by Simon Caldwell, TCW
TWENTY-ONE years ago, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, unveiled the iPhone to the world, announcing that ‘every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything’.
He wasn’t wrong. One of the consequences was the creation of what Dr Jean Twenge, Professor of Psychology at San Diego University, called the ‘iGen’, or the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the grip of smartphones and accompanying apps and social media platforms designed to be addictive.
This generation was born between 1995 and 2012 and have become known to the rest of us as Generation Z.
They are the first to experience the paradox of being better connected than any previous generation yet more afflicted by loneliness, isolation, anxiety and pathological neuroses tending toward self-harming and suicide.
Like it or not, they grew up in a culture in which they interact online rather than in what Dr Twenge in her book Generations calls the ‘meatworld of person interaction’. It has formed them into people with very different habits from their forebears. They don’t get drunk in pubs, for instance, and, as Mary Wakefield wrote in the Spectator last month, they are increasingly turning away from sex.
Unlike the bed-hopping Generation Y, or ‘millennials’, they are the generation of gender fluidity, of ‘asexuals’ and ‘incels’, of online pornography consumed alone, and of sexual narcissism expressed perhaps most egregiously on OnlyFans, the social media platform through which, according to Louise Perry, the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, some 4 per cent of Gen Z women sell their ‘wares’. Theirs is a generation giving up on marriage and parenthood more readily than any since the Second World War, with a Gen Z unwanted pregnancy more likely to end in an abortion than in all previous generations.
A people so dysfunctional, low on confidence or ill-prepared for adult life that they will not marry and produce future generations is a people doomed. It is tempting to despair at the emergence of what looks to the rest of us like a dystopia created by an imposed and uncontrollable technology, a terrifying juggernaut careering to the even greater disaster of Artificial Intelligence. Is there any hope?
There is. This because Generation Z, now that they are reaching adulthood, are using the very devices which have defined them and their era to discover religion.