 lazy, entitled, stupid, selfish, dumb, crazy, lost, ignorant, spoiled, bad, sensitive, snowflake, annoying, fucked, and on and on and on. That's how millennial and Gen Zers say they're routinely described according to SUNY psychologist Carla Vermeulen, author of the new book Generation Disaster, coming of age post 9-11. Who can blame them for being pissed off? One of the quotes that I use was someone saying, I feel like our generation has been handed a bill for a party we didn't get to attend. So this is really one of the main sources of anger at older generations, at boomers in particular. Younger Americans have been raised to believe that their leaders lie about everything, that the entire financial system existed to bail out big banks when they crashed the economy, that endless war is the natural state of things, and that they were about to be blown up by terrorists or shot during school at any moment. I have a chapter in the book called Lockdown Drills in Kindergarten. They literally have had these drills the same way that we had fire drills. Vermeulen's book looks specifically of people born between 1990 and 2001, but her conclusions are broadly relevant to folks under 40 or so. She says their fears are mostly over height. Our focus on statistically rare events such as school shootings have jacked depression, anxiety, and resentment through the roof. The psychological effect of participating in these drills for young kids and kids writing wills to their parents and thinking they're literally going to die. And it's security theater, the disproportionate attention and resources that go towards preventing these highly, highly unlikely events relative to the more direct mental health stressors kids are actually dealing with. But the biggest driver of generation disaster, stress and anger, says Vermeulen, are narratives about how climate change is about to destroy the planet in the very near future. The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. Whether or not you think that is exaggerated, this is the messaging that they've been receiving. And this is definitely the biggest source of anxiety for them. Like I would say school shootings are kind of the most acute stressor for them. But their worries about climate change and the future of the planet is truly existential for them. They talk about not thinking that they won't be able to have children or they don't want to have children because they don't want to leave them this planet that they've inherited. I think that what makes it so hard for them to deal with is they feel like there's so little they can do about it. Baby boomers who hated their own parents and used to shout slogans like don't trust anyone over 30 should be able to empathize with how millennials and Gen Zers are feeling. We need to find ways of talking more productively across generation. Vermeulen says that the essential starting point is respect. To the parents I guess I would say really listen to them. A lot of them are delightful. They are creative. They are thoughtful. They are far more sophisticated than I was at their age because they've had all of this access to all of these resources. Everything that they now have literally in their hand at their fingertips. And take their concerns seriously because they are valid in many ways. I'll add to that we need to have more fact-based discussions that take into account vast amounts of huge social economic and environmental progress that we either take for granted or politicians in the press ignore because it doesn't fit their agenda. Extreme poverty has been cut from 94 percent to 10 percent over the past two centuries. Education and literacy have skyrocketed. Racism, sexism, homophobia have all declined. Global life expectancy continues to increase and democracy is on the rise. The 2018 UN climate report that supposedly claimed that the world is going to end in 12 years actually says nothing of the sort. Policy analysts such as Scott Winship note that 70 percent of American 30-year-olds are doing better than their parents were at the same age. For generation disaster why are their parents or their grandparents having these negative reactions? Because you don't understand them anymore than they understand you but you could probably try that. Every generation fights for its place in the world and there's no question that the same boomers who once sang along to Bob Dylan's the times they are a change in are incredibly slow to exit the stage and give anyone else a turn in the spotlight. There's no question that millennials and Gen Z are facing unique problems that they didn't cause but that's also been true of every other generation. We've just lost the ability to talk to each other and to listen to views not lost entirely but you know it is challenging listen to views that are in conflict with our own and try to understand why people have these perspectives. The best way forward is to treat one another with mutual respect regardless of age. But let's try and do that perspective taking from both sides.