“We’re cooked.” That’s the overarching sentiment growingly plaguing a great part of Millennials and Generation Z. From World-War-3 memes to job burnout, a growing number of 19-to-40-year-olds are developing a quiet but concerning apathy towards their own existence. As a Millennial myself, I get it, but it concerns me as much as it saddens me to see my generational peers laughing their way into Armageddon. It saddens me not because I’d rather cry about it, but because a variety of factors clearly have been progressively pushing that demographic into a pretty dangerous position—and that position looks a lot like the edge of a cliff. I ask myself if our chronic use of humor to dim life’s realities is simply part of digital native culture and customs, or rather the symptoms of a general fatigue towards an accelerating twenty-first-century lifestyle, presenting laughter as the only resort to preserve one’s sanity. Were we always like that? And why? Bias and personal experiences aside, I’d like to dig a little deeper into what has been making us develop this degree of apathy towards human existence.
By now, over 60% of Generation Z is 18 or older—in other terms, “of working age.” As for my generation, the youngest Millennials will be 30 next year. The oldest ones are 45. While I’d like to think of the memory of watching the video of Sum 41’s ‘In Too Deep’ on a cubic desktop computer as rather recent, I’m afraid that was two decades ago. So was the memory of my dad taking me outside of the living room when footage of 9/11 appeared in the news on the television one evening after dinner. I also remember discussing the global financial crisis of 2008 in my second year of middle school back in France with my classmates, arguing whose parents may be more impacted based on their respective occupation. We didn’t understand a thing about market crashes or any of those historical events, but they surely conditioned us to a certain perspective of the world. Overall, I do remember my childhood in a positive way—riding my bicycle with my dad and older brother, visiting my grandparents at their farm, planting potatoes, going on family picnics at the beach, and the general pleasures of a childhood spent in the French countryside.
The feeling of “remembering the good old days” is surprisingly common in Millennials. A global survey from GlobalWebIndex (a market research company that provides global consumer data and insights) even reports that 61% of Millennials feel nostalgic when thinking of movies or music from the 1990s, and that 56% of Gen Z feel the same way about the 2000s. However, what differentiates Millennial nostalgia from their younger and older counterparts is how early this feeling of nostalgia set on. The essence of Millennial nostalgia lies in the frequency of transitions they had to put up with. For example, most Millennials weren’t born with a computer around. It was something they discovered during their childhood or adolescence. Some schools may to some extent have been technologically equipped, but most homes in the 1990s did not own a computer—let alone have access to the internet. Fast-forwarding to the mid-to-late 2000s, social media was another tool Millennials had to adapt to, along with carrying a mobile phone everywhere they went. This is the very playground where the Millennial emotional landscape would be defined—at the intersection between technology, societal transitions, and change fatigue.
We started with funny cat videos and somehow ended up turning countless media on the world wide web into a potential source of laughter. A video of a person crying became another GIF. Someone falling down the stairs was a new meme. Over time, Millennials and Gen Z developed a certain degree of desensitization to harm happening to others, while at the same time becoming more concerned about their own mental stability. Self-harm and suicidal ideation became a new virus in online spaces. Tumblr, for instance, was home to a large “Pro-Ana” community back in 2012–2014.
“Pro-Ana” (short for Pro-Anorexia) was an influential subculture that romanticized and promoted anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, including posts labelled as “thinspo” (short for “thin-spiration”) and extensive tips and tricks on how to lose weight fast by essentially starving yourself. Examples included photos and quotes like “Skip dinner, wake up thinner,” “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” or even personifying one’s eating disorder with expressions like “Ana is my best friend.” The “Pro-Ana” community also overlapped with other disorders like self-mutilation, depression, and suicidal ideation. Therapy wasn’t as normalized or accessible as it is today, so digital peer support thrived instead. While many then-teens recovered from their mental health adversities, the 2012–2014 Tumblr era set a new tone for digital spaces: the sharing of one’s mental health struggles. Some of that took the form of humor and self-deprecation, and some took the form of serious cries for help. All in all, what prevailed was the normalization of mental health disorders—sometimes through inaccurate self-diagnosis.
Based on a report from the National Center for Health Statistics (CDC), between 2010 and 2020, the United States saw a 60% increase in the rate of suicide among people aged 10–24. This was paralleled with a sharp increase in teen depression rates, with reports of major depressive episodes among U.S. teens going from 8% in 2011 to 15% in 2021. “What made these young people so sad?” you may ask. The answer consists of a combination of factors: social pressure, digital overload, isolation, and economic fear. They grew up in a world that feels uncertain, competitive, and overwhelming.
However, Millennials aren’t kids anymore. They’re grown adults. The caveat, though, is that their version of adulting isn’t what it was five decades ago. In the United States—and the Western world to some extent—a portion of Millennials start their adulthood and first jobs with debt, for degrees which will oftentimes not directly serve them in their day-to-day jobs. Based on 2021 data from the Education Data Initiative, 25.5% of U.S. Millennials had active student loan debt, averaging $40,438 per borrower. Collectively, they held nearly 50% of all outstanding student debt—the largest share of any generation.
