As a counterpoint to some of the recent blackpilling about Generation Z, I went back and dug up some data pointing to encouraging trends among Zoomers.
Look closely at this chart by Audacious Epigone. Pay particular attention to the generational trends in attitudes toward pornography.
“This is terrible!” you may say. “More Zoomers want porn to stay legal than any other generation polled!”
But on closer inspection, a couple of remarkable data points stand out:
- More Zoomers than Millennials want porn banned outright.
- This stat marks a reversal in the trend that started with the Boomers of each successive generation favoring porn bans less than the last.
Note that the age categories above lump Gen Zeds in with some Millennials. It’s a good bet that support for C&C is even higher among 16-20 year-olds.
Now, a common mistake older folks make is to impose their Left vs Right filter on groups that eschew that paradigm. By and large, Zoomers who reject the Death Cult’s vision are ambivalent or even hostile toward Classical Liberalism, unrestricted free marketism, and government noninterventionism. The see those 20th century ideologies as failed pipe dreams that have no relevance in the post-Western world they’ve been relegated to.
What does interest Zoomers on our side is the family and faith life their grandparents took for granted and they themselves never had.
Allow me to cast glimmers of hope on that dire pronouncement.
Just as the decades-long trend toward greater acceptance of pornography stopped with the Gen Z, the Zoomers have also arrested the decline in religious practice. The fact that Zoomers aren’t less religious than Millennials, in spite of how they were raised, qualifies as a minor miracle.
Can confirm the info on the ground. I'm in a…transitionary period where I'm working as unskilled labor with mostly Zoomers. As an example, they tend to think it's normal to have sex before marriage, but they're thoroughly convinced that children need to be in married, two parent households (and seem to think those parents should be the opposite sex, though they won't admit it).
When I bring up church, they get this look that I can't describe, like it's a far off place they want to go, but are scared to. Baby steps, but moving the right direction.
Added note: I haven't gotten to XSeed S yet, but I WANT THAT RPG! I'd kick in as playtester if I didn't have childbirth bills coming soon.
Thanks for the informative field report.
And congratulations on the imminent new arrival!
Also, send me an email.
Something to consider on the issue of porn is that Zoomers are constantly bombarded with it, from a young age. Through Gen Y porn was something you had to go out of your way for. It was almost impossible to "accidentally" run into; at worst you might see an exposed breast in an anthropology article or something.
The internet of course made porn much easier to access, but for older generations it was still a conscious choice to go looking for it. That started to change with the millennials, but I think the combination of the relatively primitive state of the internet during their childhoods as well as the idea that people who looked at porn were creepy perverts limping along by cultural inertia prevented them from really digging into it until they were older.
But for a Zoomer it is very easy to encounter porn at any time. Since many of them were raised with the internet taking place of the idiot box babysitter from Gen X onwards, they had plenty of opportunity to encounter pornography from an early age. And if a Zoomer did manage to stay away from it, it's certain that he would have classmates that did not.
All of this means that it is difficult for a Zoomer to even imagine a world without pornography. I imagine that the reason there is an increase in those not wanting it restricted at all comes from Zoomers who do not believe that it CAN be regulated, since after all they probably got a big dose of porn before the age of 18. But on the other side from having been thrown into it so early and seeing so many people addicted to it, it's easier for them to see how empty and soul crushing pornography is.
Indeed. I'm not sure which cohort I'd fall into, being born in 1993, but in Ireland, so American generational groupings don't fit cleanly onto my experience. I remember seeing and using VHS tapes and the original Playstation as a young kid, but until I was in my mid teens a PC was something you only used at school.
A lot of the divide in opinions over what Zoomers are like also comes from the divide of urbanites and everyone else. This has only sharpened over time, but most urbanites all chant the same mantras regardless of age. You can't look to them for any sort of generational trend when they exist in their own ecosystem divorced from the rest of, not only their countrymen, but the world.
If we're just talking on a base level, Zoomers are a lot more down to earth than Millennials were at the same age. Given that they and the still upcoming Last Generation are the final entries in the modernist age, it is interesting to see how they appear to be mirroring the original two entries on the list by going out as they came in with the Lost Generation.
Because as we all know, western culture is now just a secular mudpie of consumerism and degeneracy, not offering anymore shared experience.
It's going to be interesting seeing what comes next.
That's why the Last Generation moniker you used is apt. We're nearing the end of civilization-wide shared cultural experiences.
Indeed. It will doubtlessly be terrifying and dangerous, but perhaps out of the chaos that comes the endemic corruption in the modern Western worldview can finally be actually re-evalutated and thrown out, something that could never happen while things were "okay".
Two interesting points: Catholic membership is on the rise (15 vs 23).
And no-one is asking "Should people consume porn?" Zoomers have a better understanding of how badly "ban it" works in terms of who gets punished and who gets a pass.