These Wild Young People

A schism has emerged among members of the commentariat: Some pronounce Gen Z the biggest bunch of degenerate risk-takers in history (tales of the apathetic youth with nothing to lose abound), while others, thick with worry, proclaim Gen Z to be wholly risk-averse (shut-ins all, unwilling to talk on the phone, ask people out, or drink even a sip of alcohol). 

As the editors of the Gen Z magazine The New Critic, our inbox is full of a certain kind of pitch, one that decries a crumbling economy, metaphysical malaise, and institutional collapse. These essays speak of a polycrisis and Gen Z’s uniquely unstable future, with uncertainty as their crowning abstraction. In the face of such an unparseable future, young people face a dilemma: Which risks should we take, if any at all?

If pressed on why our generation faces a future of such unyielding confusion, writers’ responses vary: The ecological threat posed by climate change makes our future unpredictable, they say. The economy is so unsteady that it is hard for our generation to expect what to want from life. AI models are redefining how we conceive of our own humanity, and such changes induce existential dread. When questioned further — on why AI poses more of a total threat to Gen Z than, say, the Great War once did for the Lost Generation — answers stall and often cease altogether. I guess existential threats cannot be quantified. Maybe the risks of childbirth, or linear warfare, or famine, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the absence of antibiotics might have been pretty existential if I’d been born back then, too. 

Our peers are even uncertain about their uncertainty. One interviewee put it frankly: “I don’t know. I can’t say we face more uncertainty when I don’t know what it was like to be my age 20 years ago.”

Everyone faces the unknown at one point or another. Life is uncertain — or rather, one thing is certain, and it isn’t life. Young adults, especially, are prone to this feeling: We do not yet know what part of society we will fold ourselves into; we do not yet have families, husbands, wives, of our own. For the volatile young person, the problems of the contemporary are like volcanic craters threatening to swallow everything in ash. Every generation fights their battles. 

This unrootedness, of course, is also what makes youth so exciting. As anyone who has performed on stage has likely been told, nervousness is the same feeling as excitement. Both states derive from anticipating the unknown, and they dissipate once the curtains are parted; overcoming uncertainty necessarily involves walking on stage and taking a risk, any risk!

To probe our peers’ attitudes toward risk-taking, we forwent statistics about aggregate alcohol consumption or job preferences. Instead, we looked for the anecdotal, rang up some witnesses, and delved into the heart of the Risk-Geist.

At one end of the risk barometer is Steve, 22, who avoids risks of all kinds. He has never smoked or vaped because his grandmother died of lung cancer. He drinks, but only in moderation and with friends. He avoids drugs of all kinds. He does not gamble, he thinks the Kalshi craze is for degenerates only, and he has the strong suspicion that his peers’ desire to seek out risk is the prevailing cause of their unhappiness.

Steve believes the social rat-race leads to lower overall well-being, and it’s this competition that drives his peers toward what he calls “costly things,” or “things that are very time-intensive or things that are risky — like starting a business, maybe they’re going to space, or taking up an artsy career that they’re not passionate about — just so they can tell other people that they’re doing this cool thing.”

Steve dryly notes he recently took a gamble by foregoing investment banking interviews in favor of a career in consulting; he starts at McKinsey next year. Steve avoids even the risks that are expected of youth, like traveling to new places, asking women out, or talking to strangers. When asked if he would travel to space, he says he would not: “It scares me.”

Similarly, Dean, 20, thinks inane risk-takers ought to be punished. Why seek out risk for the sake of it? A recent college graduate, Dean says he has experience with life-threatening danger and that we oughtn’t waste the good fortune of being born to an age in which life expectancy is unprecedentedly high. As he tells it:

Standard recreational activities — surfing, for example — are too risky for Dean, who hates “even hiking past two hours.” Gambling is out too. He once heard a radio show about “kids running up debt on their parents’ FanDuel account to, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and like, ruining families.” That was enough to put him off. None of his friends are gamblers. 

Dean thinks those who risk their lives in stupid ways should face harsher social penalties. As for himself, he makes his decisions bearing Judgment Day in mind. The Yiddish stories “Gimpel the Fool” and “Bontsha the Silent” inform Dean’s moral imagination; in both stories, God calls on a man to account for his life. Dean said he imagines the same thing happening to him and hopes pointless risk-taking is not on his ledger.

Anastasia, 20, views risk from a practical rather than moral standpoint. She says the willingness of many of her peers to seek out danger derives from their inexperience. “I’m pretty satisfied with my range of experiences,” Anastasia said. “I don’t understand the idea of novelty for the sake of it. I’ve seen enough.”

Anastasia came to the U.S. from war-torn Ukraine. “I went to Dartmouth because I thought I could get in, and they had need-blind international aid,” she said. “I knew that if I didn’t get into an elite school, I didn’t know if I can afford my education.” Anastasia first heard about Dartmouth while watching Gossip Girl; her parents are working class Ukrainians of a hard-scrabble sort.

