Can the Lost Generation Be Found?
A generation sidelined by debt, ideology, and stalled adulthood is drifting — but it doesn't have to stay lost if society restores real opportunity, accountability, and purpose.
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by Victor Davis Hanson
December 15, 2025
The current generation “Z” — those now roughly between 13 and 28 years old — is becoming our 21st-century version of the “Lost Generation.” Members of Gen Z are often nicknamed “Zoomers,” a term used to describe young adults who came of age in the era of smartphones, social media, and rapid cultural upheaval.
Males in their teens and twenties are prolonging their adolescence — rarely marrying, not buying a home, not having children, and often not working full-time.
The negative stereotype of a Zoomer is a shiftless man who plays too many video games. He is too coddled by parents and too afraid to strike out on his own.
Zoomers rarely date, supposedly out of fear that they would have to grow up, take charge, and head a household.
Yet the opposite, sympathetic generalization of Gen Z seems more accurate.
All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.
In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males — 9-10 percent of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League — are of no interest to college admission officers. So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.
Gen Z men saw themselves scapegoated by professors and society for the sins of past generations — and on the wrong side of the preposterous reductionist binary of oppressors and the oppressed.
Traditional pathways to adulthood — affordable homes, upwardly mobile and secure jobs, and safe and secure city and suburban living — had mostly vanished amid overregulation, overtaxation, and underpolicing. Orthodox and loud student advocacies on campus — climate change, DEI, the Palestinians — had little to do with getting a job, raising a family, or buying a house.
During the Biden years, white males mostly stopped enlisting in the military in their accustomed overrepresented numbers. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had died in frontline combat units at twice their percentages for the demographic. No matter — prior Pentagon DEI commissars still slandered them as suspects likely to form racist cabals.
Gen Z males seemed bewildered by women and sex — and often withdrew from dating. Never has popular culture so promoted sexually provocative fashions, semi-nudity, and freewheeling lifestyles, and careers of supposedly empowered single women.
And never had the rules of dating and sexuality become more retrograde Victorian.
Casual consensual sex was flashed as cool everywhere on social media. And when it naturally proved in the real world to be selfish, callous, and empty, males were almost always exclusively blamed as if they were not proper Edwardian gentlemen.
Soon, young men feared sexual hookups and promiscuity as avenues to post facto and one-sided charges of harassment — or worse.
For the half of Generation Z who went to college, tuition had soared, rising faster than the rate of inflation. Administrators were often more numerous than faculty. Obsessive fixations with race determined everything from dorm selections to graduation ceremonies.
Zoomers were mired in enormous student debt. Yet they soon learned that their gut social science and “studies” degrees proved nearly worthless. Employers saw such certificates as neither proof of traditional knowledge nor of any needed specialized skill set.
Unemployed or half-employed Zoomers then ended up with unsustainable five-figure student loans and the insidious interest on them. Their affluent, left-wing, tenured profs, who had once demonized them as oppressors, could have cared less about their dismal fates.
Add it all up, and Zoomers puzzled their parents. And they found scant guidance from the campus.
Instead, they sought needed spiritual inspiration from a Jordan Peterson, entertainment and pragmatic advice from a Joe Rogan — but sometimes toxic venting from a demagogic, anti-Semitic Nick Fuentes.
What would shock the lost generation back into the mainstream, barring a war, depression, or natural catastrophe?
One, an end to DEI hectoring and blame-gaming, and a return to class rather than race determining “privilege.”
Two, some sanity in the war between the sexes. When women represent nearly 60 percent of undergraduates, why does gender still assure an advantage in admissions and hiring?
Three, the federal government needs to stop funding $1.7 trillion in student debt, often for worthless degrees, and wasting away one’s prime twenties and thirties. Let universities pledge their endowments to guarantee their own loans. They should graduate students in four years. And they must slash the parasitical class of toxic administrative busybodies who cannot teach but can hector and bully.
Four, society needs to stop granting status on the basis of increasingly meaningless letters and titles after a name.
Skilled tradesmen like electricians and mechanics are noble professionals. And their status and compensation should reflect their value to society—far more so than a bachelor’s degree in a studies major or years vaporized in off-and-on college.
Finally, incentivize building homes, rather than overregulating and zoning them into unaffordability.
If the lost Gen Z is not found soon, the result for everyone will not be pretty.
— Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Really haven't had time to ruminate on it, but this morning in my email feed was first a piece by Sharyl Attkisson on the lost generation, and now this one by Victor Davis Hanson.
I have five grandchildren in that age group, and I keep them in prayer daily.
As a Gen Z man, I appreciate someone getting the word out, but I hate being lumped in with this lazy victimized persona. I married at 22. I want to buy a house. I got a sensible degree in business analytics. I want kids.
For me, the lack of opportunity comes in the form of dishonest job postings and impassible AI resume screeners. It comes in the form of moving to a new city with my wife and being denied employment at Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and Sam’s Club while I try to find my “real job”.
I’m not lost and I still believe in the American Dream, but mostly out of defiance toward DEI and 50 year mortgages. That defiance is the primary cause sentiment to be reconciled for Gen Z men.