Gen-Z Wants Their Future Back!     …Part 1

A Rebellion Against Corruption

 “What do you want for your life?” A Gen-Z person in Nepal was asked this question, and she responded intensely: “Not having to ‘carry somebody else’s bags’ out of desperation, not waiting for charity organizations to give people handouts, not staying subservient to other people. Not waiting for somebody else to give you permission to advance in life.” In other words, she seeks empowerment to make her own way in her life.

She is not alone in this fervent wish. The rebellion in Nepal, which inspired other global uprisings in the last month or two, has aimed to wake society up to the needs of Gen-Z youth by ending corruption so that they can get jobs, afford food, and rent, and make choices in their lives. It is an effort to unlock wealth from limited strata of society and end a deceitful style of governing and restore dignity to people.

Informally known as ‘Zoomers’ or Digital Natives, Gen-Z is the first generation who grew up with digital technology, the internet and smart phone technology. Born between 1997 and 2012, they are now between thirteen to twenty-eight years of age. One could say that these youth are probably experiencing their lives in this global setting so far as both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing part is quite clear: They are more educated, digitally literate, and have grown up with a mobile device that connects them to a larger community far beyond their family, school and workplace. They are savvy with a huge range of internet outlets and social media to keep up with the latest in their own and outside world news. All these generational privileges, however, have not come without taking a toll on some of these youth. Maladjustment from excessive screen use has ranged from sleep deprivation to mental health issues, stress, various vision anomalies, all the way to poor immune system including various food allergies, as some research reveals.

Yet at the same time, there has been so much positive and conscientious Gen-Z behavior towards animal rights, choosing plant-based food, using more bicycles, and being environmentally aware. Their position and activism in regards to climate change is commendable, not to mention their fearless struggles against political and human rights crackdowns. This global awakening is evident in the increasing street protests by the Millennial and Gen-Z in the last decade in several countries, starting with Arab Spring, then in Iran with the Green Revolution and then in Hong Kong. One of the earlier Gen-Z movement was in 2022, when the Iranian young women led a nationwide uprising. The more recent ones started in Nepal in September 2025 followed by Ladakh-India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Peru, and Kenya and spreading in other African countries.

The curse of being Gen Z is also quite clear. Many youths in the global South (as well as in certain classes of people in North America, in some Southern European countries, and Russia) have been born to families where one or both parents are either unemployed or are day-wagers or cheap laborers, without any proper contract, healthcare or retirement benefits and without savings. This situation has remained volatile for this generation and previous generation. But through their hyper-connectedness, the Gen-Zers are waking up to the nepotism of the upper classes, oligarchs and people of key positions who have victimized vibrant, striving youths by controlling the society, passing on jobs to family members and non-qualified people, thinking only of themselves, not the society at large. Gen-Z in this context is excluded from their collective capacity, blocked from meaningful social participation, and barred from many political processes in the reforming of financial and social policies of their countries.

Gen-Z youth are facing the curse of being a generation whose share of wealth, resources and potentially bright futures is being swallowed by those we could call “future-eaters”- those whose arrogance and greed is leaving almost nothing for the Gen-Z to build their own reality and decide their futures. The Gen-Z youth want their future back! At this point, the Gen Z youth are showing us that rebellion is seemingly the only channel by which they can a signal ‘enough is enough’ to those who have been sitting on power and calling the shots.

Note that despite variations in countries’ political history, cultures, resources, status, and economics, such complaints are largely held in common among all the Gen Z uprisings. And it is not a situation exclusive to developing countries – countries in the global North are also facing very similar doubts and struggles among their youth. Their future is in jeopardy due to the serious threat of corrosive inequality, uncertainty, conflict, climate change and insecurities caused by reckless and short-sighted politics of their countries.

In modern times, the reflexive answer to such problems tends to be, “Vote! Make change through elections!”  But are elections really working? The distraction from issues of global injustice and inequality is often camouflaged by promoting the idea of democracy and elections in order to satisfy an unhappy population. Gen-Z, and perhaps many others around the world, including in the West, are getting tired of elections with no tangible results for average people.

Interestingly, in Aristotelian terms elections and politics were meant to function as a bridge between the oligarchy and the people – the privileged and the unprivileged. But today, partiality and manipulation of the election process have oftentimes failed to produce much concrete change or even deliver the basics for a decent living. The ‘bridge’ is tipped more towards the oligarchs at this point. Selling the disingenuous ideas of democracy and elections without offering a fair share of say in the country’s budget management and policy changes that would benefit everyone is nothing but deception. This type of deception is finally coming to the surface even though many continue to benefit from it while others are uninformed about it in many countries, including Western ones. (Seeing Through Elections and Power Structures).  

