In 7th grade, my history teacher told the class about a time she found blocks of frozen money buried deep in her grandmother’s fridge. Her grandmother, who grew up during the Great Depression, had a deep-seated fear of banks, and chose to stockpile her savings in secretive locations around her house, like the back of her freezer, instead.

Her grandmother lived a life based on the saying “better safe than sorry.” She would err on the side of too much, rather than too little. She would buy twice the amount of groceries she needed and store the leftovers because she never knew what could happen in the future. 

My teacher’s grandmother is a classic example of the habitual traits we form during life-altering events.

Each generation has its own distinct characteristics and “where were you when” moments that helped shape them. For the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, seeing the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Junior, in addition to watching the Watergate scandal unfold, turned them into a generation that rebuffed the very institutions they grew up with. 

For millennials, born 1977 to 1995, it was seeing the Twin Towers fall on 9/11. The heightened security measures and the national tension that followed September 11th, 2001, shaped them into a generation with increased awareness about the potential dangers around them. When it comes to their safety, they are a group that chooses to be proactive rather than reactive. 

Let’s take Generation Z — our generation. We are a technology-driven generation made entirely of digital natives, as we don’t remember a world before smartphones and computers. We are a cynical and realistic generation that grew up during America’s War on Terror. We are also the most racially and ethnically diverse generation thus far. And for us, our “where were you when” moment is right now. 

Before the pandemic, Generation Z was looking forward to a bustling economy with the lowest unemployment rates the U.S. had seen in years. But in the blink of an eye, the world as we knew it flipped upside down. Now, what were once record low levels of unemployment have turned into record highs as the U.S. endures another major recession. 

The shrinkage of the job market hits older members of our generation who are just graduating college the hardest. In March of 2020, the Pew Research Center found that half of the oldest members of Generation Z, ages 18 to 23, reported that they or someone in their household had lost a job or received a pay cut as a result of the pandemic. 

Seeing the economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus outbreak will shift our already frugal generation to be even more concerned with our financial futures. Experiencing firsthand the speed at which our lives can be upended will make us increasingly averse to taking risks.

The failure of the government’s pandemic response as well as the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in reaction to the multiple police brutality cases has depreciated our generation’s trust of government institutions. A study from the Morning Consult found that, from April to June of 2020, the average trust ratings for 15 major institutions dropped from 56% to 46%. Individually, trust ratings for the police fell by 24%, and trust in the U.S. government decreased by 17%. 

Gen Z’s general outlook on the nation’s future has also seen a sharp decline since the beginning of the pandemic. In June, only 19% of Generation Z said that the United States is on the right track, a figure down 11% from the month before. 

At the same time that our faith in authority figures has been deteriorating, our faith in ourselves and our abilities to stabilize our situations has been increasing. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, our generation saw how we could organize political takedowns and plan BLM protests from our own bedrooms.

We saw that, despite our young age and the distance between us, we still have the ability to inspire major change. From April to June of 2020, according to Morning Consult, the number of Gen Zers who agree that they have the potential to impact the world increased from 56% to 62%, and 85% of Generation Z said that they have the ability to control their futures. 

In short, our “where were you when” moment has caused us to be increasingly skeptical of the government we are supposed to trust and the future that awaits us. We now know that the world is a shockingly unstable place and that we need to be prepared for whatever it throws at us.

However, that same pandemic has made us believe in our own capabilities. Even though our faith in the institutions around us may fall, we have enough faith in ourselves to get through whatever the future has in store.

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