Why Gen Z Feels Hopeless—and What Gives Them Hope

Last updated on: October 29, 2025 at 10:00 am by Melanie Springer Mock

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Why Gen Z Feels Hopeless—and What Gives Them Hope 2025-10-28T12:11:51-07:00 Melanie Springer Mock

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Gen Z Needs Hope, And You Can Help

Hope in the small things: No Kings Protest, 2025, with students and colleagues.| Image courtesy of the author.

Mentoring Gen Z Through Chaos and Corruption

Some days, the weight of everything happening all at once feels overwhelming. A churn of bad news about our country’s seeming slide into autocracy is causing so much pain for people here and abroad, and it can seem like there’s nothing to save us from the impetuous acts of powerful people, doing bad things.

Given this, we all need some hope, perhaps Gen Z most of all.

Because my vocational life is spent hanging out with young adults, I know they are overwhelmed, too. Many of them came to adulthood during Covid. The past decade of chaos and rancor, thanks in part to President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, has consumed more than half their lives.

Social media algorithms continue to feed them, feed us all, outrage and disinformation, so much so that it’s becoming harder to know what is true, especially when official government platforms share deep fake videos, or AI videos of the president dumping feces on Americans, or disinformation intended to turn us more fully against each other.

Several recent conversations with college students helped me see clearly the significance of their despair. I long for them to have a much more hopeful, inclusive and just future. For that to happen, of course, a lot needs to change right now, including a recalibration of our country’s values and the fortitude to choose love, justice, and equity over money and power.

Unfortunately, many Christians seem to be chasing money and power instead. In one of my writing classes recently, we read about a Christian institution that chose shielding predatory administrators from sexual abuse claims, a story that’s been repeated again and again and again. Powerful men preying on young women, girls even, but who never face accountability. Who stay in their roles, while the women they abuse hide in unwarranted shame. Who are awarded with even more power, and more money, and a congregation’s applause, treated as heroes, while their victims are silenced.

A Student Seeking Hope

One of my students, troubled by this troubling cycle, set up a meeting with me to talk about what she’s seeing. She wondered what we’re supposed to do in the face of so much bald corruption. How do we live in a world where the powerful are continually rewarded, and the meek are further oppressed? And I didn’t know how to answer that question, at least initially. Some days, it’s the central question on my mind, too.

But then I remembered again the truth that gave me hope during our small town’s darkest days: that when the world out there feels overwhelmingly dark, it was the community that gave me peace. It was finding allies who believed as I did, that all children in our community needed to know they were loved, that they belonged, even when a school district’s board wanted to send a different message. And it was working together, in community, that helped turn the tide, electing a new school board that shared our values and that privileged justice over power.

And so, as I talked with my student, I reminded her to think of the people in her life who have modeled values that she admires. I told her about the saints in my church growing up, people who cared for refugees and the poor, and whose quiet, everyday efforts changed people’s lives in the ways the powerful, with all their money, never could.

I also reminded her of her professors, my beautiful colleagues, who come to work each day certain that creating art and reading others’ stories is one way to promote justice. I pointed her to the community she’s also building at the university, students who are finding each other in dark times, developing a system of support that will carry them through the difficulties they face—while they are in college, and into the future.

Hope in the Small Things

This is a message I often need to remind myself, too. It’s so easy to feel bogged down by the awful news, to feel powerless when faced with the powerful. Robert Reich, an economist who worked with four different presidents (Ford, Carter, Clinton, and Obama), wrote in late September about tyrants, who use strategies to fill those they rule with fear and hopelessness. It’s part of the autocrat playbook, one way to stay in power by stoking chaos and division.

Confronting a tyrant requires courage and tenacity, Reich writes, and it also asks that we work together in micro ways as well as large. I can think of few better small acts than building local coalitions to fight tyranny in our home communities. And mentoring young people who are disillusioned by leaders acting without accountability. Modeling values like kindness, empathy, and inclusion can convey that not everyone (and certainly not all Christians) are craven for money and power.

Some days, when the weight of everything happening all at once feels overwhelming and a churn of bad news plummets me into despair, I need to remember that I am not powerless. Nor is my student. Nor are any of us. Supporting each other, we can remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

And then, we can work together to bend that arc in the right direction.

General Christian

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