Being Gen-Z feels like showing up to the party 4 hours after everyone left.

The American dream is dead. Trump said that at the RNC when I was like 10 years old and it's gotten worse every year since. It's frustrating because everyone knows it's bad but there's still so little sympathy. It seems like all that's left of America is this vague idea that you have to work yourself to death so you can buy things. That's literally all we have left that unites us. Working and trying to buy groceries.

What is this country without prosperity?

My generation is trying to figure this out and we're not coming up with much inspiring stuff. With the benefit of hindsight, no one likes the direction our ancestors chose to take. The suburbs that gave our great grandparents the dream of homeownership left us isolated and friendless as kids, sealed up behind a TV screen so our parents could feel like we're safe. The constant economic stimulus that kept our economy growing throughout the 20th century is now like a noose around the neck of anyone who has to buy things regularly in order to survive (aka everyone). The cost of living is brutal and probably not going down unless the economy actually shrinks for a while. We've transitioned from a labor economy to an ownership economy as boomers retired and invested their savings in real estate and the stock market. It no longer pays to work. College is useless. Our society is overly bureaucratized and discrimination against white people and men is openly celebrated. Anyone who doesn't fit into DEI HR culture is effectively banned from participating in the mainstream economy.

No one is happy. Liberals aren't happy. Conservatives aren't happy. Men and women are at each other's throats but equally miserable for different reasons. We have no culture, no third spaces to meet people and forge lasting relationships. Most people are single, lonely and completely disgusted by one another. Everyone I know is mentally ill to some degree. It's really bad. I don't think older people fully understand the caliber of people who will inherit this world.

I think the negativity will only stop when the direction of our civilization completely changes. There's no making our current trajectory work, under any circumstances.

CONSTANT GROWTH IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. Constant change, constant agitation is not normal. It's not normal for every generation to die in a world that's completely unrecognizable from the one they were born into. It's not normal that our pattern of life is constantly being messed with for the sake of theoretical progress. It's not normal to feel like you're on the clock 24/7, constantly surveilled, constantly accounted for. The feeling that time is speeding up, that every moment needs to be filled with some meaningless distraction. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This is not healthy. Our birthrates are falling off because this world is not appropriate for human beings to live in.

Consumerism has to die. Liberalism (in the classical and modern sense) needs to be retired. Even rationality in the sense we know of today has to go. Inefficiency is what makes life home for human beings.

I don't want to hear people call this idealistic nonsense when our culture is visibly dying before our eyes. The status quo and the 20th century frame of reference has been discredited, as hard as that is for some people to accept. Change is our only option and it's inevitable at this point.

Conservatives will have to articulate a vision of our future that goes beyond capitalist consumerism or else we're going to become a third world communist shithole. New ideas are needed. We have to drastically expand our minds beyond what we've been conditioned to believe, or humanity is truly doomed.

Rant over.