After our episode with Jeremy Adams — a teacher who's spent decades watching generational shifts from the front of a classroom — I couldn't stop thinking about one question: is Gen Z actually as politically engaged as we claim to be, or are we confusing online activity with real participation?
I'm a millennial on the edge of Gen Z, so I have some skin in this game. And the answer is more complicated than either side wants to admit.
The Case For Engagement
The numbers look good on the surface. Gen Z voter turnout in recent elections has outpaced previous generations at the same age. Young people are more likely to say they follow political news. Social media has made political content unavoidable — you can't scroll for five minutes without encountering a take on the latest policy debate.
And the issues Gen Z cares about — climate change, student debt, housing affordability, social justice — aren't frivolous. These are real structural problems that affect their daily lives.
The Case Against
But here's what Jeremy Adams pointed out, and what the data supports: there's a difference between political awareness and political engagement.
Knowing what's happening isn't the same as doing something about it. And most of what passes for political engagement online is performative — sharing a post, updating a bio, arguing in comments. It feels like action. It creates the dopamine hit of participation. But it doesn't move policy, build coalitions, or change outcomes.
The data on deeper forms of engagement — volunteering for campaigns, attending town halls, contacting representatives, running for local office — shows Gen Z performing roughly the same as previous generations. The revolution is mostly happening in Instagram stories.
The Loneliness Connection
The most interesting part of our conversation with Adams was the link between political behavior and social isolation. His argument is that Gen Z is the loneliest generation in American history, and that loneliness is shaping their politics.
When you're isolated, political identity becomes a substitute for community. Your party affiliation, your causes, your positions — they become your identity in a way that's different from previous generations. Politics isn't just something you do; it's who you are.
That has consequences. It makes compromise harder, because changing your position feels like losing yourself. It makes political disagreement personal, because you're not just attacking someone's view — you're attacking their identity.
What This Means for Bipartisan Dialogue
This is where it gets relevant to what we do on Elevated Thoughts. If political identity has become a core part of how young people define themselves, then asking them to engage with opposing views isn't just an intellectual exercise — it's an emotional one.
That's why we try to model what productive disagreement looks like. Not because we think everyone should agree, but because a generation that ties its identity to political positions needs to see that you can change your mind without losing yourself.
The Bottom Line
Is Gen Z politically engaged? Sort of. They're politically aware to a degree that previous generations weren't at the same age. But awareness without action is just spectatorship. And the loneliness epidemic is warping political identity in ways we're only beginning to understand.
The challenge for our generation isn't getting informed — it's translating that information into real-world participation that goes beyond the screen.
And maybe, occasionally, being willing to listen to someone who voted differently than you did.
