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By Leo Tobbe
Last week, the second of what I hope will be many “No Kings” protests flooded the streets of urban America. They were overwhelmingly peaceful, and featured no shortage of costumes, instruments, and theatrics mocking President Trump’s alarming and rapid accumulation of executive power. Even those who support his politics have to admit that Trump’s lack of regard for the legislative process and abuse of the courts sets a troubling precedent for Democrats and Republicans alike. However, I want to talk about a trend that’s arguably more troubling than our president’s monarchic tendencies: my generations apathy towards politics (and everything else.)
The No Kings protests have been a resounding success in all categories but youth participation. If you look at the pictures of the crowds, you won’t find many teenagers or college kids in the mix. Gen Z hasn’t really been showing up to “fight the man,” like young people are supposed to do, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. I think there are a variety of reasons for this, including the movement’s lack of an identifiable, charismatic leader or a coherent objective other than “Trump is bad,” but I think the problem reaches far beyond that. Maybe this is just my experience, but in general, I’ve observed that a lot of my peers would rather sit in bed, watch Instagram reels or TikTok, and be in bed by 9:30 than spend their free time engaging with something greater than themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, my generation is involved in lots of things. Everyone has some club or organization and with a matching, low-effort leadership position to pad their resume. Most people have more than one. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m guilty of this too. So why won’t we join a movement to fight the thing we hate just as much as the people holding signs and marching in the streets? Some news organizations argue that my generation thinks resistance is “cringe,” so we won’t participate. This idea might have merit, but I still think there’s something more sinister at work here.
The reason Gen Z isn’t showing up to protest isn’t because we think it’s “cringe,” it’s not because we’re lazy, it’s not because of the “manosphere,” and it’s certainly not out of indifference to the situation. We hate the authoritarian direction of this country just as much as anyone else, if not more. I would argue that it’s not even out of apathy. It’s burnout.
My generation has grown up in an age where a thousand different force are competing to keep our attention for as long as possible, all at the same time. I know our parents and grandparents had things competing for their attention too—school, work, kids, bills, mortgages, etc. There’s one key difference for people my age, though.
Before the contemporary age of the internet, corporations would try to catch people’s attention in any way they could, with everything from colorful advertisements in magazines to funny commercials on TV. If they could get people’s attention, those people might buy their products. This brave new world of short form content and endless entertainment is constantly demanding the attention of myself and my peers. We despise it, and we can’t get enough of it.
Older generations blame us for being addicts or zombies or slaves to our screens. They’re right. What they get wrong is thinking that it’s something we choose to indulge in. Stop thinking of it like a piece of chocolate cake that we like and want more of, and more like a gremlin following us around that’s constantly poking us in the arm. Like heroin. What tech companies have done is gotten my entire generation addicted to heroin.
It's hard work being a heroin addict. Your attention is always scattered or misplaced. Your dopamine receptors are so fried that it becomes hard to have a joyful interaction with you’re your peers. Heroin addicts don’t go to protests. Heroin addicts are exhausted. Not by the amount of work they have to do for classes or the hours they have to spend in a job they hate, but by the fact that they keep doing heroin. Older generations aren’t affected by it as much because they didn’t grow up with it. They’re brains didn’t develop on heroin.
My point is this: The reason Gen Z isn’t protesting this administration is because we’re all addicts. Some of us are in recovery. Some of us are in the midst of the battle. Some of us have yet to start it. We’re not apathetic, we’re not lazy, and we’re not judgmental of resistance. We’re being eaten alive by the same technology that we use to call our parents, and that’s exactly what the tech CEOs want. As they pander and bow before this president who is making them richer than ever before, they’ve turned society’s most historically insurgent age group into batteries in an endless money-making machine. All while tricking us into thinking they were giving us what we wanted all along. They’ve tricked us into thinking we can fight the revolution from the comfort of our beds.
Leo Tobbe is a McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville in the class of 2028. He is studying political science and economics.