With their access to social media and their incredible connectedness with global peers, Gen-Z youth are becoming more and more aware of the partiality of elections, the corruption in politics, the money in the military, and the privileges which the elites and their children with their plentiful and lavish lifestyle are enjoying while the rest have to struggle to make ends meet. The change of a prime minister or a president or cabinet members or a party is designed to neutralize the public’s negativity. But really, very little changes. The non-violent pseudo-changeability of politics through elections sometimes seems designed to distract citizens from what they are entitled to. Populism and populistic rhetoric have kept many calm and quiet so far, but Gen-Z is waking up to the illusory promises, and to the theatrical sidetracking politics of the elites.

Instead, it is the invisible power structures that Gen-Z is focusing on. In 2024, more and more elections were held around the world than ever occurred in history. So, elections are already happening and constitutions are in place, but structural changes providing for average citizens are lacking.

Gen Z is asking: If elections are the answer to our problems, why are things still bad?

What is Corruption?

Corruption is being spoken of more and more loudly in these Gen-Z uprisings. The movement is becoming an anti-corruption movement, not just a call for special elections or changes in governments.

As we ask, “What exactly IS corruption?” we begin to see that it has many levels, and apparent and hidden dimensions. In simple terms, corruption is the coercion and meanness of people in political and societal layers who cheat and exploit those in the layers beneath them. There are various forms of corruptions: material (cash demanded from citizens for government work to be done, especially when bureaucracy is handled manually rather than systemically and electronically), and immaterial (favors, lying and covering for others’ unethical actions, and policies preferring individuals or companies over the public interest). There is visible corruption (mostly in developing countries) and invisible corruption (such as in Western, liberal democracies which support legalized corruption through subtle loopholes).

Corruption is an amorphous phenomenon that takes shape according to the circumstances and according to the norms. Psychologically, corruption emerges out of lack of respect, lack of trust, a sense of survival and greed, and focus on oneself rather than the collective society. As a result, anger, a breach of loyalty to others, confrontation, disempowerment, and broken dignity are some of the depressing byproducts of corruption. Corruption is corrosive to any society. The corrupt narrators who hold power promise a better future while avoiding any structural shift that might loosen their ties on the resources they are used to exploiting.

Corruption is when non-elite people have to bear more than their share of the natural struggles of existence. Corruption is the diversion of resources towards power structures instead of towards people. Corruption is the lack of options for people who are caught up in the cycle of a hand-to-mouth economy. Corruption means not having access to and not being able to afford healthcare because of the health of corporations taking precedence over the health of human beings.

No matter which forms it takes, corruption definitely damages a society’s fabric of collaboration and trust. Sometimes it takes on a life of its own. Once it becomes endemic in a society, corruption becomes the expected norm; in such cases, it can be extremely difficult not to be corrupt. It is very hard to break free of an interlocked system of corruption, where one level of corruption feeds into the next. Is it any wonder that Gen-Z has had it, and is calling for a change in the very nature of government itself?

The losses of empowerment and potential that Gen-Z is experiencing are being brushed under the rug under the banner of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’. Modernity and modernization should not be mistaken for an automatically better future for humanity. Andreas Reckwitz, the German sociologist and cultural theorist in his groundbreaking book, Verlust, or Loss, has pointed out that there is a paradox at work here: modernity and progress induce some kind of euphoria as a solely forward movement, and yet it is somehow also causing the loss of our future, our environment, our social privileges and our power as people. Loss can be seen in the increase in violence and the chance of war through militarization. Loss is seen in young people feeling less and less hope for the future. Loss is seen in environmental degradation for future generations.

In contrast, having an empowered sense of control over one’s own destiny is the sign of a better future. From the context of Rechwitz arguments, the question is this; what are modernity and progress offering the youth of today? In other words, is the euphoria of modernity wearing off and the bitter truth of loss and corruption becoming detectable?

Gen-Z is tired of “business as usual.” This time around, the corrupt ones cannot hide, even though they hold on to power and their security forces. Living an adequate everyday life is getting harder and harder for the Gen-Z youth and also, as always, for the unfortunate ones in this world. Gen-Z is rising up in rebellion calling for mass participation in sharing power and resources, calling for an end to chronic corruption in different countries, and calling for the restoration of dignity to people.

The maturity of this generation is the means to address the paradoxes of modernity, moving towards a global village and a greater Enlightenment. They want their future back.

