The Story of a Gen Zer: a Hypothetical Case Study
I will now suggest that the individual who has not yet received Jesus Christ as Lord, as well as refrained from entering into meaningful relationship with the Father, will live an empty, purposeless life in which they must carry the suffocating burden of their sin. I think the story I told in the previous chapter is a poignant example of that.
It is the claim of many Gen Zers today that their purpose in life–their mission statement, if you will–is ultimately aligned with something other than Jesus, which is one reason so many are leaving the Church and terminally deconstructing. Who can blame them? In this 21st century world, there are so many exciting paths one can take. Hundreds of college majors, career opportunities, and art forms all vie for our attention. Gen Zers may occupy their time with trying to make it big on TikTok, pursuing a history degree, and partaking in an online community united by a desire for radical political change–all in the span of twenty-four hours. These are a lot of compelling meanings and purposes to pursue, and they are more openly available than they have been to any other generation.
This is no surprise. If a society leaves God behind, it’s not going to be a clean break. There will be a void that Jesus once filled, and each member of Generation Z will try to fill this void in a different way.
So why, when there is so much competition, is a life spent loving and serving God the highest meaning possible to pursue? Let me answer that by telling another story. A different kind of story than last time because that was personal; this is hypothetical. This is the story of a theoretical Gen Z girl named Alexis. Her plight, I think, is indicative of the pathway down which the typical Gen Zer is going. My hope for this narrative is that it, in its droll, mildly humorous way, can provide you with some insight into what my generation is going through as you engage in spiritual conversations with them.
The Story of Alexis
Alexis was born to a standard suburban American household with all her major needs met. The digital age, currently in its infancy, grows up along with her.
As a child, Alexis is exposed to various pieces of media depicting women in splendid, fashionable clothing (for the first few years of her life, this media likely consists of Disney princess movies on VHS, but around 2005 or so her family gets a portable DVD player). Alexis, like many little girls, is enamored with the beautiful dresses the glammed-up women on her screens wear, and she loves playing dress-up and shopping for new clothes with her mother.
When she enters into her tweens and early teens, she matures, and the childhood fixation she had on princess-y wardrobes goes away. In its place, though, comes a passion for fashion and fashionista culture in general. Around this same time, the digital age produces such technological communication marvels as Facebook, X, and Pinterest. This enables her to stay connected to the lives of her peers in a way no other generation has been able to do before.
The novelty of social media is strong, and it is great fun to witness all the amazing and joyous times her friends are having in their happy lives, as well as sharing with them comparable moments from her own life.
Growing older also naturally exposes her to new questions about existence, not the least of which is the question of who she is. What is her purpose here? What potential will she dedicate herself to fulfilling in adulthood? What is her meaning?
She tries without success to determine what it is in this life she values—what it is in this life that is objectively good and worthwhile. The adults, mentors, and thought-leaders in her life are no help in this matter. Her parents, who were no exception to the rising trend of divorce that skyrocketed during Alexis’ lifetime, tell her the “right path” will be different for every person, saying there is no one road to fulfillment or one path of meaning in life. They maintain that it is up to her to determine what does and does not have value and tell her they can only support her in her journey of discovery.
This means the weighty job of ascribing value, truth, and purpose to reality is left entirely up to her, with her only litmus test for determining the immorality of an action being whether her conduct interferes with someone else’s freedom to do whatever pleases them, or whether her conduct is judgmental of someone else’s lifestyle/mode of being. Other than that, determining the existential worth and the innate goodness of life is her responsibility…and hers alone. This makes her many questions about meaning appear much harder to answer than she anticipated.
As she matures, these questions don’t go away, either; they get louder. It consistently bothers her that she has been unable to arrive at a satisfying answer to them. She thinks she could have and should have come up with one by now. Many of her peers already seem to have it figured out, as evidenced by the glowing TikTok videos of themselves smiling from ear-to-ear outside their university of choice, or their beaming faces as they pose on Instagram with their significant others. Everyone around her is determining the course of the rest of their lives with ease…at least, if Facebook and Snapchat have anything to say about it, and Alexis feels like she’s about to be left in the dust.
