Another date, another Gen Z headline

By Sophie Solly, Head of Strategy - September 18, 2025

Building on classics like ‘bringing their mums to job interviews’, and ‘getting stressed out making an omelette’ - the Telegraph is offering us ‘Why Gen Z are staying indoors for days’ … another new angle to add to the generational insight pile on.

But clickbait headlines aside, are generational stereotypes ever useful?  And if they are, how can we read them critically?

5 key questions to bring things into sharper focus

How have real Gen Z humans been involved in the development of this insight - and who’s talking? To move beyond anecdotes / samples of one / sweeping generalisations, we need to hear the voice and understand the experience of the cohort in question. We also need to be clear about who we’re talking about - the Gen Z experience in Liverpool vs Lagos is a world apart.  The broader the brushstrokes, the less clear the picture.

Is this actually a lifestage thing? Anxiety about the future, attitudes to work, levels of comfort with financial decisions - all of these things are impacted by life experience.  Let’s make sure Gen Z aren’t just a proxy for young adults.

Who’s really in the frame? Where emerging generations are compared to the status quo - particularly in the negative - what we’re often really seeing are projections of anxieties from the old to the new order. Things like wondering if we are still relevant if our skills lack relevance in a new world (See! Gen Z can’t write in cursive! They can’t read maps!), or looking for evidence of a dystopian tech future (See!  They can’t talk to people on the phone!  Can’t pay attention!).  My colleague Nick Cook has been writing about the cyclical nature of moral panics lately, and has sensible things to say here.

What’s the context? While stereotypes might be over-generalised, there is some validity to the idea that the political, economic, technological and cultural context into which we are born and come of age shapes who we are as people.

The behaviours, attitudes and beliefs which might give rise to these characterisations are a response to the environment Gen Z find themselves in - knowing this gives us a starting point to better identify and understand their needs.

What’s the underlying narrative? Perhaps the most interesting thing we can do with Gen Z stereotypes is to put them together and examine how collectively they relate to broader concerns in the culture. For example, let’s take three prevalent ideas:

• Gen Z are overly boundaried, and see self protection as a priority, including at work
• Gen Z are moralistic and self-righteous
• Gen Z are hyper sensitive to imagined inequality

Taken together these ideas speak to a moment in time where relationships with work, notions of equality and moral codes are fiercely debated in the media and popular culture. Endless conversations about the best ways to do hybrid work and various forms of pseudo quitting. Aspirational leaders being shamelessly immoral. Huge rollbacks around rights and diversity.

These Gen Z tropes are a refracted echo of bigger topics, wider discourse seen through the lens of conversations about a specific generation.

So back to the beginning - are generational stereotypes ever useful?  When used to substantiate bad thinking without nuance, not so much.

However if their existence encourages us to delve deeper into the political, economic, technological and cultural background to what people think, feel and do, or when they offer useful insights into the zeitgeist, the answer feels less straightforward.

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