Are Gen Z Sick of Woke?

Panda La Terriere has written an interesting piece in the Spectator about whether Gen Z is turning against woke culture. Here’s an exerpt:

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. “Pain lasts a long time,” he assured me.

What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.

To me and many of my Gen Z peers, who were born after 1996, such talk feels increasingly silly: a millennial trend that’s got old and tired. The absurdity has become too glaring. If being distantly related to the Irish can engender self-compassion, could not my white Englishness be reframed as a form of victimhood? How can there be an end to oppression when the opportunities to be oppressed are so endless?

We feel as if we’ve run into a mental wall, and the whole woke business is running out of road. ‘Intersectionality’ – the academic word for the game of victimhood top-trumps which has dominated our discourse for so long – seems to have metastasised so much it makes no sense to anyone. New neurodiversities, new genders, new sexual orientations, new disadvantages are spawned every day.

She goes on to say that while Millennials were able to extract some cynical advantage from wokeness, Gen Z find themselves bumping up against the cold hard reality of the cost of living.

Millennials, such as Styles (and the other Harry, HRH, for that matter), were able to popularise and profit from woke. We, on the other hand, have gone further, turned it into a cultural revolution and traumatised ourselves. Fast-forward a few years and most of the older Zs find themselves disenfranchised within the movement. Many of them, having just flown the nest in an increasingly expensive world, are experiencing that one setback that the religion of woke won’t let them build a self-soothing identity out of, namely a shortage of cash.

To the outside observer it has always seemed that Gen Z are a mixture of the extremely woke, and the extremely ‘based’. La Terriere seems to confirm this.

The younger Z cohort, those who are still at university or school, are still dominated by radicalised nutters who enjoy the cerebral workout of building a case for their own insurmountable unhappiness. But the older Zs are jumping ship fast, en masse, and leaving the flags, the pronouns and the millennials in their dust.

Let’s hope she is right.

Worth reading in full.