Her anxiety reaches its breaking point about a month before she’s set to graduate high school. What is she supposed to do with herself? How can she possibly know what her identity is? Especially when there are so many conflicting messages about life and morality bombarding her from every side. She feels like a leaf, helplessly blown to and fro by the fickle winds of culture, whose universally held desires and standards of “goodness” constantly shift and mutate. How could one ever hope to keep up with such an incomprehensible machine, the moral and spiritual messaging of which is an incoherent, often contradictory pile of gobbledygook spurred on by arbitrary whim?
And then, one night—one sleepless night amongst a drove of countless sleepless nights—an epiphany comes over her, and it changes everything. This miraculous and seismic revelation, which appears to be a divinely providential gift from the universe itself, arrives to her this fateful 3:02 A.M. And it’s seemingly the answer to all she has been searching for: she’ll be a fashion designer!
Oh, it makes perfect sense. She has always had an eye for fashion. No, a passion for it. She’s always had a keen sense for color arrangement and what clothing piece went well with another clothing piece. This skillset is something that has forever been…in her. Intrinsic. If that isn’t a sign of her calling, she doesn’t know what is.
This new sense of direction for where her life is going invigorates her, lifting her depressive state. Now, it is as if all the color in the world shines a brighter hue. Her friends aren’t going to leave her behind anymore; she has a passion to follow just like they do. This new peace within her is much welcomed.
Alexis soon finds, however, as the days pass and she enrolls in college, that the peace and fulfillment she feels are of an anticipatory sort. This means the sense of purpose she feels is based on the premise that she will be a fashion designer, as she has not yet attained the meaning for which she has set out. It feels strange—she has a much greater sense of direction than before, but it’s almost like the feeling one has when they utilize one of those “money stores” or “money apps'' that offer people the ability to spend their paychecks before they receive them from their employer: when someone uses those services, they reap the benefits of something that isn’t quite theirs yet. It’s coming, but technically it is not, in the moment, available to them.
In the same way, Alexis has the nagging, perhaps unconscious, feeling that she is living off “borrowed” meaning. She will have to “make up” or “pay for” the meaning she enjoys now by actually following through and becoming what she is working to become. In a paradoxical manner, the contentment that comes with her newfound instillment of purpose carries with it a certain discontentment because she knows she has not yet earned it. This makes her incredibly obsessive about reaching her goal, which she pursues with a fervor that sacrifices romantic relationships, hobbies, and all kinds of social opportunities. She doesn’t see this as unhealthy; it’s just her strong, career-motivated drive.
Eventually, she does finish her schooling, and much to her elation, she even lands a job in her field as a designer for a high-profile clothing company. The aftermath? Total bliss. Without any form of hyperbole, life is an absolute dream. She can now be a fully realized individual, fulfilling her destiny by living up to her gifting and potential in a career-setting. This joy she experiences is not the kind that goes away quickly, either. No, it stays—for a long, long time, life is all she hoped it would be as she taps into the true meaning of life. Her meaning.
Long, long time is the key phrase there. Because time, regardless of its quantity, runs out. Working hard and attaining her desired position was no small achievement, and the satisfying high accompanying it lasts quite a while, but once that ”while” is over, Alexa finds herself left with…only a job. She doesn’t want to admit to herself that the life-sustaining meaning her fashionista position provided her has mostly run out, nor is she even sure when it happened, so gradual was the process.
It seems impossible. Unthinkable and preposterous. But it’s true. Alexis realizes her occupation is just that: an occupation and nothing more. No matter how pleasant—albeit surface-level—the interpersonal connections she makes while she works are, and no matter how rewarding it is to follow one of her designs on its journey from sketches on a piece of paper to a final product hanging in store windows, she cannot stifle the insatiable, incessant need for more. More from day-to-day living, more from the experience of being her. She thinks, as well as fears (for if it were true, then that would mean she made a horrible miscalculation), that there has to be more to life than what she’s currently experiencing. There has to be more to sustain her through the toil of existing than just this.
