By Alex Demas
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
On average, Gen Zers say they’d need to earn a salary of
$600,000 per year to feel financially successful. That’s around 13
times the country’s median income and more money than 99 percent of
Americans will take home this year. It’s also just one of several startling
statistics tucked inside of writer and former Google software engineer Emi
Nietfeld’s recent guest essay for the New York Times, “Gen Z Fell Out
of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them.”
Throughout her essay, Nietfeld sketches a concerning
picture of how the youngest American workers view their chances of economic
success. For Gen Z, she explains, the fundamental economic promise of
America—that if you work hard, go to college, and get a job, you will be able
to afford a comfortable and satisfying life—has broken down. Instead, the young
Americans she spoke to reported feeling as if their degrees were worthless and
their dreams were no longer worth striving for.
Nietfeld empathizes with this apparent plight of
America’s youth, exposing readers to the beliefs that occupy the minds of many
Gen Zers, young millennials, and maturing Gen Alphas. (I count within this
population.) But Nietfeld also falls victim to her empathy by failing to ask
the essential question: “Is the story Gen Zers are telling about themselves actually
true?”
No, it isn’t.
America’s youth do face legitimate challenges. Their
hopes for homeownership, for example, are legitimately diminished compared to
those of their parents and grandparents. They are entering the workforce at a
time of great disruption thanks to AI. They have likewise come of age during a
pessimistic political era dominated by division, institutional decay, and
populism.
But Gen Zers are not the victims of an economic system
that has left them behind. Instead, they are the victims of a culture that has
overwhelmingly convinced them so without evidence.
I agree with Jonah Goldberg that talk of generations as
monolithic identity groups is mostly twaddle.
But it is also true that we are uniquely shaped by the cultural circumstances
in which we are raised and that shared experiences can produce broad—albeit
inconsistent—differences from one age cohort to the next. I don’t think anyone
would argue that Americans who graduated high school in 1939 were not greatly
influenced by the onset of World War II or that millennials who entered the
workforce in 2008 don’t share some attitudes toward the economy as a result of
the circumstances of the Great Recession.
It’s unfair to take the perspectives of half a dozen
college students—as Nietfeld occasionally does in her piece—and transpose their
experiences across a diverse cohort of more than 80 million Americans. However, those
students’ views are undoubtedly representative of a narrative that is quite
pervasive among at least some Gen Zers.
So what are those views? Alongside the finding that Gen
Zers believe they need to make $600,000 per year to feel successful, Nietfeld
notes that many of the students she spoke to would need incomes of $200,000 or
$300,000 to even feel secure and millions in the bank to consider starting a
family or buying a home. She claims that Gen Zers have “watched millennial
workers burn out, wages stagnate, degrees turn worthless and institutions
crumble,” and that the prospect of getting a job after college, even in a field
like computer science, is no longer considered a guarantee. She also notes that
young Americans’ internal locus of control—meaning the extent to which they
believe that they have the capacity to control the outcomes of their own
lives—is slipping.
Nietfeld relies heavily on the anecdote of a 24-year-old
general studies graduate, Mecca Durhal, who once dreamed of making a living as
a Japanese translator and a writer but now is left scraping the web for
administrative assistant roles with salaries of only $40,000. “The economy and
society that we live in is not structured right now for me to have good
answers,” Durhal says when asked about what the future holds. Delayed
gratification, Durhal adds, is also a fool’s errand: “I think looking only ahead
to the future is actually detrimental to you.”
But while these kinds of feelings are worth
acknowledging, they should not go unchallenged.
Despite the feeling that America’s opportunities for
upward mobility have not been passed down from one generation to the next, research has consistently shown that each generation of Americans
has continued to economically surpass their predecessors. Millennials, for
example (who themselves often blamed older generations for pulling up the economic
ladder), have achieved real median household incomes that are 20 percent higher
on average than those of Gen Xers at the same age. Gen Zers are no different.
Median income for Gen Z graduates, adjusted for inflation, is already
substantially outpacing that of their millennial predecessors, even as
the average number of hours worked decreases.
According to a recent report by Deloitte, 55 percent of Gen Zers say they are
delaying major life decisions—like marrying, starting a business, or furthering
their education—because of their finances, and 38 percent (a plurality) say
that cost of living is their greatest concern. However, research by Scott
Winship and Jeremy Horpedahl at the American Enterprise Institute has found that the “cost of thriving” in America continues to
fall and that, since 1985, after-tax earnings for full-time American workers
have increased relative to cost of living by 53 percent.
But Gen Zers also aren’t entirely wrong about their
changing circumstances. The relative cost of higher education and the cost of starter homes—two goods that, for many, represent
milestones along the path from childhood to adulthood—have both increased
(though perhaps to a more modest extent than many Americans believe). In a recent episode of her Washington Post podcast Reasonably
Optimistic, Dispatch contributing writer Megan McArdle remarked
that, for generations, American adulthood came with a picture attached of a
modest house on a quiet street with a white picket fence and modest green lawn.
“It’s easy to see why young people feel cheated,” McArdle said. “They followed
the rules to go to school, find a job, save your money. And yet, one of the
clearest markers of economic security—a home of their own—keeps drifting out of
reach.”
