Generation Z is rebelling against the economy with what one analyst calls “disillusionomics,” a bleak new way of thinking shaped by debt, weak job prospects and fading faith in the old script for adult life. The idea, coined by Alice Lassman, tries to capture why many young people are spending like the future is already broken.
Gen Zers now carry an average of $94,101 in personal debt, more than millennials at $59,181 and Gen X at $53,255, according to the figures Lassman cited. She said she came up with the term herself after trying to make sense of a broad cluster of Gen Z trends that seemed tied together by the same mood: not optimism, but refusal.
Lassman said she first felt the force of the 2008 financial crisis when she was in elementary school, and that since then it has felt like a perpetual crisis. That history matters because the youngest members of generation z are still in middle school, while the older end of the cohort is approaching 30 and confronting a labor market that has not delivered the security earlier generations were promised.
Last year, the unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds reached 10.8%, compared with 4.3% for the overall labor force. In the same climate, one-third of Gen Z says it believes it will never own a home, and many are planning to forgo having children. Lassman said the economic system their parents talk to them about is not going to work out for them in the same way.
That disconnect helps explain why some young adults are described as “doom spenders,” throwing hundreds of dollars at concert tickets or international travel even while familiar markers of stability — homeownership, family and retirement — feel unattainable. The behavior is harsher than the caution many millennials adopted after 2008, and Lassman said the rejection of financial prudence runs deeper than what followed the last crisis.
She said she sees the divide even among school-age children, who absorb a message that the economic system they are being introduced to no longer fits the life they are expected to build. For generation z, the point is not just that the old ladder is broken. It is that many are acting as if no ladder is coming back at all.