Welcome to the first Gen Z election. Because, whatever else 2024 might be said to symbolise, for many of those (like me) born between 1997 and 2012 it is a moment of maturity. Eight million of us are now eligible to vote: Gen Z makes up 15 per cent of the voting population. We enter the political arena freighted with bizarre and contradictory stereotypes. Can our generation be living through an unprecedented period of sexual drought, and also represent a new species of bed-hopping polyamorists, kinked to the gills? The less said about our chronic laziness or teetotal neuroticism the better. But in a few weeks, rather than being defined by moral panic or media slander, we’ll be voting en masse for the first time.
Generations don’t get to choose the world that shapes them. The Greatest Generation were thrust into uniform in the 1940s, which bequeathed them their epic capacities for social solidarity and nation-building. The baby boomers came of age at a moment of demographic glut and intellectual experimentation – it isn’t hard to understand the counterculture that followed. And it wasn’t Gen X’s fault that their parents kept getting divorced, or that millennials were the first to grow up on the internet.
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