Ok, but how it ends?

Leitura: 6 min

The First World War between Cringes and Tiktokland aside,

one thing has worried me more, and it has nothing to do with the behavioral difference between 14–24-year-old people and the 25-40-ish.

At the first sight, the matter seems to be a clash between those who hate coffee, paying bills, and waking up at 9 am. And those who enjoy reading Instagram posts and making 15-second videos.

Well, it is not.

It is just foam, a smokescreen.

On one of these Sunday mornings, I went downstairs in the building where I live, a building built back in 1923 in Lisbon – therefore, very elegant, Parisian, beautiful, delicate. When I got to the ground floor, I could hear a song.

It was coming from inside the apartment of the janitor, a Portuguese lady in her 80s. Skinny, always wearing an apron, she takes care of the building, every day, calmly, with a little cloth, a broom, and when we pass by her, she casts a distant look, which evaporates into a smile, as if she took a few minutes to come down back to the world as if she were in another world.

She lives alone.

She has lived in this building for decades, I am sure. People of her generation in Lisbon are not people of many possessions. Once they got a roof over their heads, they stayed there. For sure she saw Salazar, the dictator who imposed more than 40 years of repression in Portugal. Repression and poverty. She saw the liberation of Portugal, the 25th of April. She saw Portugal become empty, without young people, she saw Portugal abandon the Escudo, which was their official currency until 2002, and then adopt the Euro.

She is a witness of History.

I think it is a miracle that we speak the same language, even though we are distant in so many realities.

That Sunday, I noticed that there was a song coming from her apartment. It was a choir, a religious choir. I stopped on the stairs and listened to it. It was a classical choir, a Catholic one, singing a hymn to Mary.

Religion, something so important to this woman, to this old Portugal, the comfort and the memory of those more religious times get renewed through the radio waves, where she listens to the morning mass, the sermon, and the choir.

I am a Protestant, but I have deep respect for the religious feelings of the old people, including the Catholic ones. Because they are not going to change anymore. You must respect the religious sentiment of those who have seen everything they have to see. Even if they do not respect Protestants, but this is another matter.

I stayed there, listening to the song for a few minutes, and then I went out to buy bread.

We must observe the life of the elderly because we will end our lives like them. There is no innovation for old ones. Observe the life of the elderly and be curious to find out all kinds of elderly lives, because tomorrow one of them will be yours.

And there is no escape from that.

Your body will have pain. Limits. Illnesses. One day, your body will no longer obey your commands. Your efforts. Nothing. Your body dies slowly, and you will realize that the soul is one thing, the body another.

And this has nothing to do with the kind of technology you use. Cell phones will be museum pieces in 20 years. The devices will be inserted in the body, in different shapes and sizes, more anatomical, more interventional. So, this 15-second video that you record, will have no future, no more than cinema, or the hot dog had.

Things are more and more ethereal.

A whole generation, despite the fact of being full of potential and more likely to succeed than any other in the History of Humanity, especially in terms of knowledge, because of the scientific, environmental, social, and technological progress and developments the whole world is working on, can actually be defined today in a simple and singular illustration: a young person holding a cell phone and dancing some ridiculous trending steps, just because.

The BBC has published a report stating that this digital generation is the first generation with LESS IQ THAN THEIR PARENTS. Consider that all generations had small or moderate advances in IQ in comparison to their parents, until now, when setbacks are being observed.

From the report, an excerpt:

“The Digital Cretin Factory.”

This is the title of the latest book by French neuroscientist Michel Desmurget, director of research at the French National Institute of Health, in which he presents, with hard data and conclusively, how digital devices are seriously affecting – and for the bad – the neural development of children and young people.

“There is simply no excuse for what we are doing to our children and how we are putting their future and development at risk,

warns the expert in an interview with BBC News Mundo, the news service in Spanish of the BBC.”

That is such a dick in the ass of Generation Z, and this is not for mere pleasure.

This generation will find a world with fewer natural and economic resources than the Millennials. Our generation, the X one, has already found a collapsing world. But the Millennials encountered the most ultra-liberal level of the market, which any other generation before did.

The ultra-rich were already defined. In my generation, not yet. And you see, there will always be rich people in every generation. But not everyone in my generation was a Luciano Huck, a host of one of the most popular and watched TV shows in Brazil, and not everyone in yours will be like Juliette, winner of 2021 Big Brother Brazil, the most-watched reality show in Brazil. The masses will make up a middle class increasing in poverty. Poorer and poorer.

The biggest problem for Millennials and for Z’s, besides poverty, is the job market, which is scarce, with fewer possibilities, fewer opportunities. There is another problem, and this one is fatal:

The Social Welfare System.

My generation benefited still from a Social Welfare Policy that was almost similar to the one created in the last century. The reform in the welfare system, retirement funds, and labor laws has increased the power of businessmen and made the workers expendable and disposable. The political and economic crisis that Brazil is going through today, all of this, will have consequences within 30 years from now.

The changes in the Social Security funds are made having in mind one generation only, so the Millennials and Gen Z will feel the burden of poverty and discouragement, and this will not be changed in one generation, this is clear as daylight.

This means that Brazil, within 48 years will have as many elderly people as Japan, when I will already be dead, will have a huge number of aged people, the Generation Z, who haven’t had jobs with signed work cards – in fact, they won’t even know what those are, much less how to get a Social Security. Therefore, they won’t have any retirement funds or any other funds for their old age. And that old age will come. No matter how much technology advances, nothing has yet stopped this biological reality.

In other words,

Generation Z is going to be faced with an extremely poor, hard, lonely, and neglected old age.

Columnist Daniela Lazzaroto wrote in UpDate or Die about the impoverishment and depression of the Millennials. Just think, with Generation Z, it is going to be even worse.

So, let’s hang on where we can.

And the question is not how Generation Z starts, or how it makes its noise.

But rather,

how it ends.