Bari’s Picks: Gen-Z Takeover

A jarring number of people in The Free Press office are under 30 and on Wednesday morning, a lot of them were late to work. Was I mad? No. I was thrilled. Because all of them were nursing hangovers from the previous night—our first ever Free Press Under-30 Meet-Ups, with two parties in New York and D.C.

Gen Z has a terrible reputation. These are the kids who don’t know how to grow up; who use adulting as a verb; who vape between therapy sessions; who consider a Labubu a smart personal investment.

I confess that’s not been my experience. The Gen Zers who work at The Free Press are not only highly functional, they animate what we do. They aren’t concerned with the old world, or with fancy names in education, or media. They are curious, eager, and they aren’t afraid of change. Sure, sometimes they wear tube tops to work, but we’re still working on that part.

Most importantly, the stories they’ve written have helped illuminate the world today.

For this Zoomer special, I’m handing the mic to Sascha Seinfeld, who’s rounded up all the stories you need to read to understand what the people born between 1997 and 2013 are up to—told by the ones living it. —Bari Weiss

Hi everyone! Sascha here. I confess—I was one of the late risers, shuffling in with a Gatorade; a sausage, egg, and cheese; and a hazy memory of texting Bari from the bathroom: “This is bigger than we realize.”

But while some nights leave you wrecked, others leave you glowing. Tuesday night was the latter. It wasn’t just a party. As Lexi Baker, a D.C. attendee, wrote in a letter to the editor: “It was clear something else entirely had occurred. I left feeling more connected and socially invigorated than I had in months.” She added: “I moved to D.C. for opportunities like this—events with driven, curious young people. Yet almost a year in, this was the first time that was actually coming true.”

The charming West Village bar in New York was packed with twentysomethings, many of whom had read my piece “Why My Generation Is Bad at Partying” and were ready to pull me up on it. I spent most of the night waving my arms around, yelling, “I TAKE IT ALL BACK” into different people’s ears.

I couldn’t have been more thrilled to receive Lexi’s note—not just because she related to the problem I’d pointed out (that in our quest to optimize, we accidentally drained nightlife of spontaneity), but because we were offering the antidote.

It was a reminder that despite all the talk of our generation’s inability to party, have fun, or have sex (all of which I’ve personally contributed to in my two—and only—bylines so far), Tuesday night made it clear: There are exceptions. At least 300 of them, to be exact, who showed up in Manhattan and D.C. for our first-ever under-30 parties. Both were so stuffed to the brim with quality kids, it quickly became clear: We’re going to need a bigger boat.

So, Gen-Z Doomers, I am no longer one of you. I now caucus with my colleague Maya Sulkin, who writes: “As I said when I got into work the next day: It was the best night of my life. The Boomers in the newsroom laughed with not a small amount of pity that neither my prom nor college graduation held a candle. But the night was proof of what I’ve known to be true since my first day at The Free Press: I’ve found my people.”

Read Maya:

I may have been too harsh on Gen Z’s capacity to party. But unlike Gen Alpha (2010–2024), who came of age fully wired, we didn’t. We had analog childhoods—and then got swept up in a tech tsunami before anyone realized what was happening. And I still stand by the fact that it’s had some . . . unintended side effects.

Like sacrificing our personalities.

Even as we obsessively “work on ourselves,” we only seem to get farther from normalcy. As Freya India explains in “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore,” therapy-speak and TikTok diagnoses have turned quirks into conditions and replaced personality with pathology. “Now you are always late to things, not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting, but because of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you, not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does—nope, it’s autism.”

It’s also changed the way we have sex (or don’t).

In “What Porn Took from Us,” another brilliant piece by Freya, she explains what happens when an entire generation comes of age with unfettered access to hardcore porn. It leads, as she writes, to “seeing people as sex categories . . . gazing into screens instead of eyes, and preferring pixels over people. . . . All of it, dehumanizing.”

Two Gen Zers see the problem—and are trying to solve it, bro to bro. Our Sean Fischer profiles the young entrepreneurs behind Quittr, an app helping their peers escape the clutches of porn addiction.

We’re so starved for low-effort intimacy, we treat Love Island as parasocial flirtation practice—unfiltered, unpolitical, and often humiliating. In my piece, “What ‘Love Island’ Gets Right About Dating,” I write, the islanders “bravely lean full tilt into embarrassment—bumbling through courtship, tumbling through challenges, getting their hearts broken on camera, their only protection a crocheted beach cover-up.”

It’s also changed our relationship to money—and our idea of the good life.

For some, that means making peace with the system. In her profile of TikTok economist Kyla Scanlon, “The Gen Zer Making Capitalism Cool Again,” Shreeda Segan explores how Scanlon makes capitalism feel less like a trap and more like a tool.

For others, it means walking away from the system altogether. In Bordeaux, France, generational vineyards are drying up from disinterest. As Josephine de La Bruyère reports, Gen Z isn’t opting for a life of cultivating grapes over a fintech salary in the city. The wine isn’t selling, and neither is the lifestyle.

And for a growing number of young people, it means finding a middle path. In “The Good Life, According to Gen Z,” Maya Sulkin chronicles the wave of Gen Zers leaving big cities for small towns, swapping Postmates for pastures, and redefining success on quieter, slower terms.

And then there’s the matter of growing up.

Columnist Suzy Weiss has grown up in and through her culture column and just recently turned 30. Finding herself wildly underqualified for adulthood, she took an “adulting” class. Read what she learned:

Meanwhile, in the dating trenches, River Page reports on a viral app (Tea Dating Advice) that promised to protect women—but instead sparked mass doxxing, revenge hacking, and a war of the sexes that ends with no one getting laid.

Ultimately, Gen Z is an overdiagnosed, underdeveloped, sexually frustrated generation trying to function in a world with no leadership, anywhere, in any realm. We have one foot on solid ground and the other on a slick patch of ice.

These stories—almost all written by Gen Z, about Gen Z—are a trailhead, marking not just where we are now, but where we might be going.

Or, if you prefer, treat this collection like a guilty pleasure true-crime show: horrifying if you think too hard, but oddly cozy from a safe distance.

It’s honest. It’s awkward. But at the very least, it’s proof that connection still matters to us—even if we have no idea how to achieve it.