The Participation Phase Is Over
The youth aren’t restless.
They’re resistant. And resistance doesn’t look how people expect.
Restlessness implies motion. And motion means hope—the idea that if you push hard enough, something might give. That’s what we had. We marched. We argued. We believed the room might rearrange itself if we made enough noise.
This generation isn’t pacing the room.
They’re leaving it.
The usual explanations arrive right on time. They’re lazy. They’re soft. They don’t care. They want everything handed to them. These stories are repeated so often they start to sound like facts. They aren’t. They’re alibis.
What this generation wants is a reason to believe.
And there isn’t one left.
Belief used to pay. That’s the part people forget. Go to school, get a job, buy a house. The deal wasn’t a fantasy—it worked, for a while, for enough people to make the story stick.
Generation X watched that deal rot in real time. We watched factories close and towns empty out. We watched pensions vanish, wages stall, jobs head overseas. We were told to get degrees for careers that were already gone. We were handed debt and told to be flexible. Stability was rebranded as a perk.
So we adapted.
That’s where the myth creeps in. We like to say we rejected the system. What we mostly did was learn how to live inside it. Cynicism wasn’t rebellion—it was insulation. Irony wasn’t resistance—it was cover. Knowing the system was broken didn’t stop us from navigating it. Sometimes it taught us how to benefit from it without believing in it.
Some of us fought.
Many of us coped.
Too many of us cashed checks and called it survival.
Maybe it was. Maybe it was convenience with a better excuse.
I’m not even sure anymore where survival ended and convenience began. I just know we told ourselves a lot of stories to sleep at night.
Then we had kids.
Those kids grew up watching both sides of the collapse. Grandparents who believed and lost. Parents who saw through it and still got stuck. They didn’t inherit optimism. They inherited paperwork. Student loan balances. Medical bills. Pay stubs that never caught up. Layoff emails written in that soft, bloodless HR dialect that manages to sound apologetic and final at the same time.
They inherited receipts.
They watched education turn into indenture.
Careers turn into gigs.
Homes turn into speculative assets.
Healthcare turn into fundraisers.
The future stopped being something you planned for and became something you braced against.
And the sales pitch never stopped.
A gig economy sold as opportunity.
High rent marketed as vibrancy.
Low pay disguised as experience.
Permanent precarity rebranded as flexibility.
At some point the language became almost funny. Not in a laughing way. In the way you recognize a scam because you’ve seen it too many times.
I was standing next to a young woman on a crowded bus. Hot day. Long sleeves. When the bus lurched, she reached out to steady herself and the fabric slipped. Her arms were covered in scars. Not fresh. Not hidden. Worn.
She noticed me noticing. I looked away — because I had nothing to offer but guilt.
There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t have been a lie. Nothing I could offer that wouldn’t have cheapened what she was carrying. I was fine. She wasn’t. That asymmetry sat between us, unfixable.
No embarrassment. No performance. Just the practiced reflex of someone who had already decided explanations weren’t worth the effort.
That’s the part people don’t understand.
They’re not angry—not the way you think. Not restless. Not naïve. They’re exact. They’ve done the math. They’ve watched what obedience buys. They’ve seen what belief costs. And they’ve noticed how much emotional labor the system demands from people it has no intention of protecting.
So they stop providing it.
Not loudly.
Not theatrically.
Efficiently.
They don’t riot because riots still assume someone is listening. They don’t argue because arguing legitimizes the premise. They don’t plead because pleading requires faith.
They withdraw.
They disengage.
They refuse to pretend.
This is where the panic starts.
You can hear it in the rhetoric. You can see it in the accusations, the hysteria, the endless op-eds asking what’s wrong with the youth instead of asking what happened to their stolen future.
Because here’s what no one wants to say out loud:
Empires don’t fall when people rebel.
They fall when belief dies.
And sometimes nothing happens at all—
except that fewer people show up the next day.
Institutions can survive anger.
They can survive protest.
What they cannot survive is indifference.
They cannot function without participation—without millions of people quietly agreeing to act as if the system still works.
Empires don’t fall because people protest.
They fall when the hoi polloi refuse to eat shit.
And right now, you can see it in their faces.
They’ve pushed the plate away.
This generation isn’t agreeing.
It doesn’t matter what comes next.
The participation phase is over.
That isn’t a warning.
It isn’t a threat.
It isn’t prophecy.
The paperwork just hasn’t caught up yet.
