So they took an intensive nine-monthcodingboot camp and started applying fortech jobs.
“It was just another pathway to shit,” they recall thinking.
Last year, the World Happiness Report dubbed Zoomers the unhappiest generation.
By several measures,Gen Zmay be the mostrejectedgeneration in human history.
Fromeducationto careers toromance, never before have young adults had this much access to prospective yeses.
And, in turn, never before have young adults been told no so frequently.
Last year,Hingesurveyed 15,000 people about their dating views.
“It’s this funny situation where it’s OK to not get back to people, he says.
“I’m finding there’s more of a pervasive numbness thatlookslike resilience,” she says.
“But that’s not resilience; that’s disconnect.”
For some, this is shaping their core beliefs on motivation and merit.
“I know a lot of people who applied to 20 to 40,” he says.
In the end, he received only three or four acceptances, which was demoralizing.
Ella, a 20-year-old from Allentown, Pennsylvania, applied to 12 colleges and got rejected from 10.
“I had so much hubris and unfounded confidence,” she says.
They ask, ‘Why us?’
obviously, and I couldn’t tell them why besidesit’sHarvard.”
“I thought that I was going to be someone,” she wrote.
Others have taken rejection to court.
“When the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded.
“I didn’t have people applying to 20-plus schools, like now.
It might’ve been 10 or 12, and that was outlandish!”
Perhaps they were already steeling themselves against rejection another shade of disconnect.
“I think they’re just throwing them out there sometimes to see what’ll stick.”
Today’s perceived infinite-choice standard seems to have given rise to legions of maximizers among Gen Z.
But what happens when one’s choices are preemptively limited, perhaps relentlessly, via rejection?
That’s 243 nos or ghosted applications for every yes.
His computer science grad friends have been sending applications in the thousands, he says.
Is it really a mystery why some Gen Zers have startedghosting employers back?
Since graduating from Barnard last year, Catherine has applied to 300 jobs and interviewed for 20 of them.
“You don’t have any ability to get feedback.
For Gen Zers, the disenfranchising reality of chasing entire flocks of wild geese has diminished their self-esteem.
“Self-worth-wise, this is the lowest I’ve ever felt,” she says.
Dylan, the finance grad, says the job hunt made him modify his expectations for the future.
“I just remember applying to so many and feeling like: I don’t care what I get.
I just need to survive.
I’m not scared of failing; I’m just scared of dying.”
For others, mass rejection can be liberating.
For many Gen Zers, theinfluencereconomy is the one job market that seems legible to them and it’salwayshiring.
As Gen Z grows older, the rejection and risk they face could easily compound.
For much of Gen Z, success is increasingly boiling down to a numbers game.
But Schwartz also believes that the experience of rejection is markedly different from that of disappointment.
It’s impossible to get in,” he adds.
“It’s not a statement about me; it’s a crapshoot.'
This, for me, is the most tragic element of Gen Z’s rejection arc.
And maybe the anger should be directed at Apple and Google and Tinder and Facebook orMeta.”
Yet this anger is curiously absent in all my conversations with Gen Zers.
Instead, the predominant mood was one of resignation, or perhaps acceptance.
It’s 35 hours a week with no benefits.
Delia Caiis a writer living in New York.
