Disclaimer: This Blog is based on South African socio-politics.
Every generation has one thing that defines them: the generation of the 60s and 70s grew up in the violence and atrocities of apartheid, they were the "law" breakers who had to fight for their basic human rights and they had to do whatever it takes to survive. The generation of the 80s and 90s grew up in the era of change, they saw Mandela get out of prison, they saw (what was supposed to be) the reform of the nation, they were the ones who would define democracy and they ushered in the Rainbow Nation. My generation? We are the 2000s, the "born frees", the ones who are supposed to go farther than our parents. We are the fresh start which heals the nation and deal with the aftermath of centuries of injustice. We are the depressed and anxious generation. We are the "spoiled" generation, the stressed generation, the generation of social media and modern technology.
We were raised by a generation who never really dealt with the wounds of apartheid. I mean they glossed it over with their "Rainbow Nation". Our parents, grandparents etc. never healed from that era; the anger, the frustration, the despair and the anguish of thousands of years of oppression was glossed over. They didn't do the work of healing, of forgiveness, of moving on; and to be fair, they were never really given the chance to. My point though is that they never worked through their negative feelings, if anything they were told to swallow it. "We're in better times now" they were told. So they swallowed it and they kept it in. However, emotions aren't that easily contained, are they?
Emotions sealed in tend to bleed out in different areas of life. So all that anger and resentment? It manifested in how they interacted with us, they parented us, taught us in schools. I mean, imagine having to fight for your right to be treated as a human being every day, living through that trauma, and then being told to just let it all go. Then, you see this person completely untouched by the trauma you've experienced. You ask yourself "what have they done to deserve this peace?" So all the anger and resentment you have for those that hurt you turns to the people untouched by that hurt. The story of how us "born frees" turned into the spoiled, irrational, and ungrateful generation starts there kids.
There is a deep divide between my generation and our elders. For one, the social climate they grew up in versus the one we're growing up in is vastly different. We are surrounded by social media, immersed in tik-tok algorithms. I feel that we, as a generation, are very deeply contemplative about existence. Gen Z doesn't simply exist, Gen Z is constantly healing, growing and working on ourselves because we grew up in a world of adults who lived in the ignorance of their issues. We watched as their ignorance destroyed the world around us. We grew up hearing "the world is gonna end" and witnessing the adults around us do absolutely nothing to fix the problems we were seemingly faced with.
One thing about my generation? We are a group of self-aware individuals. We are well aware of ourselves: our best and worst attributes, the ways in which the world has shaped and formed us. We live in a world ravaged by climate change, social inequality, social injustice and late-stage capitalism. We've basically grown up in a pre-apocalyptic world our entire lives. I mean, we spent our early childhoods (the 2010s) being told that the world would end in 2012, we spent our teen years living through Covid (yet another near-apocalyptic event) and our entire lives we bore witness to natural disasters which scientists claimed wouldn't be possible if not for climate change.
We live in the reality of failing economies, corrupt governments, and the ticking time bomb that is climate change. Growing up we could clearly see that the world was on fire but the chorus from adults around us was "everything has already been done for you, you guys were born free, you have no right to complain". We've learned pretty quickly that the world is screwed; but more importantly, we learned that the adults around us couldn't be trusted.
Imagine growing up in the reality that there are real problems in the world, yet the chorus from all the grown-ups around you is "no, you're overreacting". Gen Z grew up in a climate where our futures weren't secure. Moreover, we were met with no empathy from adults around us, who felt we had no right to complain. Therefore we spent our early teen years learning as much as we could about society, educating ourselves so that adults couldn't keep telling us that nothing was wrong. We educated ourselves so we could no longer be gaslit into thinking that everything was alright with the world. That's how we became known as the "woke" generation.
However, the more we learnt, the more we realized how bad things actually were. I mean for one, we were told that apartheid was over, and with it racial inequality had ended as well. But a bitter discovery is that white supremacist systems are still rife in our country and the inequalities in South Africa are still drawn along racial lines. For example, most poor and homeless people are black, the majority of townships are occupied by black people, black women are at the bottom of the labour market and also make up the largest group of unemployed people. Therefore, when we look at our country and the progress our parents had claimed they made; we can't help but see that there is still a long way to go.
In many ways, it is easy to see where the general anxiety my generation lives with comes from. We are the generation that is most concerned with social issues and climate change; and most gen Z'ers will tell you that their concern about the world started at a very early age. As we become adults and study our degrees, we're realizing that we might not have jobs by the time we graduate. I mean, I'm studying medicine and for years that has been one of the most secure career paths. However, now we're seeing more and more stories of unemployed doctors. It's unprecedented, and yet those older than us still wish to tell us that there is nothing to worry about.
Even though we were born in "the era of peace", it is still up to us to grow up and fix the work of those who came before us. We watch them run the country with unequivocal greed, looting and stealing while they try to blind us with R350 grants and occasional electricity. It is the age of late-stage capitalism, where a billionaire president is on a mission to privatize all state-owned entities at the expense of the poor. The age where ministers can make memes about the state of our country as if they are not (directly and indirectly) responsible for the state we are in.
My generation has the task to fix the country. This isn't a task we chose, but rather one forced upon us by the same adults that keep voting for a failed leadership. A task that is given to us by the same generation of people who were supposed to safeguard our future through affirmative climate action. It is an uphill battle, and for most, a hopeless one because we live in the reality that in a few years, the planet will be hostile to human life.
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