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• A recent WSJ op-ed argued that Gen Z is a generation of “weakened kids.”
• The article was based on an interview with NYU professor Jonathan Haidt. 
• Haidt said that social media and a culture of victimhood are to blame for Gen Z’s state. 

The Wall Street Journal ended 2022 with an opinion piece on the “national crisis” of Gen Z, written by Tunku Varadarajan and based on an interview with social psychologist and New York University’s Stern School of Business professor Jonathan Haidt. Varadarajan is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

“We have a whole generation that’s doing terribly,” Haidt is quoted as saying in Varadarajan’s op-ed. Haidt pointed to high rates of anxiety and depression among young people and said that a “performative” social media culture was to blame. 

Varadarajan writes that Haidt’s 2018 book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” covers victim culture in detail, and that social media is the focus of two additional books that Haidt is currently working on.   

Gen Z, typically defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, live in “defend mode,” Haidt said.

“You’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present,” he said, adding that those qualities could threaten America’s culture of innovation. He noted that Mark Zuckerberg, a millennial, was 20 when he founded Facebook, but that Gen Z has only Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai to compare themselves to. Millennials, he argued, rebuilt the “entire world.” 

Gen Z is now entering the workforce, and these “weakened kids” are “less innovative, less inclined to take risks, and that may ‘undermine American capitalism,'” Varadarajan writes in the op-ed, citing Haidt.

“This is something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback,” Haidt said. Notably, millennials’ entrance into the workforce about a decade ago also caused hand-wringing among older workers who worried that generational differences would lead to communication challenges.

The concern about giving feedback to Gen Z workers is occurring just as social media promotes an organizational culture of fear and could have larger knock-on effects, Haidt said.

“If corporations become less effective because everyone’s afraid of Twitter, afraid of what will be said about them,” Haidt said, “this could severely damage American capitalism.”