Before I begin this article, I want to make it clear that the sect of Gen Z I'm talking about here is the non-practicing leftists to radical leftists. There are plenty of Gen Z folks who have flatly rejected the kind of mentality I'm about to discuss and have placed their morality in very real, substantial, and time-tested virtues. However, it's hard not to notice the overwhelming stink coming off the rest of the generation, and I want to highlight it.
I'm going to upset some people by first giving Gen Z something of a victim status, which seems counterproductive to acknowledge a generation that has effectively made themselves victims in as many ways as possible, but I think a lot of what they've been told they were victims of has always been a distraction from what was actually done to them.
Gen Z was brought up in an era where mental therapy had become the lens through which everyone was supposed to view reality. Everyone had trauma, everyone had a disorder, and everyone needed to deal with said difficulties by making sure any situation they were in, or any person they interacted with, tiptoed around their personal negative experiences.
To be clear, there is real trauma out there, and real disorders that must be dealt with by professionals and medications that actually help, but the overarching idea was that every person had the same level of trauma as people who suffered actual trauma; it just looked and sounded different, or went unnoticed because it was never pointed out.
This kind of victimhood is easily accepted, though, because the culture (largely guided by university professors, celebrities, politicians, activist groups, and popular media) connected these traumatic and troubling instances to a failure in Western culture.
Suddenly, personal preference gets linked to morality, and if something doesn't meet your standards, it's judged as evil.
With every other generation, including what I'm seeing so far out of Gen Alpha, if something doesn't align with your personal preferences, it's just not for you. You move on to whatever floats your boat. Gen Z, however, was not taught to do this. If something didn't meet them where they were, it was a personal slight that they could then go to war against on the grounds that it breached some sort of moral boundary.
The examples are numerous.
If they want to live in a place but the rent is too high, then it's a symptom of greedy landlords, not market forces making one location more expensive than another.
If a workplace functions in ways that value merit and hard work over identity, then it's a symptom of a toxic work culture with social sins such as sexism or homophobia to boot, and therefore, HR departments need to start putting their thumb on the scales to make things more "fair." Funny enough, this is the same excuse used in many "progressive" corporate environments to reward employees with a quarter of a year off for "mental health" while still being paid.
Anything that doesn't match up to their ideals of representation and inclusion is "problematic" and thus needs to either be destroyed or reimagined and rereleased to match the modern moral idea of inclusion.
Everything is attached to modern morality, and everything lives or dies by that idea of morality.
And in many ways, this has made Gen Z incredibly depressed and stressed, because everything becomes personal. Everyone, from the corporation to the random guy on the street, gets dragged into a sort of hot seat situation to answer for Gen Z's hurt feelings. They want to know why it happened, that you're sorry, and what you're going to do to change things going forward so that they never have to experience that kind of "trauma" again.
This effectively encourages them to be hyper-sensitive and not see it as being such, because tying it to their personal morality makes them believe they're not doing this for themselves, but for the betterment of everyone. They believe they're changing the culture in ways that will make for a better future.
Of course, this also causes everyone else, including other members of Gen Z, to get sick and tired of the nonsense. Everything becomes a culture war as Gen Z attacks everything around them and others are forced to defend it. This only makes the members of Gen Z who fell for this psychotherapy view of the world believe that they're vindicated and affirm to themselves that the reason everyone pushed back on them is that they're right, and they should only fight harder.
Thus the war only grows, divides only widen, and everyone becomes more miserable.
And it's all hooked to the idea sold to Gen Z that personal preference and morality are one and the same.
