A story about people much younger than me caught my eye this week.
NBC News reported that nearly half of adults ages 18 to 29 said if they had the option, they’d choose to live in the past. That’s based on a new NBC News Decision Desk Poll conducted through the SurveyMonkey polling company. One-third said they’d pick a time period less than 50 years in the past, while another 14% said they’d choose more than 50 years in the past.
I’ve lived in both of those spaces. I wonder if the 47% of Gen Z members who responded that way would really enjoy it.
Meanwhile, 38% of Gen Zers said they’d prefer to live in the present, 10% said they’d go less than 50 years in the future, and 5% chose more than 50 years in the future.
Now, curiosity about the future, I get. The changes within the lifetimes of those of us who have been around awhile have been astonishing. The idea of things we haven’t even imagined is fascinating.
Some of their reasoning is a bit sad, though understandable.
“The broader sentiment underscores the negative outlook many young Americans feel about their future prospects and the state of the country,” the NBC report stated. The poll found that 62% of Gen Z respondents said they expect life will be worse for them compared to previous generations, compared to 25% who said it will be better and 13% who said it would be about the same.
At a time when costs are rising much faster than salaries, when home ownership seems out of reach for young people and when the combination of corporate greed and artificial intelligence has us all looking over our shoulders at job cuts, their pessimism has to be taken seriously.
And 80% of Gen Z adults said the United States is on the wrong track, the highest share of any age group in the survey.
That’s stark.
In interviews with NBC News, young adults said the desire to live in the past is shaped by their relationship with technology and a growing discomfort with being connected to the internet at all times, the story stated. “Nostalgia for a previous era can bring a sense of community and comfort to Gen Zers who are anxious about an uncertain technological and geopolitical future, they said.”
Indeed, for someone of my vintage, who played vinyl records, 8-tack tapes and cassettes, the resurgence of vintage tech has been interesting and amusing.
Those things all worked, but now I either download hours of music or podcasts to listen to in the car. At home, I ask Alexa to play the music that’s on my mind, or to tell me the weather forecast or lots of other things. This is better.
According to the NBC story, many young people wish to live in an era “right before social media and computers mediated life,” nostalgia researcher and existential psychologist Clay Routledge said in an interview.
If you yearn for a time too far before the ’90s, he said, “you don’t have some of the advantages of societal progress.”
It seems a lot of the Gen Z respondents identified the 1990s as their time-travel target. That makes sense. That was a time of much convenience and social progress, but a also a time before we were so overconnected to everything.
One young man quoted in the story, Skyler Barnett, a 28-year-old construction worker in Missouri, cited the internet and smartphones as one reason he didn’t select the present as the ideal time to live in.
“There’s so, so much internet nowadays and so much just bullcrap that goes along with, you know, internet,” he told NBC News. “And these kids today, they got so much stuff going through their heads that’s just not relevant to the outside world.”
People my age are feeling some of that, too. The internet created a giant void that needed to be filled, and not everything that fills it has value.
I hope young people reach a point where they look forward to the future, where they actually will live. Nostalgia glosses over some of the realities of the past. Those of us who were there can tell them it was not always pretty.