There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Members of Gen Z are often nicknamed “Zoomers,” a term used to describe young adults who came of age in the era of smartphones, social media, and rapid cultural upheaval.
Males in their teens and twenties are prolonging their adolescence—rarely marrying, not buying a home, not having children, and often not working full-time.
The negative stereotype of a Zoomer is a shiftless man who plays too many video games. He is too coddled by parents and too afraid to strike out on his own.
Zoomers rarely date, supposedly out of fear that they would have to grow up, take charge, and head a household.
Yet the opposite, sympathetic generalization of Gen Z seems more accurate.
All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.
In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males—9-10 percent of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League—are of no interest to college admission officers.
So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Gen Z men saw themselves scapegoated by professors and society for the sins of past generations—and on the wrong side of the preposterous reductionist binary of oppressors and the oppressed.
Traditional pathways to adulthood—affordable homes, upwardly mobile and secure jobs, and safe and secure city and suburban living—had mostly vanished amid overregulation, overtaxation, and underpolicing.
Orthodox and loud student advocacies on campus—climate change, DEI, the Palestinians—had little to do with getting a job, raising a family, or buying a house.
During the Biden years, white males mostly stopped enlisting in the military in their accustomed overrepresented numbers.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had died in frontline combat units at twice their percentages for the demographic. No matter—prior Pentagon DEI commissars still slandered them as suspects likely to form racist cabals.
Editors’ Note: Public Discourse recently hosted an essay contest for students in high school, college, and graduate school. Participants were to answer the question: What do you wish your elders knew about the greatest challenge your generation faces? This essay is the second of two winning essays. The author is Matthew Malec, a JD candidate at the University of Chicago Law School.
I’ve always loved winning. Growing up, everything from board games to Little League was an intense competition, and learning to lose with grace was difficult. As I got older and gained a better understanding of what the most important things in life are, winning took on a deeper, but still important, meaning. I want to have a fulfilling career that helps others, lead a loving Christian family, and, when the time comes, hear the words “well done” and enter into the joy of my Lord and Savior (Matthew 25:23). I was incredibly blessed to grow up in a home where what it means to truly win at life was made clear to me from a young age. Many of my peers are not so lucky. One thing I wish my elders, especially those in positions to mentor young people, knew about my generation is that, for the most part, we are not lazy or intentionally aimless. We need direction. We need to know what it means to win at life and to be supported by communities that give us a meaningful chance to do so. This requires understanding the unique challenges we face and responding with novel solutions.
Today’s young people face collapse in three areas that older generations often took for granted: shared metaphysical traditions, real-world friendships, and family life as a normative good. While Gen Z bears responsibility for its choices, many of the tools and signposts that guided earlier generations are now missing. If older mentors want to help, they must understand how the world has changed and why traditional advice often falls short.
Searching for God in the Modern World
Ultimately, Gen Z’s problems begin at the metaphysical level and spiral down from there. While rumors of revival continue to flare up, and there are certainly many people seeking truth, the data shows that Gen Z is the least secure generation in their faith in recorded history. Unsurprisingly, without a higher power defining truth and morality, people are unsure what it means to live a good life. This can manifest in several forms. Many search for meaning through an obsession with left-wing politics or embracing the “manosphere.” Others (especially men) simply opt out of society entirely, feeling like utter failures with no chance to turn things around. A healthy Christian culture would alleviate many of these problems by filling the God-sized hole many try to plug with politics. It would also encourage both genders to pursue marriage and family formation. And most importantly, it would remind people who are struggling in other aspects of life that they are worthy and made in the image of God.
Older Christian pastors and mentors need to do a better job of getting this message out there, both for young people in their congregation and those outside of it looking for purpose. Too often, older Christians assume America still has a shared moral framework. While the Gospel will always be Christianity’s central message, when engaging Gen Z, it’s important to zoom out even further. Instead of starting with why someone needs redemption from sin, demonstrate that sin is real and corrosive. This task is quite different from most of history, when the goal was to bring someone from another religion to Christianity. People believed in a higher power and a moral law. Now, instead of showing why the Christian God is the true one, the first thing to do is to demonstrate that life has a higher purpose and that moral law actually exists. The playbook from the 1980s and 1990s will not work with Gen Z. Today’s cultural terrain is far too fragmented and mediated by digital life. Before the church can reach hearts, it often must compete with screens.
A Brave New (Online) World
This leads to the next reason Gen Z is so uncertain. Social media has led to deep cultural fracturing and also to people spending huge amounts of time in curated online communities or watching content selected by an algorithm that knows them better than they know themselves. One report found that Gen Z spends 10.6 hours per day online. Unsurprisingly, this has been bad for social capital and caused the highest amount of isolation and loneliness in recorded history. Social media is not bringing people together; it’s giving them short-term dopamine hits in isolation alongside long-term loneliness. Jonathan Haidt’s book about this topic labeled Gen Z “The Anxious Generation,” and while anxiety is up significantly, I would argue that anxiety is more a symptom of uncertainty than the other way around (regardless of which is first, they operate in circular feedback loops). People never learn important social skills, and then, when pressed to use them, become anxious, resulting in further retreats into the numbing comfort of algorithmically optimized solitude. Gen Z certainly deserves some blame for not being more willing to leave their comfort zone and put themselves out there, but at the same time, both the real world and the internet have changed in ways that make organic socialization harder.
