The brutal math behind Gen Z’s lonely weekends: $15 drinks are driving a generational ‘spending hangover’

In 1993, the classic Britpop band Blur closed “For Tomorrow” with a spoken aside: modern life, as far as their narrator was concerned, was rubbish. It became the title of the album and, eventually, shorthand for a certain flavor of Gen X disillusionment—bored, unwilling to take the world’s dysfunction too seriously because taking it seriously wouldn’t change anything.

Three decades later, the generation that Gen X largely raised has inherited the sentiment, minus the irony. The evidence is stacking up across polls, surveys and countless anecdotes that Gen Z isn’t the problem, it’s just that modern life is a bit rubbish. Or, as global advertising firm Ogilvy puts it in its new Gen Z Pulse report: “Gen Z isn’t contradictory. Modern life is.”

The Harris Poll, in a separate survey of 4,100 American adults conducted in late May and early June, found a harsh set of economic conditions that conspire to leave half of the generation lonely every weekend: and that’s because they can’t afford to go out. Nearly three-quarters spend their weekend time at home, and according to the pollster who ran the numbers, the connection between them isn’t psychological, it’s a “spending hangover.”

“We call it placing financial regret over FOMO,” Libby Rodney, Chief Strategy Officer at The Harris Poll, said in an interview with Fortune about the firm’s new Gen Z Weekend Report. “It isn’t the physical connection of things [that Gen Z is trying to avoid], it’s just financial.”

Reid Litman, the director who authored Ogilvy Consulting’s Gen Z Pulse report, sounds similar. “Contrary to how they’re viewed in most media coverage, Gen Zers are not hypocritical or incompetent,” he writes. “They’re navigating new contradictions created by modern life.” Gen Z is, in fact, the first generation to entirely grow up inside a “new reality” as the last decade has progressively shifted “the systems that once carried people through adulthood” onto the individual. “Identity, relationships, and work increasingly blur together,” leaving the youngest generation to do the heavy lifting of figuring it out for themselves.

A generation raised indoors

Rodney argued for a physical component to Gen Z’s loneliness, echoing Litman’s argument that one by one, the structures that previous generations have enjoyed have been removed. Gen Z has spent a childhood spent being funneled toward screens while being locked out of unsupervised physical space, often by the very Gen X parents managing the household.

She cited data showing that 75% of 8-to-12-year-olds are allowed to play on Roblox, while only 25% of the same children are allowed to play unsupervised in their own front yards. That same logic, she argued, followed Gen Z into adolescence: cafes that withhold Wi-Fi, malls that treat teenagers as a shoplifting risk, public space increasingly designed to discourage unmonetized gathering. “They’re really having a hard time connecting in places that aren’t capitalized or monetized around them,” Rodney said. The result, layered on top of a global pandemic that hit during their formative years, is a generation whose default setting became staying in.

Ogilvy’s data complicates the assumption that this is a........

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