If you live in a state like California, which can't balance its checkbook but thinks it knows everything about science and health, you are besieged with cancer warning labels, prediabetes awareness campaigns, and the vaping form of 'Reefer Madness' in commercials. Then they tell us in another taxpayer-funded campaign that young people are undergoing 'toxic stress' more than others.

We won't let them go out to play without a tracking device and a Ring camera, because everyone is potentially a kidnapper, so we might want to consider we're part of that stress problem.

My ancestor went to war against all the Democrats who wanted to keep owning slaves when he was age 14, I have a hard time believing my kids have it worse if they get a warning at for being late to school.

Does Gen Z, a term used by marketers who decided everyone is having children at 15 so that is how generations now (1) are counted, risk being unprepared for adulting?

Only in rich countries, it seems.


We have cancer warning labels on 5,000 products in Walmart. And on the outside of the Walmart building. And on the corkboard in cancer wards in hospitals. No wonder Gen Z feels like we ruined the world for them.

Like prediabetes and toxic stress, Gen Z being timid, socially awkward, recluses is a wealthy phenomenon. In most countries, 80 percent of the world, Gen X incomes are instead rising at a much faster pace than older workers, while we tell young people they need to be on their mommy's health insurance plan by law until age 26. They can get life-altering surgery and medical procedures as teens but not drink a beer. 

Outside rich countries, where politicians need to manufacture social crises they can claim they will solve, Gen Z tend to be healthier, wealthier, and better educated than their parents were. They are thriving.

Scientists who have lost their way and want to get back on track go back to first principles, and we need to do that with culture. We've let politicians promise to give so much away for free that they are pricing young people out of homes and, thanks to President Biden's war on cars, automobiles by 2032.

We don't need more social authoritarian government telling us we are at risk and only more government can help, we need to let kids skin some knees, get in arguments, and learn how the world works. Otherwise, Gen Z in developing nations are going to eat our lunch in the future.

And it won't be the fault of our young, it will be the fault of the rest of us.

(1) It was 20 when I was young, and the Baby Boom was an event, not a generation that even included the lead singer of Generation X, Billy Idol. When these crazy generational labels were first fabricated, I was nearly the last 'Baby Boomer' despite my mom being 5 years-old when the Baby Boom occurred. Then generations changed to 18 years so I was the first Gen X, even though it was originally Gen X only because they were the 13th generation of Americans and 13 was an unlucky number, and then...who knows. Marketing groups will have generations down to 10 years by the end of this decade and the labels will need to be in hexadecimal.