Older people have an understanding that younger people spend too much time online and are sometimes antisocial. What they understand less well is that the modern internet is something entirely different from what it was even a decade ago. When I first joined Instagram as a teenager, I could only see posts from people I followed. This meant there was a limited amount of posts to see, and it was generally safe (if often silly) content. There were no advertisements, and no algorithm feeding me endless content to keep me glued to the screen for hours.
Today, social media is more addictive and more dangerous to young people. A 2023 Common Sense report found that the average age for a child to be exposed to pornography is now twelve, with over half (58 percent) of these first encounters being accidental. A recent Wall Street Journal report also exposed how Instagram connects pedophile networks, and a 2024 study found that the TikTok algorithm exacerbated eating disorders by biasing the algorithm toward pro-anorexia content. The modern internet strikes at children’s innocence.
The internet has rapidly transformed into a place where the best-case scenario for kids is staring at mindless videos for hours, and the worst case is that they are exposed to content and communities that erode innocence and distort their understanding of love, trust, and the body. Parents would do well to delay getting kids a smartphone until they are more mature and to aggressively use parental controls.
The modern internet exacerbates my generation’s uncertainty by discouraging real-life social interactions that lead to meaningful friendships, healthy romantic relationships, and knowing how to interact with authority figures. While Gen Z is certainly partially at fault, parents, teachers, coaches, religious leaders, and other adults who lead young people should be mindful of how starved my generation is of real community. Have patience with young people who are trying to put themselves out there and give them opportunities for real-world socialization. Some will stay online, but many will be grateful for the opportunity.
We are not lazy or intentionally aimless. We need direction. We need to know what it means to win at life and to be supported by communities that give us a meaningful chance to do so.
The Family in Crisis
Finally, and related to both the decline of religion and online harms, Gen Z is struggling mightily as it relates to dating, marriage, and the family. Here, the lack of traditional guardrails and the cesspool that is the modern internet work together to make family formation harder than ever.
As religion and other community structures have broken down and fractured in America, the family has suffered greatly (arguably even more than metaphysical belief). In 2019, just 51 percent of high school seniors lived with married parents, down from over 60 percent in 1996. Ample studies have shown that children with two married parents do best, and fewer married families mean fewer role models for today’s youth to look up to. A generation raised without seeing healthy marriages risks never understanding what true love even looks like.
In addition to a lack of role models, the decline of religious community, meaningful friendships, and general social interaction has led to a decline in teen dating. Marriage is happening later than ever (if at all), and older people are oversimplifying the causes. The go-to line, even in many more conservative circles, is that young men just need to step up and approach more women. Young men are imperfect, and many critiques of them have some truth, but few ever stop and think about why young men are reluctant to date. Examining everything wrong with modern gender relations is beyond the scope of this piece, but the decline of traditional morality and real-world community feels like a good place to start. As does their replacement: dating apps and the modern internet.
A majority of American couples now meet online, but the system isn’t working. In addition to the overall decline of marriage, couples who meet online have less satisfying and less stable marriages. Throw in the rise of the app “Tea,” a women’s-only app for “spilling the tea” (sharing information, often in a gossipy manner) about their dates, which soared to the top spot in the App Store in late July, and the situation is only getting worse. While some men who disengage from dating do so out of immaturity or bitterness, many are simply worn down by a system that feels rigged or unreachable. The traditional ways to meet a partner are more difficult to access than in the past, and online dating is often unserious even when one does get a match. Without the traditional structures (churches, family, friend groups), meeting someone is hard, and it only creates further doubt about what it is to live the good life. Men and women both bear responsibility for this crisis, but the digital dynamics that govern modern dating were designed for profit. They lead to the commodification of human beings rather than healthy marriages.
An increasing number of young Americans say they don’t want children, and the fertility rate is cratering. If these trends continue, the result will be worse than a generation that struggles with family formation; it will be a culture that rejects it as both a moral and social good.
The Roadmap to the Good Life
My generation needs help discerning what the good life truly is. For many, the internet has become just as (or more) important than the real world, having a happy family feels like an impossibility, and the soul yearns for God but finds the church either legalistic or passive.
Many in Gen Z don’t know what it means to win in life. As a result, many just want to survive or escape. Older guides need to light the way. Place an intense focus on cultivating real-world community and spaces for social interaction, don’t be afraid to try to pair people up, and most importantly, be bold in faith and show people how amazing God is, both through your words and through the life that you live in an attempt to reflect his glory. What I want older people to know is that Gen Z isn’t evil. Gen Z is crying out for help in a world where traditional structures are crumbling and nothing has filled the void. Gen Z is anxious, uncertain, and looking for something to cling to. Show us happy marriages, rooted friendships, and the way, truth, and life (John 14:6). We were made for higher things. Show us it’s still possible to reach for them.
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