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Gen Z: The silver lining of the digital age

Use all the power of the internet and AI while we have it to forge connections

I found some light.

I have decided to be optimistic about Generation Z and our place in the world, young people overall, all because of a shift in energy I’ve felt these past few weeks. There’s less willingness to stand idle, and easier to get on the right side of history.

After months of this column, what’s made it back to me is that what resonates the most is reminders that you are seeing what you’re seeing, living through what you’re living through. A hyper-awareness about your own reality and the lived realities of others is no longer just a peril of being a third culture kid, but for anyone with a screen and an internet connection. What’s worse, we’ve been robbed of the tools of change, a handful of interests holding most of the power, wealth, and influence.

Acknowledging this fact is a difficult one, even as in 2024 more people than ever seem to be aware of it, there is still a segment that sits in the middle. Unaware of how global powers grapple for control of huge swathes of the developing world and the industries and resources necessary for facing down climate change, artificial intelligence, and increased need for base power just to store all the data being gathered at an exponential rate. All that as we are forced to watch a genocide unfold in Palestine.

So, in all that, from where do I draw optimism? That I can say it now, state the obvious but the unsaid, and that more people see every day? More people know every day, and so many awful facts about the world that were hidden beneath the fold or behind a little more real research cannot be avoided. Far from it, in fact, because knowledge and awareness hang like an albatross around the necks of the generations behind. I have no albatross, because I’d know, and I’d have said something.

We have to draw strength from that freedom of burden, and hope from the knowledge that bad times always end. Forces rise to challenge the status quo, and the wings strengthen as the centre weakens. As a journalist at the start of a career certain to be interesting, when the public trust in journalism remains at is lowest in centuries, I have to believe that Gen-Z can ride a wave of change that I know is coming, because hoping for it to come is the only thing that we can do.

What I am doing, what many of us are doing and everyone should be doing — using the tools at our disposal to keep the conversation going. Keeping the facts in the public consciousness is what I’m doing, letting myself feel all the awful emotions, and taking a lot of heart from the good in my life.

I’m cooking family recipes and sharing them with friends, I’m seeing my friends and family and — gasp — not spending money to do it. I’m even inviting people over to my home, on a regular basis. ‘Visiting’ an elder millennial friend of mine called it. Then he said my cat was fat.

What I’m trying to say is make them regret giving us so much connection. Use all the power of the internet and AI while we have it, and don’t worry about your single use plastics when celebrities and their jets are giving off more emissions in a day than you ever could in a lifetime. If you have a story to tell but don’t know how to tell it, get online or find a journalist — preferably at Khaleej Times — to tell it, and just be one of the good ones.

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