Teenagers and the end of the world
Generational privilege
I regularly stand in front of very privileged teenagers.
As a playwright and drama facilitator, I work for many schools. A lot of the time, they’re expensive and private. They have sliding glass doors, pin-striped uniforms and a performing arts hall you could land a plane in.
But teenagers are teenagers. Regardless of class, gender or race, teenagers who study drama are a particular breed. I know because I was one of them (and in almost every aspect apart from age, I still am). They are wild splashes of expression against a deep, serious backdrop. Earnest, desperate to be taken seriously and charmingly daggy. I’ve been doing this work for more than fifteen years now, and I enjoy it.
I’m usually there to ‘devise’ new work with them and spend the first few sessions getting to know them and their interests. Teens think their problems are unique, but certain ones are evergreen. Bullying, mental health, family trouble and academic pressure often arise. But more recently, climate change and social media have taken over almost any other area of concern.
In one exercise, I will give a statement, and the students will tell me how much they agree with that statement by standing on one end of the room (‘strongly agree’) or the other (‘strongly disagree’). It always triggers an intense conversation. Lately, I’ve added a new statement to my repertoire.
‘I believe that my life will probably be cut short by the effects of climate change.’
Would you be surprised when I tell you more than half the students of any classroom surveyed strongly agree with that statement?
Because I was.
I checked multiple times to ensure they understood the prompt. Yes, they tell me. They believe they will likely die because of drought, fire, famine or flood. They don’t believe they will live to be seventy.
It’s important to say that I believe in climate change, and I think the damage will only climb exponentially in the coming decades. It’s an urgent crisis.
But these wealthy and well-educated teens had construed the crisis as globally and personally apocalyptic. It was difficult to imagine the flood waters of climate change reaching the leafy and lush neighbourhoods of the Gold Coast Hinterland, or inner-city Ascot. Apart from the fact these neighbourhoods are drowning in old money, they are also perched ridiculously above sea level.
Climate change is most dangerous to the world’s most vulnerable people. Those who are already disempowered, poor and forgotten have already faced deadly consequences.
So my first reaction to the classroom was to dismiss their concerns out of hand. That’s a surprisingly ‘boomer’ reaction from me, who has long advocated that we respect young people by taking them seriously. The more I’ve talked with teens about this topic, the more I’ve realised that my naively optimistic view of the world (‘things are pretty fucked but I think I’ll be okay’) results from a generational privilege. Even the most wealthy of teens walking the Earth in 2023 have been deprived of one of humanity’s most abundant natural resources: hope.
Born in 1987, I’m a middle millennial. I remember very few crises from the 90’s, other than arriving home one day to my mother standing in the front yard to tell Dad that Princess Di had died. Bill Clinton’s affair registered as a distant blip on an inconsequential radar.
I was freshly fourteen when I watched planes fly into the World Trade Centre. I knew war was imminent, but I didn’t understand what that meant. My peers and I speculated on World War Three. Instead, we got the birth of the 24 hour news cycle and a long, painful occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq that battled on for decades. By the time I was graduating, World War Three was a joke. I was a cis white guy graduating from a private high school.
Was I suicidally depressed? Yes! Was I suffering from paralysing anxiety? Yes! Was I terrified out of my mind of my own sexuality? Who isn’t?! But I didn’t think my future was in doubt. If I could somehow find the mental wellness to keep living, I could. In my adolescent imagination, I thought I would probably end up poor, alone, gay and afraid, but at least I was alive.
I didn’t own my first smartphone until I’d graduated from university. I joined Facebook around that time too. While I was sitting on my share house verandah showing off the iPhone’s touchscreen, the children that would once stand in front of me in those classrooms still weren’t even born.
They would arrive a few years later. Social media had taken over the world, and their parents were probably already glued to screens. Before they were twelve, they would see a confessed sexual abuser elected President of the United States. The UK left the European Union. By the time they were fourteen, the same age I was awakened into international consciousness with the Two Towers collapse, they would already be savvy in catastrophes. In Australia, they’d never had a Prime Minister from the left of politics. Half the country spent their summer underwater or on fire, and there seemed to be no way to stop it. Then the world quite literally ended. In March of 2020 we all locked ourselves indoors and told our children to keep quiet.
In this context, it’s surprising Gen Z aren’t more glib. They revel in irony. They are, after all, the generation that now owns ‘camp’. They’ve brought back the mullet, crocs, and the audacious ugliness of 90’s fashion. Outfits for the end of the world. Outfits that say: who gives a fuck? But they are also tenaciously political and suspicious of authority. I can respect them for that (less so the mullet).
There’s a lot that separates my adolescence from theirs. But we’re united by the feeling of not being seen or heard at a vulnerable age. We all have a societal allergy to teenagers. Most mainstream rhetoric assumes they’re rebellious (rarely with charm, usually with criminality) and hysterical. My Facebook neighbourhood group is awash in death threats for teen criminals. The comments are agist hate speech that refers to teens (those who less than five years ago were in primary school and learning to spell) as ‘scum’ and ‘filth’ that police should be legalised to shoot on sight.
While that degree of violence is new, humanity has always held teens at arms-length. Fucking Plato said it himself:
“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.”
I’ve spent a big chunk of my career trying to figure out where this aversion comes from. It appears so ancient that it could be classified as a human impulse. We distrust teenagers.
My only answer is that we are not reacting to them but a memory of ourselves. When we were fifteen, feelings were ginormous. We were confused, scared and awkward. Most of us were disassociated from our bodies. We were children, but we were celebrated if we were ‘mature’ or adult-like. We spent most of our time shooting at goal posts we couldn’t see. I’m convinced most people prefer not to think about their own adolescence because with the joy of youth, there was also a deep melancholy and pain.
So apart from taking climate change seriously, perhaps we can draw teenagers closer to us rather than push them away. They are, after all, almost sure we are leaving them a world that will kill them.
The truth is many of them are hideously, disturbingly correct. Our job, then is perhaps not to give them hope but the truth. And to listen. For the moment, that’s all I’ve got.
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More next week. And audio post for paid subscribers coming in a second.