September is a new start for countless teens and twentysomethings. New classes, new courses, new jobs. For many Generation Z-ers, it’s the first taste of making what seems like a life-changing decision and then having to stand over it.
How do you know you’ve picked the right course? Should you have gone with commerce in UCC rather than drama and theatre studies at Trinity? And what will your friends think of you if you drop out after a semester?
The short answer is there’s no way of knowing if you’re about to make a mistake. But that’s okay.
To steel yourself against self-doubt, can I recommend reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Or, at least, one passage in particular.
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Towards the end of the novel, Stephen Dedalus – a character loosely based on the young Joyce – is challenged on his decision to pursue a writing career in defiance of religious and social conventions. “You made me confess the fears that I have,” he tells a close friend. “But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
Joyce reminds us that anxiety about decision making is not new. But there are reasons to believe Gen Z – those aged roughly 13-28 years – feel it more acutely. American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has tracked the data over time, calls this the “anxious generation”. He identifies two main culprits: over-parenting and smartphones.
By sweeping away obstacles from their children and rushing to comfort them when they fall, “helicopter” parents stand accused of inhibiting the development of resilience. One of the best things a parent can do, Haidt says, is to spend less time with their children and let them learn to deal with problems themselves.
As for smartphones, these have heightened anxiety by magnifying errors or missteps while also providing endless opportunities for your peers to judge your mistakes. These two layers of worry can be found in the area of personal relationships. You have the first-order worry that you’re going out with a “7” – to use the crude ranking of modern dating – when a “9” or “10” is waiting to be found. But, then, you’ve the second-order worry that, regardless of what you think, your friends rate your girlfriend/boyfriend a “4” .
For some, this second-order anxiety can be more powerful than the first – the worry that you’re not necessarily making a mistake but that your peers think you are making a mistake.
A third factor that may be contributing to rising self-doubt in the under-30s is cultural: a shift in recent decades towards emotionalism. This is the idea that emotions, or feelings, are a reliable guide to what’s valuable. Such thinking is a major break from the past as historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book Homo Deus. Humans searching for direction in life once relied on a holy book, or the traditions of ancestors. With the Enlightenment, they turned to cold reason and rationality for answers. Now we just ask “what feels right” and go with that.
Feelings can be a very unreliable guide to your best interests. Moreover, putting too much weight on people’s feelings results in very fraught and feverish public discourse. To add to all the usual anxieties of twentysomethings, Gen Z are now blighted by what my daughter has coined “FOCO”, the fear of causing offence.
Is there anything older generations can do to make things easier on the under-30s? Well, for a start we should more robustly defend the right of people to cause offence. We should actively resist pile-ons. Instead of magnifying relatively trivial human errors, we should contextualise them or demonstrate forgiveness.
At the very least, we should ditch the phrase “not a good look” from our vocabulary. This is perhaps the laziest phrase in political commentary as it applies to situations where someone has not actually done something wrong, but rather appears to have either hurt someone’s feelings or else failed to demonstrate sufficient empathy towards a cause.
Finally, we should remind Gen Z they are not the first generation to experience angst. For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, a feeling of dread about the contingency of your existence is the hallmark of being human. “What we all want, of course, is all our best options left open as long as possible,” the author Richard Ford writes in his novel Independence Day. “We want not to have taken any obvious turns, but also not to have misread the correct turn the way some other boy-o would ... It makes for a vicious three-way split that drives us all crazy as lab rats.”
The solution? Make Joyce’s proclamation your own. Use it to banish both the first-order worry of making a wrong move and the second-order worry of being seen as an eejit for doing so. Say it to yourself, but also say it aloud and proud: “I am not afraid to make a mistake... ”.
