Worse Than You Think
Postscript No. 16 | Clare Ashcraft on gen z doomerism and romantic delusion
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*Submissions for the first New Critic essay contest are due Wednesday, May 27th! On the occasion of our graduation, the New Critic founding editors seek a proper commencement address — one that answers “What Was College For?” The winning essay receives a $1,000 prize!*
*What follows is a conversation between Clare Ashcraft and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is supplement to Clare’s essay “Collegiate Value.”
Being the “voice of your generation” is a rather difficult role, especially if you earned the moniker from a piece you now consider a re-packaging of Jonathan Haidt.
Last August, Clare Ashcraft wrote an essay for the The Republic of Letters titled “Gen Z Is Worse Than You Think” (not Clare’s words). The post has more than 5k likes on Substack — the platform’s equivalent of a platinum single.
“Gen Z is, in most ways, no different than the generations who came before us. Cigarette lighters in our cars were replaced with phone chargers, but we still follow the incentives given to us and do what is required of us to survive. The problem is, to survive requires almost nothing.”
The uproarious reception of Clare’s jeremiad provoked our skepticism — why were adults so eager to wag their fingers at the young? — especially knowing Clare, whose temperament always seems to attract the most measured takes. (Clare works, after all, at the media bias think tank AllSides.) When faced with a question that trends toward destabilization, Clare locates the comfortable, balanced landing ground.
Clare is also a remarkably honest thinker. Her most recent piece for The New Critic, “Collegiate Value,” is a story of despair and aspiration, in which Clare reflects upon her atomized and ultimately disappointing undergraduate years at Capital University:
“I don’t regret going to an affordable school as much as I regret the feeling of stuckness that came with it. There was a richness to the warm wood, vaulted ceilings, and tall windows at Kenyon. It allowed breathing room that was absent under Capital’s buzzing fluorescent lights and dusty linoleum floors. Simply put, Capital was a harder place to dream in.”
Our conversation — on finding meaningful friendships, online or IRL, and accepting or rejecting your romanticized delusions — has been edited for length and clarity.*
*You can access the entirety of Postscript — this conversation in full, new weekly installments, and the complete archive of our gen z interview series — for only $30 a year.*
RUFUS Reading your takedown of gen z or your reflections on the friendships you did or didn’t make in college, I could imagine someone our age thinking, “What the hell is this girl talking about? She just needs to get out of her room.” What is your response to that criticism?
CLARE I think that’s fair enough. I don’t know everything, nor do I pretend to. I think people sometimes give me a little too much authority with that RoL piece. Yeah, I’m a 22-year-old sitting in my room. I don’t know any more than anyone else, fundamentally. But the one pushback I will say is that I feel like a lot of the people saying, “Oh, this girl’s just sitting in her room, she doesn’t know anything,” are the type of people who are going out and going to a party and are like, “Our generation’s fine because look, there are other gen zers here.” And there probably are, but there are also a lot of gen zers sitting in their rooms like me that you don’t see — because they’re sitting in their rooms. And it’s very hard to quantify how many people are just sitting online all day when, by your very nature, you don’t see them, if you’re the healthy one who’s out in the world.
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