warnings.” We posted and protested in order to change both policy on paper and culture on the ground. We unironically “signalled” our virtues on our sleeves, lawns, clothing, Instagram story, and Twitter bio. Say what you will about the political leanings of the majority of my peers, but you can’t deny that we sincerely believed that we were making a difference in the world.
But the problem is that we believed too much—or rather, too blindly. Our proclivity for hopping on the social cause du jour—whether BLM, Defund the Police, or #MeToo—caused us to lose sight of the fact that to be human is to be limited, fragile, and sinful. Our quickness to point the finger at the ways other people or structures were “problematic” was rooted in our inability to embrace the inevitability of evil and injustice, which we ourselves are far from immune to—a fact we thought we could absolve ourselves of by merely posting a black square on Instagram or publicly renouncing our privilege.
Our naive attempt to build sinless structures with our own hands—and to punish anyone who deviates from these ideals in the slightest—infringed on civil liberties and, ironically, served to further entrench and expand far-reaching—and deeply unjust—systems of power. Alas, as thinkers like John Milbank, Christopher Lasch, and Robert Hugh Benson have warned, the inevitable trajectory of utopian forms of liberal humanism tends to propagate deeply impersonal, bureaucratic systems of power—what Father Giussani called “abstract power” or what Pasolini called “power without a face”—that rob the people of their agency and impose sinister forms of social control under the deceptively sunny guise of promising greater equality, progress, and freedom.
Furthermore, millennials’ lack of humility, denial of our sinfulness, and rigid moralism yielded a generation with no sense of humor. The anxious climate of needing to prove one is “on the right side of history,” of language policing, and losing one’s jobs and friends for merely cracking a joke led us to censor ourselves and to carry ourselves with a dreary air of self-righteousness and self-seriousness. There’s no time to laugh if you’re too busy building utopia (or spending your free time posting infographics).
Having grown up in this climate (and lived to tell the tale), I can’t help but find “irony-pilled” zoomers to be a breath of fresh air. Surely, their lack of political seriousness is colored by their nihilism. Yet I must admit that such an attitude toward the expansion of abstract powers that absorb our agency is more fitting, and in the least more honest, than that of my delusionally idealistic peers. In reality, the flashy yet hollow nature of my peers’ performatively “symbolic” political activism didn’t pose a substantial threat to the expansion of state and corporate power.
Thus, as much as zoomers are prone to total apathy and even to chaos and violence, their attitude can also open the door to forging more concrete forms of political engagement that are in touch with the lived needs of one’s community members, and thus with the common good. The resurfacing of talk about principles like solidarity and subsidiarity and of initiatives that aim to rebuild civic society are all promising means to recover our collective sense of agency. One can see this in the brand of populism promoted by public servants like former FTC chairwoman Lina Khan, the revival of the labor movement, the emergence of new faith-based grassroots initiatives like New Polity, as well as renewed interest in older ones like the Catholic Worker.
Gen Z’s ironic sense of humor can be darkly misanthropic at times. But I’ve also seen iterations of ironic humor that are rooted in a healthy sense of what Cornel West would call the “tragicomic” nature of being human. In particular, I find hope in the reemergence of self-deprecating forms of irony—the kind that was popularized by the Jewish comedians who carried on the legacy of the Old Testament prophets, whose mission was to call humanity to remain in the tension between the “almost-but-not-yet” of being sinful creatures awaiting the promise of redemption. When done right, this self-deprecating form of irony—the kind exuded by figures like GK Chesterton, Slavoj Zizek, and our friend Lorenzo Albacete—can foster the much needed virtues of humility, gratitude, and hope.
Personally, I’ve seen how much my relationships with the zoomers I’ve taught and critically engaging their sense of humor has given life to much of my own work in writing and curating cultural events. I find that using a cautiously-playful mode of detached irony has enabled me to enter into dialogue with people of all stripes about everything ranging from the arts and politics to faith and our own personal experiences, and where I feel free to debate contentious ideas and crack the occasional joke…all of which I found the hypermoralistic air of millennial discourse to be definitively closed off to.
The markedly postmodern impulse1 driving Gen Z’s ironic “vibes” can breed an apathetic relativism and straight-up nihilism. Yet it can also lead to the rediscovery of those needs, questions, and desires which make us most human, and of a greater Truth that fulfills them.
The literary critic Wayne C. Booth once observed that “postmodernist theories of the social self have not explicitly acknowledged the religious implications of what they are about. But if you read them closely, you will see that more and more of them are talking about the human mystery in terms that resemble those of the subtlest traditional theologies.”
This insight was part of what inspired the exhibit about the life of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that I curated with some friends at the 2023 New York Encounter. Despite being known for having popularized the “Death of God” and the assertion that “there are no facts, there are only interpretations,” we found that his ideas opened up a space for rediscovering the deep-seated human urges—for freedom and fulfillment—that the shallowness of modern Enlightenment thought seemed to have relegated to the backburner. Thus, even Nietzsche himself admitted toward the end of his that he had an “urge for [a] truth” that could shatter his relativistic philosophy, and even went as far as revealing that he was “in a mood of fatalistic ‘surrender to God.’”
I find this a great narrative of the generations, and love the glimpse at hope.