Before the Zoom boom, there were Zoomers. Generation Z got this much zippier soubriquet well before virtual video menageries started clogging up 30-minute-to-two-hour chunks of our Outlook calendars at algorithmic rates in early March.
One reference to this cohort of 67 million Americans born between the years of 1997 and 2012 comes from an aviation architect, Jennie Santoro , AIA, NCARB, who’s VP and studio leader at HNTB Seattle. Santoro addressed an HNTB symposium in 2016 with remarks entitled, “Boomers to Zoomers: Passing the Torch to Generation Z!”
As local, county, state, and federal lockdowns ease their grip, and relaunches attempt to gather fuel enough to become liftoffs throughout society, business, and culture, a big question–and many, many words, pictures, headlines, blog posts, social media threads, etc. that have become the fabric of human connectivity and dis-connectivity–remains.
Who is protected during and after the ravages of COVID-19, and who is vulnerable?
Some who were protected before the pandemic outbreak and its concurrent economic blast now find themselves added to the ranks of the vulnerable. While the vulnerable–ones whom 10 years of economic recovery largely left behind, and whom housing’s 2010 to 2019 footprint of progress have relegated to non-participatory sidelines, become more so.
In our own recent musing about the financial, economic, and social impact of COVID-19 on this next generational cohort of both workers and potential customers–and what it means to stakeholders in the home building business, we wrote:
What we can only guess is how powerfully events and circumstances of a moment we call “unprecedented” imprint on their lives, their values, their attitudes, their preferences, and their behavior as they one-day take the reins in communities, regions, nations, and the world.
Here, from Pew Research again, we have an analysis that suggests that Zoomer Gen adults “came this close” to having it really good as they emerged into society’s next breed of business, community, and culture’s movers and shakers.
COVID-19’s breakneck force and nearly ubiquitous reach wrenched that feeling of great expectations away, leaving America’s youngest of young men and women to fend for themselves in the early-going of their career path in a more hostile, fear-filled, stingy economic environment.
“There are already signs that the oldest Gen Zers have been particularly hard hit in the early weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis. In a March 2020 Pew Research Center survey, half of the oldest Gen Zers (ages 18 to 23) reported that they or someone in their household had lost a job or taken a cut in pay because of the outbreak. This was significantly higher than the shares of Millennials (40%), Gen Xers (36%) and Baby Boomers (25%) who said the same. In addition, an analysis of jobs data showed that young workers were particularly vulnerable to job loss before the coronavirus outbreak, as they were over-represented in high-risk service sector industries.”
Still, what may be the challenge of the early 2020s as a society trying to prioritize and deploy finite resources to where they’ll unleash the greatest value, is grasping an important distinction between “unprotected” and “vulnerable.”
Protections for America’s newest adults–low unemployment rates, labor and talent shortages in many occupational fields, slightly improving household incomes, and a robust national and global economy–may have vanished in a flash of the past eight to 12 weeks.
However, between the lines in the Pew Research analysis comes a clear sense that Generation Zoom may not need focus nor pity nor extra accommodation in the sense that more vulnerable people may need it in the wake of COVID, now and for the next several years.
To gauge how resilient this age-cohort is in the face of challenge and adversity that may lie immediately ahead, let’s look at the raw materials of fitness we can expect to evolve. Zoomers are more diverse, more technologically nimble, more integrated in real ways, and above all, more educated than any group in the history of humanity.
“A look at older members of Generation Z suggests they are on a somewhat different educational trajectory than the generations that came before them. They are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to be enrolled in college. Among 18- to 21-year-olds no longer in high school in 2018, 57% were enrolled in a two-year or four-year college. This compares with 52% among Millennials in 2003 and 43% among members of Gen X in 1987.”
What Gen Z’s Zoomers don’t need are parents who keep this next cohort protected from the slings and arrows of the real world, including its toughest conditions. What they need is belief, confidence, encouragement that the investment of time, resources, and education, and the commitment to a world that is coalescing, integrating, and teaming up will bear fruit in the next 10 years as a generation with superpowers.
Here’s three reasons to consider Zoomers as tough and fit enough to weather the COVID-19 economic paroxysm, and become one of our brightest, most vibrant sources of energy and momentum–economic, societal, cultural–over the next few years.
- Polarization won’t paralyze them as it has the Baby Boom, Generation X, and Millennials. Zoomers see, understand, and live the wisdom of Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan when she writes: “When you are reasonable with people and show them respect, they will want to respond in kind. But when they feel those calling the shots are being disrespectful, they will push back hard and rebel even in ways that hurt them… This is no time to make our divisions worse. The pandemic is a story not only about our health but our humanity.”
- Purpose runs deeper and thicker than divisiveness. Zoomers, too, have come up grassroots, and embraced the brilliance of New York Times columnist David Brooks, who writes about leading from below, from humility. “So far as a country we are hanging in with one another. And we’re in a process of discovery. We’re slowly learning the strange features of this disease, slowly improvising what will be a wide variety of local ways forward. Endurance is not static. It’s slowly learning, slowly adjusting…. The pandemic has revealed the rot in many of our political dogmas and institutions, but also a greater humanity, a deeper compassion in the face of suffering, and a hidden solidarity, which I, at least, did not know was there.”
- Value needs, by design, to be experienced on both sides of the producer-customer equation. Generation Z is native to design and systems thinking, and its 67 million individuals have emerged into the matter of Seth Godin’s Haiku-like principle. “The cost of something is largely irrelevant, people are paying attention to its value…Your customers don’t care what it took for you to make something. They care about what it does for them.”