In order to stay in America after graduation, Anastasia will need visa sponsorship and social security. Wealthy American peers, gunning for the same banking internships, baffle her: “You have these great safety nets, why do you want these jobs?” Anastasia said she needs the money and the path to citizenship that a job in finance would provide; if income were of no concern, she says she would become a writer.

Though Anastasia smokes cigarettes occasionally — everyone from her village in Ukraine smokes, she says — she has stopped short of making it a habit; she’s decided the potential costs to her health aren’t worth it. And she ruthlessly avoids hard drugs in the US, where she thinks the threat of fentanyl is too high. Wealth, for Anastasia, is an insulation from danger. The one time she tried coke — after avoiding it on multiple continents, no less — was when someone wealthy gave it to her. “I, like, got it from a friend who I, like, really trusted, and she’s, like, really rich, so she probably had good coke,” Anastasia said. “That’s my logic.”

Max, 23, a rationalist type, has avoided most drugs, especially hallucinogens, since a friend of his had a psychotic break “and thought he was a KGB operative and that his friends were all members of the Greek pantheon.” But Max has few regrets, and though he says he often finds himself in dangerous situations, they’re always circumstances which he has carefully chosen and considered.

“[On vacation in Madrid,] my friend’s typical way of getting around the city was to grab one of the Citi rental bikes,” Max said. He had cycled in urban areas before, but never with such vigor. “I would chase him through the city, weaving in and out of cars. I was not weaving as he was. That felt like the most dangerous thing I’d ever done.” Next time, Max says, he will express his alarm.

After graduating college, Max took a job as a consultant but soon grew restless. “There’s a limited amount of creativity and agency in the world. I don’t think everyone takes career risks. People are less likely, generally, to take risks with large life decisions like careers. For the people I worked with — certainly in the New York office — the number one topic was the over-unders for the Seahawks that weekend.”

Soon thereafter, Max left his job to establish a one-man AI start-up: “I figured, what are the bad outcomes? If what I’m working on doesn’t become wildly successful, I will probably develop skills and meet people such that the downside risk is not that significant.” Max is encouraging of those who take risks with their careers, as long as they complete a cost-benefit analysis first.

For government major Maeve, 22, risks can likewise be tabulated. Maeve hails from Alaska, the state with the greatest number of apex predators in the United States. “[In Alaska] it’s not a question of if you’ll see a bear or a moose, but when,” Maeve said. You have to be prepared, she adds: “That being said, there is obviously still an acceptance of fatal risk any time you step out your front door to go skiing or something like that.”

Her brother and her boyfriend both ice and rock climb, though Maeve herself is no mountaineer. She has forbidden her boyfriend from free soloing — climbing with no ropes— as his younger brother died in a climbing accident earlier this year. But ultimately, Maeve says, “both [my boyfriend and my brother are] fairly rational people. They enjoy climbing enough to take the risk to be out there doing it, but they pretty much only do the safest forms of it.”

When asked what makes them rational, Maeve replies, “I would say they are good at assessing risk in those scenarios, primarily because they’re knowledgeable in them, so they’re able to make a well-informed call.”

Efraim, 21, of Pennsylvania, evaluates the risk of going to space in terms of  effort rather than  safety: “It’s about hassle-averseness as opposed to risk-averseness. It’s not that I’m scared that I’ll die. It’s just, is it worth the effort, you know? Honestly, actually, that’s a good point. I think risk-averseness is just, ‘Is it worth the effort?’ ’ I feel like that’s what people think about with relationships, too. Like, ‘Is it worth the effort?’”

Efraim says there’s a 70% chance that he will join the IDF; he wants to avoid the rather pedestrian careers of his friends, and he believes the future of the Jewish people is in Israel. Otherwise, he says he will marry a non-Jewish girl and take the LSAT. He says he avoids stupid risks: he cliff jumps, but in moderation. He hates gambling. He avoids hallucinogens out of worry for the damage they could pose to his subconscious, but does cocaine when the party is going particularly well:

For painter Skye, 22, missed opportunities present the greatest danger. Her conscience will determine whether or not she pursues her aspiration to become an artist.

“For me, logically, I know that if I don’t try my dream, which has very little financial success at first but has the potential for great financial success — but that is very rare — I’ll forever regret it. I don’t know if that’s specific to this generation. But it might be more risky for me to not try [...] It could be a risk to bet on yourself, but I don’t think it is, because I trust myself, because I’ve proven to myself over the past 22 years that I can do hard things, and I can figure stuff out.”

Skye has decided that the universe will sort things out for her. “I’m not planning years in advance right now,” she said, “because I really believe if you move in alignment with your values and your truth, to some extent doors will open. I feel like I have the experience often where it’s like, things will unfold, and I literally cannot predict the future at all. Who knows if we’ll be in World War III? I don’t know. I truly don’t know, so I don’t want to live out of fear. That’s my biggest worry, that I’m making decisions out of fear.” 

