The painful truth about Gen Z

An older friend once described his freshers’ week in some detail: a botched proposal, two inadvertently-acquired tattoos and more alcohol than he cared to remember. Mine was rather different: I was confined by the pandemic to a 3×4 metre room with solitary meals in an exam hall canteen. Corridors determined household bubbles (there were two of us) and ‘going out’ meant yet another riveting walk.

For many young people, substantial chunks of education or early working life were marred by similar experiences. With all these setbacks, you’d think we might have raised a generation of hyper-resilient go-getters, eagerly and adequately braced for the inevitable challenges of the real world. But many people don’t think that’s the case.

Steven Bartlett describes Generation Z – those, like myself, born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s – as ‘the least resilient’ cohort yet.