******

Gen-Z Wants Their Future Back!                 …Part 2

 Addressing Paradoxes, Political Maturity and Global Enlightenment

Born in French Martinique in 1925, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and political philosopher. He wrote about former colonies in Africa, reflecting on the sense that postcolonial governments, despite becoming more independent, had failed to fully escape colonial and imperialist influences: most of the formerly colonized countries, severely damaged by colonization, headed toward corruption, domination and violence. Even though they were now independent, self-governed and fully back in charge of their own destiny, the postcolonial elites in such places carried on with the exploitation of their own people. As Fanon put it, the new ‘Black’ rulers were doing what the White colonizers had been doing all along, exploiting as if they had put on White ‘masks.’  (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952).

The metaphor of Black faces and White masks does not apply solely to African nations. The imagery also applies to the oligarchs of other developing countries and including Western ones, those who put on masks to disguise themselves from their own people, and yet exploit them in intricate ways. Fanon believed that this dichotomy between the exploiters and the exploited gradually becomes the basis of social neuroses and a disordered relationship between the subordinate people (“subalterns”, the term coined by Antonio Gramsci) and the elites – the “domestic colonizers.”  In such cases, people develop a ‘love-and-hate’, sort of schizophrenic attitude towards their own country and its politicians – their “compatriots” who are exploiting them. This is enough fuel to flame the fire of violence and even rebellion.

If we imagine for a moment the British citizen Thomas Paine as a “Gen-Z” of his generation, we can then appreciate his famous 47-page Common Sense booklet from 1775-1776, written in support of American independence from British colonialism towards the creation of an egalitarian society on the moral grounds for justice and common sense. His cause was noble and pure, in this case on behalf of the exploited people of the Thirteen Colonies, even though they weren’t his actual compatriots. His rebellion against his own native corrupt and immoral government is in line with the modern Gen-Z youth who wish for justice, oppose the obstinate oligarchy, and reintroduce common sense into governing.

Today, the Gen-Z youth of the West and in modern societies, while having more freedoms and comforts in a postcolonial era, may feel that along the lines of Fanon’s (and even Paine’s) analysis, their existential future is in the hands of ‘compatriot’ oligarchs who govern them, whether with massive wealth, visible or invisible corruption, and endless military spending and build-up. This issue has been coming for a long time.

Thus, the rebellion by Gen-Z is not just a movement in non-Western countries for liberation from entrenched hierarchical and wealth-based domination: it is perhaps also about domestically ‘decolonizing’ this and future generations while imagining a new world for all people, not just one’s own country or for a particular class or race. It is instead seeking a new humanity with less focus on supremacy. Gen-Z represents an emergent and new consciousness. This new consciousness is their weapon to break down the archaic power structures and to dissolve the dichotomy of complaining while doing nothing.

The Gen-Z movement of today is demanding hope for their future and an end to the oligarchy’s domination of the world’s resources, starting with the basic things that will make it possible for them to thrive in their lives. They generally suffer from not getting their fair share of employment because of rampant nepotism among the power classes. They also do not get their share of the massive global capital generated through sale of gas and oil by certain countries among other earth natural resources which actually belong to all humanity. These natural resources located in different regions/countries are extracted and are sold by the governments, companies or groups of dominant individuals, causing the world populations to be deprived of a share of this wealth that the planet earth has left for all generations and for all people, not for the oligarchies. These natural resources will eventually have to be given back to earth and to all people who inhabit the earth in each generation. (Can We Internationalize the Earth’s Resources for All?).

Gen-Z movement, despite a long road ahead, seems to be heading in the direction of engaging on a collaborative level with a meaningful role and equal participation in politics rather than just being passive voters in questionable systems of pseudo-representation. With the aim of social justice and decent, empowered lives, Gen-Z is saying that the old era of cheering for a little bit of this and that and being satisfied with political crumbs, is over. Now they are demanding an overhaul of injustice, inequality, arrogance and deceit.

Perhaps Gen-Z is saying the time is ripe for a Global Enlightenment!?

Global Enlightenment 

One common global denominator among the Gen-Z youth movements, despite differences in their cultures and polities, is that they do not believe the old model is working in a productive and respectful ways, nor do any longer blindly believe just what they are told. If the Gen-Z movement can truly universalize its demands, then they can become an outlet for all the disadvantaged citizens of all ages in their respective countries, and catalyze a global renovation of the old and arrogant model of governing.

It is true that on one hand, there is little room to complain; our wonderful modern achievements have made things happen faster, more effectively and more comfortably. But the problems of modern civilization now tend to lie in its depressive paradoxes. Such paradoxes arise from focusing on materialist, mechanical progress rather than human, civilizational progress. For example, in order to make inexpensive goods, cheap offshore human labor is exploited almost like a modern form of slavery. Structural corruption in the name of bureaucracy and systems require obedience and fealty from the people. Wars continue in the name of territory and ideologies. Human rights are only invoked when it serves the interests of a country, not as a matter of committed principle.

