TL;DR: The last twenty years have been a masterclass in how to drain a people of hope and then mock them for feeling it. Millennials and Zoomers are not “angry for no reason.” They are angry because they were handed a rigged game and then blamed for not winning.
Millennials are the first generation to watch the American dream turn into a subscription. Many did what they were told. Go to school. Get the degree. Play by the rules. Then they graduated into a world where the ladder had been pulled up, wages were stretched thin by inflation, and the biggest “opportunity” was learning how to manage their debt.
The Federal Reserve has documented that the median education debt among borrowers with outstanding debt in 2024 was between $20,000 and $24,999, and that is the median, not the outliers with six-figure balances.
Outstanding student loan debt remains massive at the national level, with the New York Fed tracking it in the trillions. It’s easy to dismiss these figures as numbers on a balance sheet, but they have very real people beyond them with very real negative outcomes.
We are talking years of deferred marriages, deferred children, deferred homeownership, deferred stability, and the slow boil of resentment that comes from realizing the adults who preached “responsibility” built an economy on indenture.
Housing is where our rage turns from frustration into fury, because housing is not just another luxury. It is the foundation of family formation. When you make shelter unattainable you are not just hurting wallets, you are attacking families. Urban Institute research found that Millennials ages 25–34 had a 37% homeownership rate in 2015, about 8 points lower than Gen Xers and Boomers at the same age.
The broader market has been brutal: 2025 ended with existing home sales at levels described as the lowest annual total since the mid-1990s, while the national median home price sat around $414,400. Even people who “did everything right” can look up one day and realize they are working to enrich landlords, banks, and asset holders, not to build a legacy, a family, and a life.
So a huge share of Millennials became renters for longer than planned, and renters have been squeezed hard. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that in 2022, half of all U.S. renters were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30% of income on rent and utilities.
This is a pressure cooker.
You cannot build generational wealth when your paycheck evaporates into rent, insurance, food, and taxes before you can even think about saving. Our rage is not childish. It is not entitlement. It is not “victimhood.” It is the natural response to being harvested by the system like animals.
Zoomers inherited all of this mess, plus a cultural wasteland that actively trains them to be anxious, isolated, and fragmented. They are growing up inside algorithmic cages, with corporate and political actors shaping their reality while calling it “choice.”
A widely cited 2023 Gallup survey found that 47% of Gen Z ages 12–26 often or always feel anxious, and 22% often or always feel depressed. This is what happens when you strip away rooted community, mock faith, replace family with the feed, and then act surprised when the soul starts to revolt.
Zoomers are not just mad about prices. They are mad because they can feel the system trying to shape them into good little consumers who race to buy the next iPhone and watch the next Marvel movie. They know this vapid existence isn’t all there is to life. Their rage is often confused, sometimes misdirected, but the fire in their bellies is real and valid: they are starving for meaning in a world that sells nothing but hollow and distorted distractions.
Underneath both of these young generations is the collapse of trust. Pew’s long-running trust tracking shows trust in the federal government remains near historic lows, with the overall measure sitting around the low 20s in recent years and 2025 being described as one of the lowest points in decades. Our society cannot survive on cynicism forever. Eventually, cynicism mutates into revolt, or into withdrawal, or into radical rebuilding outside the system.
So what comes next from all of this righteous rage?
It’s obvious that the rejection of legacy institutions is going to accelerate, not slow down. The housing market, the student loan scam, corporate media, and the political class have spent decades lying openly. They trained multiple young generations to see “official narratives” for what they are: marketing campaigns. Spin. Propaganda.
Everyone knows this intuitively now. The trust is gone and it is not coming back. Knowing the system is corrupt does not automatically make someone wise, but it does break the spell. Once the spell is broken, people stop asking permission. They stop pleading. They walk away.
What replaces it likely won’t be a single centralized movement or group of institutions that some hope for. It will be thousands of small ones. Local networks. Churches, families, small businesses, and communities bound together by trust instead of credentials. Shared values instead of shared brands. Loyalty to people you know instead of institutions that despise you. When big systems fail or turn hostile, people revert to what actually works: tribe, kin, faith, and place.
At the same time there is certainly something else happening beneath the surface. A hunger for order. Not chaos. Not revolution. Order. Moral order. Structure. Permanence. Young people are not craving disorder. They have been marinating in it since birth. They have been told chaos is freedom and it has hollowed them out.
What we want now is something solid. Something that holds. Something worth submitting to. They want fathers instead of bureaucrats. Real leaders instead of “influencers.” Truth instead of “vibes.”
We have a responsibility to meet that hunger, not exploit it, ignore it, or worst of all: scorn it.
If Millennials and Zoomers allow their rage to be shaped by the same forces that poisoned them, it will rot into nihilism, envy, and destructive political cults. You can already see this path playing out clearly in some circles online.
Doom. Hopelessness. The belief that everything is fake and nothing is worth building. That mindset is not accidental, in fact it is actively being cultivated. A hopeless population is easy to manage. Easy to sell to. Easy to rule. We must reject the doompills entirely. Despair is not realism, it is surrender dressed up as intelligence.
Do. Not. Fall. For. It.
The lie they want us to believe is that we are broken, incompetent, and incapable of building anything of value. That lie is necessary because a people who know they can build do not ask permission.
Millennials and Zoomers are not stupid. We are not lazy. We are not deficient.
We are the most technologically fluent, information-literate, and adaptable generations in human history. We taught ourselves skills that used to require institutions. We learned to code, design, publish, distribute, and organize outside of gatekeepers. The fact that we were forced to do this out of necessity does not make it less real, rather it makes us more dangerous to the status quo.
Despite every obstacle placed in our path, we have already built parallel systems at scale. Alternative media. Independent platforms. Decentralized finance. Online education. New forms of commerce, communication, and community. All while being censored, deplatformed, mocked, and sabotaged. We inherited decay, but we learned to innovate inside of it.
What separates our generations is not raw talent, but our clarity. We can see what does not work because we have lived inside the failure. We watched institutions rot in real time. We saw the lies fail stress tests. We understand, intuitively, that systems must serve families, not replace them. That technology must serve human flourishing, not dominate it. That economies must be rooted in production, not financialized illusions.
These are builder instincts. Civilizational instincts.
When these instincts are grounded in truth and ordered rightly, they become unstoppable. Builders think longterm. Builders think in generations, not election cycles. Builders understand sacrifice, delayed gratification, and responsibility. Builders do not need applause.
Give a young man a mission worth dying for and he will build something worth living for. Give a young woman a future worth protecting and she will raise children who outlast empires.
This is why they fear our generations. Not because we are loud, but because we are capable. Not because we complain, but because once we stop complaining, we start building. Our rage is the ignition. What comes next is construction. Infrastructure. Families. Institutions rooted in truth. A future that does not ask permission from liars.
Rage is our energy.
Left undisciplined, it destroys.
Disciplined properly, it builds civilizations.
The coming years will not be quiet. They will not be polite. You do not get to price a generation out of housing, bury them in debt, flood their minds with chaos, strip them of meaning, and then expect compliance wrapped in motivational quotes. The righteous rage of the young is going somewhere. It will either be turned inward and rot them from the inside, or it will be forged into a tool for rebuilding what was stolen from us.
Choose to build. Build something real. Build something that lasts. Build something that will still be standing when the liars are long gone.
