Gen Z is afraid to drink, date, marry or have kids

Gen Z's retreat from risk is continuing as they move from college to the workforce, writes Arthur Brooks in The Free Press.

"Among adolescents and young adults, all manner of risk-taking — from having sex to driving a car — has tanked in recent years," according to psychologist Jean Twenge, he writes.

America in the Making: Daniel Boone/Newell Convers Wyeth

Not-so-rebellious teenagers are not experimenting with alcohol, reports Monitoring the Future, which has been tracking trends for decades. "In the mid-1970s, 92 percent of 12th graders had tried at least a sip of alcohol; by 2025, that proportion had fallen almost by half, to 47 percent," writes Brooks.

Anxious young people prefer digital messaging to face-to-face interaction, writes Brooks. Most say that strangers are untrustworthy.

Teens and young adults are less likely to say they hope to marry some day, he writes. "In 1980, 90 percent of 35-year-old men were married; today, the rate is 60 percent and falling fast."

In  2023, "only 51 percent of those ages 18 to 34 without kids said they planned ever to have any," writes Brooks, though males were more eager to children than females. The "average number of children young adults planned to have fell from 2.3 in 2012 to 1.8 in 2023."

The "nanny state" is popular with the risk-averse young, according to researchers at the Berkeley Initiative for Young Americans. They want a stronger social safety net, and more government action to on AI, automation, and climate change, writes Brooks. "Seventy percent of Gen Zers think the U.S. gov­ern­ment should pro­vide a uni­ver­sal basic income."

The world is safer than it used to be, writes Brooks. But young people don't see it that way.

Brooks thinks Americans are becoming more "European," losing the pioneer spirit Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy in America. The American "trusts fearlessly in his own powers, which seem to him sufficient for everything," the Frenchman wrote. "Suppose that an individual thinks of some enterprise, and that enterprise has a direct bearing on the welfare of society; it does not come into his head to appeal to public authority for its help."

"A growing culture of risk aversion is a harbinger of all manner of bad civilizational choices: ballooning welfare programs, punitive taxes, disappearing economic vitality, class-based activism on the right and left, and demographic collapse," writes Brooks.

He wants older Americans to stop being such doom-and-gloomers. "Look no further than commencement addresses from the past 10 years from speakers who tell Gen Z that the world is messed up (sorry!) and that it’s their job to fix it (good luck!)," he writes. "No wonder the generation that will now take the wheel of the American economy is sad and worried. Frankly, the only thing that surprises me is that they aren’t turning to alcohol."

I see way too many people who don't want to be adults.