Gen Z doesn’t feel great about the state of the country right now.
Among 18 to 29-year-olds, 80% say the U.S. is on the wrong track, 76% disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the job of president, and just 25% expect life for Gen Z to be better than for previous generations, according to a new survey from NBC News.
Gen Z’s attitudes toward technology and history might be among the most interesting insights from the new survey, with nearly half of respondents (47%) saying they’d like to live in the past. That response was more popular than the number of people from that generation who said they’d like to live in the present (38%) and dwarfed those who wanted to live in the future (15%).
It appears that at least some of this longing for the past is rooted in apprehension about emerging technology. 48 percent of respondents said they were either concerned or anxious about AI, either because it would require new skills to keep up or because it could force them to change careers.
Twenty-seven percent said they’re not worried about AI and believe it won’t really affect their jobs. Just 25% said they’re optimistic about AI, believing it will allow them to do their job better.
You see the nostalgia for a previous era in trends emerging, like the retro-style landline phone called the Tin Can, which has gone viral in the past year. And as Bloomberg noted in a recent article about the Tin Can, retro tech is almost being thrust upon Gen Z, as countries like Australia ban social media for kids under 16.
Nostalgia for a previous era obviously isn’t that weird. In fact, by the late 2000s, there were articles being written about how Millennials were pining for the world that existed before the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. And when boomers flocked to see the film American Graffiti in 1973, set in the early 1960s, they were romanticizing an era that they were either too young to appreciate in the same way or didn’t remember at all. Likewise, in 1993, the movie Dazed and Confused was set in 1976 and, for Gen X, represented a way of life many in that generation wanted to “return” to.
There were also some surprising responses in the new survey when it came to Gen Z’s familiarity with so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. Just 7% said they were currently “investing” in prediction markets. Sixty-seven percent said they were not participating in prediction markets, while 26% had not even heard of them.
Nostalgia isn’t uniform across Gen Z, as you can imagine. Just 33% of young Black adults in the generation said they wanted to live in the past, compared to 52% of whites, according to NBC. That likely has something to do with the prolific and systematic racial discrimination of the 20th century (especially before the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and the existence of chattel slavery in the 19th century.
The survey didn’t drill down specifically on that question. But it seems like a safe bet.
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