Gen Z is also entering the workforce at a time when
artificial intelligence is actively disrupting the sorts of entry-level roles
in the knowledge economy that college graduates typically rely on when
beginning their careers. Even though the unemployment rates for 18- to
19-year-olds and 20- to 24-year-olds are relatively
normal
compared with historic levels, they are trending in a concerning
direction relative to rates for older Americans. And while economic
disruption does offer young workers unique opportunities for innovation and
advancement, it also leaves graduates with greater uncertainty about how to
plan for their futures.
But despite these hurdles, Gen Z’s narrative of economic
helplessness still presents a massive gap between how Gen Zers think they’re
doing and how they’re actually doing. No amount of innovation or disruption
justifies the belief that an income of $600,000 per year is necessary to feel
“successful” or that a person needs a seven-figure salary before considering
having children.
Nietfeld touches on one factor that could explain this
gap: Gen Zers’ declining sense of agency. Research has almost universally linked
having a high internal locus of control to greater resiliency, mental health,
satisfaction, and life outcomes. Lacking such an internal locus means that
younger Americans broadly feel less in control of their own lives and less
capable of guaranteeing their own success. When success feels like something
that, with luck, might happen to you as opposed to something that you
can actively pursue yourself, it makes some sense that America’s youth
would stop striving for it. Winning the lottery doesn’t require a whole lot of
skill or determination, after all. And if effort feels disconnected from
reward, then disengagement from that effort is a coherent response to a world
you don’t think you can influence. “Speaking to Mx. Durhal and other young
adults for whom tomorrow seems uncertain, I see a generation that’s learning
not to hope too hard,” Nietfeld writes.
But even that fails to explain why a subset of
America’s youth perceive success not just as out of their control but set at an
unrealistically high standard. For that, I have one possible culprit: Gen Z’s
all-encompassing influencer culture. Another metric Nietfeld cites, that around
57 percent of Gen Zers would be influencers if they could, is a telling one.
What are influencers, after all, other than performers of success? Influencers
design their lives around how they want to be perceived by others, building an
authenticity only insofar as it photographs well and is capable of funding
their continued stagecraft.
Influencers: the coolest, prettiest, fittest, and
smartest peers across the country and world—peers who are often sponsored or
paid for their one-dimensional pursuits and who almost certainly shouldn’t be
considered peers at all. When your eyes are constantly pasted to a never-ending
queue of people who structure their lives not to pursue actual satisfaction but
instead to present an image of what they believe satisfaction looks like,
you’re bound to end up with an unrealistic understanding of what you should
expect from life. And that doesn’t end at wealth alone. Online, you’re faced
with people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting one aspect of a good
life: the perfect set of abs, an impressive half-marathon time, the most
adventurous vacations, the most devout adherence to a religion or creed. Taken
together, they offer an image of success that no one person could ever
realistically achieve. And if that’s what success looks like, why strive for it
at all?
For this, America’s youth deserve empathy, not derision.
Undoubtedly, not every Gen Zer has been sucked into this unrealistic digital
culture. But those who have are faced every day with the prospect that they
will never be good enough and that their own success is out of their hands. The
fact that this belief is false does not change the sincerity with which it is
likely held by many young Americans. We can acknowledge the resultant distress
without criticizing or mocking those who experience it. It may be easy to poke
fun at the general studies major who believed their degree was a pathway to
prosperity or the aspiring entrepreneur who thinks that starting a stay-at-home
honey business is a surer way to earn seven figures than a corporate career
(the belief of another recent graduate interviewed by Nietfeld)—but that
doesn’t mean we should. Older generations should put themselves in the shoes of
Gen Zers and seek to understand what America’s youngsters believe about
themselves and why.
But Nietfeld’s approach—accepting this untrue narrative
without challenging it—is also counterproductive. There is a cult-of-youth
tendency among many American progressives that posits that young people have
some wise insight that deserves inherent deference. However, to cite our own Jonah Goldberg, “Young people tend to be
stupid,” and “as a statistical matter, the younger you are, the more likely it
is you will be ignorant and, frankly, dumb.” Many young Americans—such as those
referenced by Nietfeld—do seem ignorant of the opportunities for success and
satisfaction that are available to them. Mocking them for that ignorance is
unnecessary. But refusing to challenge it is, perhaps, even worse.
Gen Zers, and Gen Alpha behind them, do face
uncertainties, barriers, and difficulties. But they also have vast
opportunities. Both are coming of age during the most prosperous period in
human history, in a country that—despite its political chaos—remains
institutionally robust, wealthy, and innovative. They are entering the
workforce as one of the greatest power and wealth transfers in human history
unfolds, and they are the first generation to be native to AI.
The risk for America’s youngsters is therefore not that
they are faced with insurmountable obstacles. The risk is that they are so
bought into that narrative that they give up on success without even trying. “I
also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet
ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground,” Nietfeld writes, speaking of her
own experience climbing the ladder to corporate success. She is correct: Dreams
can be more than just comforting stories—they can serve as functional tools to
light the way from where you are to where you want to be. Which is why the
narrative of helplessness absorbed by many Gen Zers is so corrosive. The truth
for Gen Zers is that the ground beneath them is firmer than they’ve been told.
The path is still illuminated, but only if they keep walking.
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