The verdict is out. We, the oldies, are convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that the Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—are wild-eyed, narcotic-soaked brats who are lazy, irresponsible and incorrigible. 

Their aversion to hard work, and to routinely turn up at the workplace, bedecked in black shoes and tie and patiently slog away until death or pension kicks them out of the door, drives us nuts. Their unwillingness to woo or be wooed by a member of the opposite sex, a wooing that should result in the exchange of livestock, wedding bells and the popping of bountiful bundles of joy, boggles the mind. 

And what is that nonsense of not taking care of us, their long-suffering parents, in our old age? They want us to die in old people’s homes or in our huge, rural mansions—lonely, poor and neglected in filthy, urine-drenched bedding? Don’t they know that we couldn’t save and invest because we were paying their fees in fancy academies and motivating their teachers?

Our lamentations are legion: about grown-ass adults who won’t be bothered to leave the nest, clean after themselves or contribute a shekel to house costs. About young workers who won’t bother to turn up for work or job interviews. About trained professionals who demand flexible working hours, preferably in pyjamas, at home. About young people who scoff at the toxicity of formal employment and its associated perks—pension, taxes, wanting mental health. 

To be fair, our parents didn’t think much of my generation. We couldn’t bathe without being instructed, couldn’t water the cows and goats without being reminded, couldn’t study without getting whipped and couldn’t stop losing pens and geometrical sets. Didn’t we, for Christ’s sake, know how tough life was? Didn’t we appreciate their sacrifices or comprehend that education was the key to life? Didn’t we want to dine on bread and butter, a cuisine that was only available to those who burned the midnight oil? 

Mostly, our folks worried that we would abandon them after making it in life; that we would get lost in far-off cities, marry ill-mannered people from other tribes, and sire two children who couldn’t speak in mother tongue. They pictured themselves dying alone in old age, huts falling apart, their offspring scattered in the wind, and, alas, their graves lost in thickets. We had, after all, sworn we would build homes in Nairobi, and be done with the muddy village and its smoky kitchens, stinky cows and that smelly pit latrine standing 50 metres away from the house on dark rainy nights.

To the contrary, their fears were mostly misplaced. We are more rural than they were; we have built humongous homes in the village, rigged them up with running water and power and surrounded them with trees. What is more, no generation has invested more in their parents. Our folks, in general, feed better, dress better and access better healthcare than our grandparents ever did. Turns out we were never as lazy or half as stupid as our parents feared.

So, what happened? Well, life happened, that’s all!  

We married wives that we couldn’t flog as our grandfathers did, while our sisters married men who behaved as badly as their grandfathers. We begot children who talked back, unlike we did, worked at jobs we hated but couldn’t walk away from because we had to pay the bills and feed and educate the kids, and suddenly became too bloody old to run around the streets waving twigs, fighting riot police and eating teargas.  Now, we are “just there”, as our good Gen Z will become in the fullness of time. 

Like us, our children will face a compounding set of challenges that their age will bring—challenges that could be harder than anything we ever saw. Life will happen for them, and circumstances and demands arising from their sexual escapades will force them to trot to the outhouse in blinding rain to painfully grunt out the folly of constipated youth and grow up.  

Sometimes, however, this “folly” is only in our heads. The “crazy” things our Gen Z do are no different from what we, our parents or grandparents did. My grandpa, for one, thought my father was an idiot for buying furniture instead of cattle. My father thought I was a numbskull for spending the equivalent of five months' pay on a music system instead of, wait for it, buying cattle! Mark you, clean-shaven I, who once pranced around with a bushy afro to my father’s chagrin, couldn’t stand the strings my son carried around on his head. 

Our lamentations are the result of the older generations pigeonholing the youth into one stereotype, in our case, the false belief that all Gen Zees reside in the madness and mirage of social media.

But even they will quickly learn that not everyone can be a content creator, and not every content creator will be successful, nor every youth an “expert” blowing millions by hunching over a laptop in pyjamas and socks. Matter of fact, the social media hype could, like our buying of plots and other “quick” money-making schemes, become history before they blink.  

When the cards fall, we will see in that Gen Z crowd tough-as-nails operators who will walk through hell without a second thought to their mental well-being. In that crowd, young men and women who will know to turn up and stay put because they have sickly parents to take care of, orphaned nephews and nieces to raise, or because that is simply how they got raised. 

There are those who will join the army and the police, become medics and teachers; engineers, builders and farmers; lawyers and civil servants; and grave diggers and morticians – occupations where the mere thought of flexible working hours or working from home is laughable. The smart will thrive, and the lazy, foolish and criminal minded will—like has happened in every generation—suffer. 

There is only one way in which we differ from Gen Z. Until now, society was neatly stratified into leaders, managers, supervisors, workers and the have-nots. The leaders made decisions and whipped everyone, including the have-nots long resigned to fate, into line. 

In meetings—from Cabinet to funeral committees—the chair at the head of the table directed who spoke, for how long and if what they spoke made sense. The “idiots” were muzzled, their “foolish” ideas shot down outright if they dared to open their mouths. If the crude, uncouth and ill-mannered mistakenly wandered into spaces of decision-making, they were resolutely shooed out. Lanes. 

We changed that. We taught our children that they could become whatever they aspired to be, that they had every right to be heard, even when we knew that they were dumb as a rock. Above all, we taught them that it was okay to follow their hearts’ desires—and to pursue happiness and not our dreary and life-long pursuit of putting food on the table. YOLO, we cried. 

And then, we gave them social media.

So, for the first time in the history of mankind, the crude, rude, angry and foolish are speaking, and the brainy and steadfast have been cowered into stupefied silence. What a racket!

Some things won’t change, though. Like us, our Gen Z will also spawn a new generation of sufferers whom they will roundly curse to their dying days.  

Ted Malanda is a consulting editor and a columnist with The Standard.

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