Furthermore, the more she converses with coworkers at the xerox machine or the coffee maker, and the more she goes out with them for an after-work cocktail to talk about their lives, the more repulsed she becomes at the apparent emptiness of her current existence. It is as if her work-friends are magnifications or mirrors of her own insufficient lifestyle. One woman is devastated about a promotion on which her employer passed her up again, a position she’d put a lot of work into attaining, and Alexa recalls a strikingly similar conversation she had with this same individual only a year ago, with the woman lamenting the loss of a totally different promotion.
Another woman (incidentally, the one who received the coveted position and whose career by every conceivable metric is flourishing), finds herself plagued with a depression and anxiety she assumed her success would remove; she has been going to therapy and looking for love in order to fix things, but so far has had no luck.
Finally, one man, over an expensive margarita, tells her he has at last determined the reason he has felt so down and incomplete lately: he has been focusing too much on work and not enough on self-care, not enough on maintaining his own mental sanity. Consequently, he is cutting back his hours in the office, taking more time for travel, and putting himself “first for once.” And guess what, he tells her, it’s working—she should really try doing this too if she is feeling the same way. Alexis only smiles and nods. Perhaps she would be more inclined to believe him if he hadn’t, a few months back, adopted a series of completely different life changes in order to alleviate his state of funk, enjoyed them for about three seconds, and then gone back to being miserable again.
The list of sympathetic characters she encounters goes on and on, and she sees herself in all of them. Her emotional state worsens until a stroke of genius hits her, not unlike, if she were paying attention, the stroke of genius that initially led her to pursue her career so ardently. Throughout her life, she has been inwardly focused. This was her grave error. Clearly, she realizes, if one derives their worth and fulfillment exclusively from the realm of their own little world, then that will be insufficient to sustain them in the long term—that’s where all the “love yourself” and self-care gurus got it wrong. No, she must have an outwardly focused component of her life, too, an outlet in which she may bless others with abundant kindness and try to relieve the world of at least a smidgen of suffering. If anyone was to ask her why this was an objectively good goal or why it held enough moral and spiritual weight to cure her of emptiness, she would not know by what or whose standard she has determined this. Not that it matters. It’s good, she knows it’s good, and that’s enough for her.
To this end, she uses her spare time to feverishly work on a great idea for a non-profit providing gently used clothing to girls and women in need. It seems the perfect fit—it’s clothing-related, and she knows a good bit about running an organization now. Besides, who doesn’t have out-of-circulation clothes to donate? After a few weeks of blueprinting the organization conceptually, she takes it to the higher-ups at her hoity-toity fashion company and asks if corporate can spearhead the formation of this noble endeavor. The executives, thinking that having a non-profit associated with their business is good publicity, agree to give her some funding.
Soon, Alexis’ Benevolent Closet Foundation is operating at full force, and it’s a wilder success than she ever dared to hope. The testimonials that her non-profit generates are inspiring, involving such stories as little girls in abject poverty finally able to wear more than one outfit a week and down-on-their-luck single mothers having something to wear for important job interviews. At long last, Alexis feels as if she has attained meaning. Now, not only does she have an occupation in her personal life that challenges and fulfills her; she can also say that she is genuinely making a difference, leaving the world a better place than it was when she initially arrived. She can at long last live a rich and abundant existence.
Until, to her dismay, the same feeling from before slowly creeps back into her…the same familiar void in her heart. She doesn’t let it fester this time and immediately seeks out professional help. When she sees all the fancy letters that come after her therapist’s name, she has high hopes that he can help her determine why she always feels so devoid of purpose. However, through a year and a half of extended counseling, he always tells her, with one leg crossed over the other (you may decide for yourself whether it is in the girly or manly way), that purpose looks different for everyone–much as her parents told her all those years ago. Everyone is on a unique journey, he says, and “the path” that is right for one person to walk might be the complete opposite of the path for another person. He tells her that he can’t help her determine the meaning that will fill the void in her heart–that is up to her to discover as he cheers her on.
One day, Alexis unlocks the door to her home, closes it with a quiet thud behind her, and stands in the middle of her dark living room. An epiphany hits her just then. Not one of hope, like the two revelations from before, but one of hopelessness. She realizes her life has gone full circle. She may be a few years older, but she’s still just like the little girl she used to be, scrambling to find something to delight her innermost being and sustain her soul.