As for Millennials across the pond, based on data from insurance and retirement business Aviva and London newspaper The Standard, nearly 95% of students entering UK universities in 2020–2021 took out loans—resulting in an average graduate debt of around £53,000 in England. In hindsight, 37% of British Millennials regret taking on university debt, reflecting its significant financial burden. This very financial burden, topped by growing inflation, has hindered a lot of Millennials’ and Gen Z’s financial development. With the rising cost of living and the increase in rent prices, many have even made the decision to move back with their parents—with some who never moved out in the first place.
A BBC News article recently shared that among 25–34‑year‑olds in the U.K., nearly 18% were still living with their parents in 2024, up from 13% in 2006. More broadly, around 42% of all young adults in the United Kingdom aged 15–34 lived with their parents in 2023. The COVID pandemic added another layer of financial adversity, with a sharp rise in layoffs in 2020, later subsidizing in 2021, and finally resurging in 2022. It’s 2025 now, and we’re still not out of the woods yet. Both in the United Kingdom and the United States, unemployment rates in 2025 are at their highest in the past three years, with many people unable to find jobs despite submitting hundreds of applications. This includes Millennials, Gen Z, and everyone else.
Last but not least (and the reason why I named this article “Saved by the Bell”), the cherry on top has lately consisted in rising geopolitical instability, the looming threat of war, information overload, and fearmongering in the media. From Ukraine to Gaza, Iran, and most recently Thailand, it feels like we’re standing at the edge of what could be World War 3. While all of this sounds like a lot to worry about, somehow, a growing number of Millennials and Gen Z simply no longer have the capacity to stress about anything anymore. In corporate jargon, we’d say that they just “don’t have the bandwidth.”
Nevertheless, not showing fear towards the prospects of one’s death isn’t a positive here. Most Millennials and older Gen Zs have gone through three recessions within the first quarter of their lives alone (counting the dot-com recession of 2000, the Great Recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 recession of 2020), plus multiple terrorist attacks, wars, and a global pandemic. Naturally, there’s only so much pressure the human psyche can handle—and when it comes to that of Millennials and Gen Zs, I’m afraid we broke their threshold to the point of desensitization. This is what opened the door to memes on social media about death by nuclear bombing, and jokes along the lines of “At least, if I get nuked, I won’t have to go to work anymore.” For these generations, death in late-stage capitalism is starting to look more and more like liberation. Liberation from a system otherwise unescapable. Nihilism, unfortunately, became Millennials’ and Gen Z’s subconscious philosophy. Too much is happening, so nothing matters anymore. Nihilism became a psychological coping mechanism for a generation disillusioned by broken promises of prosperity, home ownership, and meaningful work.
To conclude this unfortunately grim review of the current zeitgeist and its effects on younger generations, I’d like us to reflect on what this says about us as people and how we treat our offsprings. What does it say about humanity when young adults associate death by bombing with a feeling of relief, and not tragedy? When memes turn nuclear annihilation into a joke, it isn’t just absurdist humor. It’s a quiet scream for help. It’s a return to 2012 Tumblr’s “sad girl era,” lulling a generation into depression with melancholic Lana Del Rey songs. For many early-to-mid-career adults, the system didn’t just fail them. It locked them into a cage, and locked them out of real adulthood, ownership, and self-responsibility. As phrased in a video from the World Economic Forum, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” What wasn’t taken into account, however, is that the human mind does not feel compelled to protect shared objects like it would for owned possessions. In that context, death becomes a perverse kind of freedom. It becomes a way out. That’s the irony behind “Saved by the Bell”. It’s not a rescue by hope, but by obliteration. And while that should terrify us, it should also shake us into listening. Because if the only thing that feels like liberation is death, then maybe the problem isn’t the people. Maybe it’s the bell.
Sources
GlobalWebIndex. (2020). Why nostalgia marketing is booming in 2020. GWI.
https://www.gwi.com/blog/nostalgia-trend
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Suicide and self-harm in youth aged 10–24, United States, 2001–2021 (Data Brief No. 471). National Center for Health Statistics.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db471.htm
Education Data Initiative. (2023). Student loan debt by generation.
https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-generation
Aviva. (2016, August 17). Generation regret: Over a third of Millennials who went to university regret doing so as they struggle with debts and squeezed finances.
https://www.aviva.com/newsroom/news-releases/2016/08/uk-generation-regret-over-a-third-of-millennials-who-went-to-university-regret-doing-so-as-they-struggle-with-debts-and-squeezed-finances-17653/
The Standard. (2024, May 30). Millennials regret student debt: Nearly 40% question cost of university.
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/student-loans-debt-young-people-graduates-university-tuition-fees-b1168648.html
BBC News. (2024, April 12). More UK adults in their 20s and 30s live with parents than in 2006.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2j8v8wvrko
UK Parliament. (2023). Young adults living with their parents (Research Briefing No. CBP-8898). House of Commons Library.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/CBP-8898/
World Economic Forum. (2018, April 9). You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy [Tweet]. X (formerly Twitter).
https://x.com/wef/status/983378870819794945
Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen: Why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy—and completely unprepared for adulthood—and what that means for the rest of us.
Aude Calloch 