The inertia of Generation Z and the crisis of the West

Western society seems more focused on keeping the already born efficient and healthy as they age than on procreating new human beings. In a condition of unprecedented demographic decline, people in their twenties seem to experience youth as a burden to be met with inertia. While pensioners have the energy that their parents and grandparents had at age 45 and increasingly return to work, for pleasure or necessity, Generation Z is the first that does not know what the world was like before the internet and therefore does not recognise cultural elements and values of the bygone analogue age. They experience a contradiction between the 'workism' (identification between life and work) of the Boomers and those values such as environment, friendship, equality, equity that they put before individual professional success. Work, according to Ipsos, is for them only eighth on the value scale. Including corporate ones: when companies seek them out, even for their digital skills, they fail to integrate the conditions they impose while remaining productive. In order to choose a company, it should in fact satisfy their sensitivity to the consequences of the work they do.

They call for smart working and a four-day working week, oblivious to the fact that this will reduce GDP by twelve percentage points and billions of euros and put pension support in doubt. The burden to this distance and uncertainty has been put by pandemics and wars, which have eliminated any clear point of reference and increased anxiety. Two million young people in Italy are neither looking for work nor studying. Incel, involuntary celibates who cannot find or are not looking for a partner or companion and mainly practice 'sexting': online sex.

In Anglo-Saxon countries, intergenerational discomfort seems even more serious and some schools have become veritable battlegrounds. At the centre are no longer educational issues but struggles over identity. In London, California and Australia the news increasingly features teachers under attack because they refused to recognise, for example, a pupil's identification in an animal. Often a cat. It seems unbelievable, but this is how it is: the pupil enters the classroom and meows, demanding that the teacher and his classmates recognise his feline identity. If this does not happen, the parents themselves will start to complain to the school and the teacher will be put on the spot. Example.

More serious misunderstandings have arisen around gender affirmation, and they hold sway in British schools. Until a few months ago, puberty-blocking therapies were allowed even on minors, to allow them time to make a more informed choice about their gender while feeling trapped in a sex that is not their own.

One clinic, the Tavistock, became famous as a centre for gender affirmation and reassignment medicine for minors. Sex affirmation surgery has also been arranged for some boys. Mastectomy or emasculation. Choices they later regretted; some, interviewed in the episode of 'Code' entitled Alien, available on Raiplay, since waking up from anaesthesia. Now they cultivate suicidal thoughts.