My son recently asked why I sent him an email. The question startled me. He stared at his inbox like an archaeologist discovering ancient hieroglyphics and informed me that email is to his generation what mailed letters were to mine—slow, formal, and vaguely irritating. Apparently, for Gen Z, communicating via email is about as convenient as strapping a note to a carrier pigeon.
This generational moment stuck with me, mostly because it made me feel slightly prehistoric. And it’s not just email that has me feeling my age. Watching football last night, I found myself thinking how impossibly young the players looked, only to notice, with a shock bordering on mild panic, that even the coaches are starting to look youthful. How did this happen? Wasn’t every coach supposed to look like a grizzled veteran from a Clint Eastwood movie? Now they’re fresh-faced prodigies who seem like they might still get carded buying cold medicine.
My first instinct, the one hardwired into the firmware of every generation that has ever had to squint at the youth, is to grumble. Complaining about the next generation is a timeless, if lazy, tradition. We love to quote Socrates lamenting, “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority.” It’s a quote so perfect for complaining about kids that we had to invent it for a philosopher who was literally sentenced to death for being too popular with them.
The real history is just as telling. In the 1700s, elders feared youth were being “poisoned” by the disruptive technology of novels. In the 1920s, they panicked over “frivolous, scantily clad, jazzing flappers,” who threatened the social order with their newfound mobility. In the 1950s, rock and roll was decried as “savage music” and a “degenerate, vicious form of expression” that was blamed for juvenile delinquency and got concerts banned in major cities. Then, it was our turn. My Gen X cohort was dismissed as “slackers,” a generation supposedly lost to the lethal cocktail of video games, Axl Rose, and Jerry Springer, with the audacity to trade the corporate ladder for the terrifying freedom of a world with no safety net.
Each panic was never really about the kids; it was about the older generation’s anxiety over a future they didn’t understand. If that pattern holds, today’s nonsense is tomorrow’s GDP. And Gen Z’s nonsense looks suspiciously like the science fiction I grew up reading.
They are building a new economy on pillars that are already reshaping our world. First, born into economic uncertainty and distrustful of traditional finance, they are embracing decentralized systems. More than half of Gen Z already owns or has owned cryptocurrency. They are driving a decentralized finance (DeFi) market projected to exceed $230 billion by 2030, seeking not just profit but direct control over their assets.
Second, they are turning authenticity into a macroeconomic force. Disillusioned with the 9-to-5, 75 percent of them aim to be entrepreneurs. They are the engine of the creator economy, a $250 billion industry that Goldman Sachs projects will nearly double to $480 billion by 2027. They don’t need focus groups; they read the comments. They don’t need billboards—they are the billboard. Their native digital fluency allows them to leverage new tools to build businesses faster and more efficiently than any generation before them.
So, when my son gives me that blank stare about my email habits, I no longer see a kid who doesn’t get it. I see someone who has already decided to build his own systems, thank you very much. He’s not waiting for a legacy institution to anoint him; he’s weaving his own future out of code, content, and community. It’s confusing and chaotic, but for the first time in a long time, the future feels like an exciting, unwritten story.
I realize my role isn’t to become a relic guarding a museum of how things used to be. It’s to be an early adopter of their world, to offer a little hard-earned wisdom when asked, and then, most importantly, to get the hell out of the way and cheer them on as they build it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to invest in some better knee braces and take a nap.