Gen Z

Quinn Mitchell, WhoWhatWhy  -   As a member of Gen Z, I have observed that ours is a generation that cannot be stereotyped into one category. We are a diverse cohort, with various perspectives shaped by the rapidly changing age in which we grew up. Our oldest members were 11 when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and our very youngest hadn’t even been born yet. 

In 2016, some older members were in college or in late high school; others (the median Gen Zer was born around 2004) were still in grade school; and the youngest were just learning to read. 

Assumptions about the views and political leanings of Gen Z taken as a whole are, therefore, likely to be misleading, if not outright erroneous. And such unnuanced assumptions can, as we have witnessed with respect to the 2024 campaign, lead to serious political miscalculations. 

Yes, this generation is all under 30, and it’s easy to see how, from a boomer or Gen X perspective, we all just look “young” and more or less indistinguishable from each other. But flattening a whole spectrum of people — growing up, crucially, in a period of rapid, time-stretching social and technological transformations — into one monolithic group fails to account for our varied experiences growing up. 

A 26-year-old who came of age during the Obama-Trump transition era is bound to have a perspective different from that of someone my age, nearly a decade younger, whose first exposure to politics came from scrolling on TikTok.