Skye tries to avoid those decisions. She recently listened to a podcast with famed climber Alex Honnold that resonated with her. She thought of Honnold as someone taking life-threatening risks that are, at least, intentional and meaningful. “And, yeah, you have the chance of dying,” Skye adds, “but everyone’s going to die anyways.”

On the warmest end of the spectrum is George, 22, who finds profound comfort in risk-taking. He forewent college altogether, working as a line cook in his Midwestern hometown instead before moving to New York. “Most of the people I work with in bars in New York went to college and then took up the jobs I am doing,” George said. “Why even go? The risky thing would be to go to college and take out loans and have to figure them out. School, you can go back to. If I went, it would be pretty expensive directionlessness.”

Though he avoided accruing major student debt working in bars and restaurants, vice crept in to fill the space. George showed up each day at work only to hit his co-workers’ vapes. He drank constantly on the job. All his co-workers, he said, were alcoholics. 

The “most dangerous thing” George has done to date was walking from Hanover, New Hampshire to Montreal on foot. He trespassed, sleeping on others’ land; he awoke to angry Vermonters pointing their thumbs toward “Posted” signs; and when he finally made it to Canada, the sidewalks ended, requiring him to maneuver alongside the highway late at night. But these risks, George says, were worth it. They helped him feel alive.

In 1946, pediatrician Benjamin Spock published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, a manual for childrearing which sold more than 50 million copies in the 20th century. The first line addresses parents directly: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.”

But we were born into the internet age, that firehose of data and alternative information that trained parents on a new mantra: Doubt yourself. You know a lot less than you think you do. In our childhoods, a hazard label guarded every substance, and any new activity required a waiver form. This caution was often for good reason, too: No one wants to slather their baby in carcinogenic powders, and no one wants their kid to crack open their skull while riding a bike with no helmet.

Of course, risk wasn’t always treated with such sterility. The children of 19th century farmers had three ways to assess danger: they listened to their instincts, their parents or community members told them what to avoid, or they fucked around and found out. Risk was everywhere: if one had penetrative sex, a baby could be born; if a mother birthed said baby, she could die; if the baby survived through infancy, disease lurked around every corner: out of every 10 newborns in the 1800s, between four and five died before their fifth birthday.

Our grandparents raised their kids largely by feel: Growing up, our parents just did things, often utterly stupid things. If there was a 1% chance they could have died while fishing in a Florida hurricane, well, they only knew it in hindsight, and apparently they lived to tell the tale. Talking to Gen Xers as we researched this article, we realized the same midnight cigarettes, reckless stunts, hazing rituals, and roadtrips without seatbelts they enjoyed in their youths — often without second thought — are now the very needless dangers their offspring (us) are told to avoid. “You don’t want to be turned into a headline,” is an oft-repeated refrain.

This chilling effect, accelerated by social media, has created a culture of warning saturation. In middle school, “Dumb Ways to Die,” a song devised by the Australian metro transit system to promote safety around the rails, was the scourge of our teachers and administrators: “Set fire to your hair/Poke a stick at a grizzly bear/Eat medicine that’s out of date/Use your private parts as piranha bait,” we all sang in our stairwells and schoolbuses. By high school, we could watch videos of such tragic accidents in real time. Today, fringe cases proliferate online — the worst possibilities, the unimaginable tragedies — exceptions that are shuttled endlessly before us by the spectacle-hungry algorithmic machine, until these exceptions don’t seem so exceptional anymore.

Two years ago, a Dartmouth classmate of ours drowned during a drunken nighttime swim with his fraternity. Our classmate’s death was the modern parent’s worst nightmare: an avoidable tragedy, one that parents had no control over and no means of stopping. It was also a disaster for the College; an Ivy League horror story was sure to make national news. The incident forced students, administrators, and parents to reckon with a tangle of questions: how should we regulate the wildness of youth? Where does fun end and danger begin? What sorts of risks make life worth living? Today, the associated fraternity is permanently banned from operating, but undergraduates drink much the same way they always have.

We are kept ever-aware of our fragility: every summer oyster could be a parasitic life-ender, every red Twizzler could precipitate cancer, every hit of a joint could be laced, and our last. At the crest of our vitality and the advent of our sovereignty, how a Gen Zer approaches decision-making — how much they are willing to bet and what danger they are willing to risk — will define the rest of our years. From skipping out on college, to landing a job at McKinsey, to biking in a foreign city, to joining the IDF, to snorting coke with your friends, to climbing unsupported, to majoring in studio art, to steeling yourself for Judgment Day, each one of us ascends and descends the ladder of risk in our habits, choices, and politics.

The salience of risk makes life feel like one great minefield. Indeed, there are “so many dumb ways to die.” The problem, and the ecstasy, is that the world is just as dangerous as we are told.