The paradoxes of civilization are better portrayed in a historical context by James C. Scott in his book Against the Grain. Scott says we left our hunter-gatherer life for a better life and brighter future, joining the supposedly more advanced agriculturalist societies, but along the way we experienced things in these newly stratified societies that we never did as hunter-gatherers. The unfortunate mass atrocities of complex societies as opposed to a hunter-gatherer’s life have been genocide, servitude, religious-political hierarchy, slavery, accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, incarceration and expansionism.

The Eurocentric Enlightenment started in an effort to remedy some of these paradoxes. This localized Enlightenment still continues its path with many deficiencies and double standards without genuinely aiming for a global Enlightenment. (Second Enlightenment) The postcolonial societies and the unprivileged people are left alone by the Enlightened West to find solutions to their own predicament.

Gen-Z is becoming more and more socially mature than their preceding generations. In his short essay on Enlightenment (Aufklärung) in 1784, Emmanuel Kant employed a meaningful description: sociological “immaturity” (Unmündigkeit) in the time before the Age of Enlightenment was because people could not think and decide for themselves due to social factors such as Church control, monarchies, aristocracies, etc. Kant thought the mental immaturity of the masses was perhaps due to their unconscious herd mentality; they are often paralyzed, unable to use their own understanding without the direction of their superiors or rulers. He suggests that this immaturity may not be a lack of intellect, but instead is a result of the “laziness and spinelessness” that comes from being forced to live under tyranny, and thus not be able to decide for themselves. By paraphrasing and contextually interpreting and updating what Kant meant, in this way we can understand where Gen-Z is coming from and how much they have matured in their political thinking.

Perhaps their maturity is jumpstarting a global Enlightenment originating from non-Western countries. In a Kantian sense, Gen-Z youth are finding the maturity and the courage to think for themselves by not letting others in the broader political realm to think and decide for them. There is a collectivity at work here. Gen-Z people in different places often talk about the inspiration they gained from the uprisings of their peers in other countries. This is maturity on a deeper level, strengthened by the sheer solidarity and focused energy of others engaged in similar efforts around the world. Their message: together we can make things different and better.

Global Enlightenment does not mean global uniformity. Rather it means the end of the global scourge of corruption, the creation of new and more just international and national laws to protect citizens (instead of corporate and military investments), harmonious coexistence, the tempering of the power of reason with compassion, and ending the master-and-servant mentality that has been so insidious through much of global civilization. The future that Gen-Z is aiming at would maintain the best parts of our modern civilizations while getting rid of the worst.

How can the aims of the Gen-Z movement and a global Enlightenment manifest? It is easy to name some examples: it should mean using funds to help people, not militaries; it should mean building more trust among citizens by engaging them in political decision-making through more referenda; it should mean providing real human rights, including healthcare and old age benefits – for all citizens even for those who maintain Unconventional Careers such as artists, musicians, poets, writers, etc., who provide a humanizing uplifting element to any society. Everyone says they don’t want war or injustice, and so if we really mean that, we can even abolish war and make injustice a crime punishable by law.  But the first step is to reinvent ourselves and release ourselves from the trap of our double standards.

We cannot keep looking to the law-makers or the rulers of the past; they did not know this world of today, which is changing in ways that global humanity has never seen. Communication systems have created an entirely new situation where there now is a GLOBAL community that cannot be easily suppressed. Corrupt businesses and corrupt people can easily be exposed these days; transparency is becoming inescapable. Covert agendas are no longer covert. Even though military build-ups and wars are sold through unconvincing propaganda, the Gen-Z and others are beginning to see through this dubious marketing. This new consciousness is what makes the world completely different. We can also no longer say, ‘It’s always been this way.’ We must look with fresh eyes and imaginative, brave minds and ask ourselves as a planet: what kind of life do we all want for ourselves and for others, and what do we have to do to make that happen?

Gen-Z may not have all the exact solutions in short term for tackling corruption and political manipulation and systemic inequality, but we know in our deepest core that there must be other ways of doing things. Problems such as these are not inescapable like the law of gravity; we are not doomed to be stuck in such a dire predicament. As conscious and thinking human beings living in our respective communities, we have choices. We can make fundamental improvements in how we live together, and Gen-Z is doing their part to wake us up.

Mostafa Vaziri
October 29, 2025 – Kathmandu, Nepal

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