Generation Z Is Most Conservative Yet

The human race has begun to shift toward K:

Teenagers born after 2000 – the so-called ‘Generation Z’ – are the most socially conservative generation since the Second World War, a new study has found.

The youngsters surveyed had more conservative views on gay marriage, transgender rights and drugs than Baby Boomers, Generation X or Millennials.

The questioned were more prudent than Millennials, Generation X and Baby Boomers but not quite as cash-savvy as those born in 1945 or before…

Baby Boomers took a difference approach and said that ‘money is made to be spent’.

Again only the prewar generation came ahead of today’s teenagers for holding an even more shrewd financial head.

r and K seen in resource consumption, and everything else.

It is tough to program into someone the same level of cash savvy-ness as was inherent to those who lived through a Depression or war-rationing.

Still, consider that K comes with age, as the amygdala comes online. It is interesting that as a group, today’s aging Hippies are more r than today’s young Generation Z, who still have quite some level of K-ifying left to do in their lives, as their amygdalae mature. This is conservative at twenty (with lots more conservatizing to do) vs still liberal at 65.

It is interesting that some measure of r K is burned in in youth, and remains as a foundation for a population for the rest of their lives.

r and K are relative to the normal experience of an individual, which makes them difficult to measure objectively based solely on environmental conditions. Someone raised without electricity in a cabin the woods will get a dopamine rush just from watching news shows on TV, and be r-ified by very little doses of technology. Someone raised with the internet, video games, 3D movies with CGI graphics, cellphones, and so on would find that TV with just news program totally boring. If someday we have intergalactic space travel, in our own personal spaceships, and lives spent with class III level technology engaging in exploration of the unique species and cultures that have evolved in the universe, today’s level of technology would be positively K-ifying by comparison.

r/K’s status of the population being relative to previous experience doesn’t mean r and K can’t be measured. Clearly one excellent measurement would be this study’s method. Having gained such a measurement, I am sure you could map out probabilities for everything from economic failure of a nation, to product consumption, to likelihood of war.

I think the last net dopamine gain was the smart phone, and it was nothing compared to the rise of the internet before it. Now, even with stable economic conditions, the net dopamine rushes (relative to the immediate past) which produce the real looniness are mostly over. Add in the mild economic shortage, and things are beginning to turn K all by themselves. Add in a real, prolonged depression, and you will be looking at K rising in the levels which produced the last World War.

Apocalypse is rising.