You know the clichés by now: Gen Z are boring. They don’t drink. They barely go out. They don’t have sex. They are highly anxious, terminally online and – despite being hyperconnected on social media – are some of the loneliest people on the planet. If you believe the critics, these are all inherent traits of the generation, the oldest of whom are now entering their late 20s.
Recent analysis from NatWest bank initially appears to back up this withering assessment. According to their findings, one in five university students don’t go to the pub and around a quarter don’t hit up nightclubs, either. In fact, half of them are going out less as a general rule. But here comes the catch: Gen Z aren’t doing this out of some inbuilt generational puritanism. They’re doing this to save money.
The recent survey of more than 5,000 students found that almost a third preferred socialising at home, because it was cheaper. Which makes sense, given that the cost of the average student night out in the UK has almost doubled to £30.83 over the last five years. (Another survey from StudentBeans, a platform for those going to university, found that students can spend up to £70 on a night out in cities like Liverpool and London.)
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Clearly, these financial decisions aren’t the result of an unusually tightfisted generation – instead, the image painted by the NatWest Student Living Index, which has been running annually for the last decade, is one of bleak financial desperation. According to their findings, 31 percent of students have reduced the number of meals they eat in a day in order to save on food costs and one in four have turned down the heating to lower their bills.
These painfully drastic cost-cutting measures are the kind you’d expect from pensioners in fuel poverty, not young people who are expected to be living it large on their student loans. On the contrary – you’d be hard-pressed to find a student, particularly in more expensive cities like London or Edinburgh, who can afford to splash the cash they’ve been lent from the Student Loans Company.
As the Times reports, maintenance loans haven’t kept pace with increases in rent and food. Once you adjust for inflation, the maximum amount available in loans actually works out to be £1,300 less than it was in pre-pandemic times. That should put any Gen Z asceticism into perspective: if you’re waking up shivering in the night in your mouldy student rental or worried about not getting to eat three times a day, downing pints and pulling a fresher on the dancefloor is obviously not going to be high up on your list of priorities.
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I am as guilty as every other millennial of rolling my eyes at the supposedly clean-living nature of this younger cohort. After years of battling accusations that my age group were avocado-chomping spendthrifts responsible for the demise of everything from bar soap to formal dress, being able to punch down at the newest kids on the scene felt almost cathartic. (We may have killed breakfast cereal, but at least we never killed clubs!).
But there’s plenty that unites millennials with our zoomer counterparts, including the fact that we were both forged in the fires of economic precarity. My generation graduated into the burning embers of the post-2008 recession economy, while the double whammy of Brexit and the pandemic pummelled the prospects of those who came after us. Yet while we can reasonably account for our own behaviour, we don’t extend the same understanding to Gen Z. Perhaps it speaks to a wider incuriosity about the young that society can’t comprehend their abstemiousness as rational decisions made under economic duress in an increasingly unstable world – and instead uses it as another stick to beat them with.
It’s a natural human urge to categorise those different to us, but I am growing increasingly convinced that some generational labels may do more harm than good. Rather than providing tools that allow us to understand younger generations, they simply pathologise them and widen the gulf of misunderstanding between us.
If we want young people to go out, we don’t need to invest in a personality transplant for an entire generation. The answer could be as simple as making it cheaper to have fun. Bring back the £2.50 pint and the £3 quad vods; resurrect the free student union night where the dancefloor has a decade-old patina of sweat and sticky drinks. Failing that, a little compassion and sympathy for a hard-up generation wouldn’t go awry.
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