While this is absolutely true, there's also another elephant in the room: a global pandemic that's destroyed every kid's routine, robbed 2+ years of their childhood from them, and for many put them severely behind in school and extracurricular achievement. Given all the pressure we put on kids these days to excel at everything in order to ensure their futures, it's not surprising that many are feeling more hopeless and jaded than even the generation that came before them.

Frankly, I think all of this jadedness and depression is at least partly a product of the inconceivably high stress of everyday life experienced by millennials and then Gen Z.

Most millennials saw all of this before finishing high school:

- Gulf war

- 9/11

- Wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/etc.

- Hurricane Katrina

- 2007 housing bubble/fuel shortage

- 2008 financial crisis

In short, America's "squeaky clean best country in the world" image falling apart;

Most Gen Z will have seen all of this before finishing high school:

- Sandy Hook shooting, among dozens of others

- The election of Donald Trump (who, love him or hate him, is _extremely_ unpopular and seen as an existential threat by most American teenagers)

- Rapidly increasing ecological destruction (West coast fires, Australian fires, Hurricane Maria, etc. etc.)

- The COVID-19 Pandemic

- The murder of George Floyd and many others besides

- The unbelievable greed of major corporations financializing nearly every aspect of modern life

- (as of a few days ago) the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey vs. Planned Parenthood

In short, the basic fabric of society starting to unravel.

This analysis is obviously extremely slanted by my leftist bias and leaves out plenty of other tragedies and trials I could mention, and I'm not going to deny that. But the fact is that the teenagers I know have zero hope left that the future holds anything better for them. They're inheriting a broken world and they know it; their mental health reflects this. People love to wax philosophical about how "kids these days have no trust in authority or institutions" and...well shit, you wonder why.