The Gen Z that doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t love but smells like mothballs. A research

The music is over if the young people have left partying and libertinism in the lurch. From 1999 to 2019, in the highest-income countries, men and women aged 12 to 16 implemented a fun austerity. He reveals it Social Science & Medicine research on changes in youth habits. They are final numbers. Data that pulls the curtain down on life in its prime.

Thirty years ago fifteen-year-old smokers represented 26 per cent of the total, today they are around 10. And if Piero Ciampi’s sentence is still true: “…he drinks like an Irishman”, in these hours Ireland itself gets the green light from the European Commission to health warnings on wines, beers and spirits. While awaiting the latest authorization – that of the World Trade Organization – to affix the warning (alcohol kills, causes cancer, abortions and you must remember that you have to die) on all bottles, ballast exports and encourage brewers to put the mug down. The tobacco debacle – it is natural – draws even Bacchus to itself. According to research from Australia, the UK, the USA, the Netherlands and New Zealand, the past 15 years have seen a turnaround, with drunk boomers and increasingly temperate little kids. And you don’t want the meat to come off with the wine since sex – never harmless – is often more harmful than a hangover. The western kid isn’t in the mood for a hangover or bad love. He’s not interested in complicating things, either due to hepatitis or out of pleasure (fortunately the waning copulation mainly concerns the United States while in Italy things seem stable).

In short, the “blonde beast” seems to collapse. And it’s all very clear: the carnivorous boy of existence renders blood to the god of public spirit. As well as the mantra of responsibility. One can hope he will come back as young as Benjamin Button, but it’s not easy to flourish with age. Born fearful, the boy is already twenty years old. And the eternal twenty-year-old seems to him his father, inattentive to health, advocate of a reckless lifestyle.

A recent front page of the Figaro headlined: “Quand les enfants veulent éduquer leurs parents”. A tale of the Taliban of good – health and environmentalists – born between the 1990s and the present. The story opens with the thunder of Louise Bussy. Twenty-six-year-old Louise is furious with her mother for letting water drip from the tap. “Maman”, the French girl chants, “you can’t do this to our planet!”. The lady – moved but still frightened by her scream – smiles at her. She not like a mother, but like a girl to an old man’s ravings. And like thrifty old grandparents, Louise and many of her friends have stopped buying clothes. The second-hand dress replaces fashion, which perhaps interests mamans. And again, the Atlantic crossings are no longer carried out. He buys them a few even at Christmas, when the gifts are wrapped in newspaper to avoid waste.

They are the young people of the third age. Western kids who economize in the reel of a unfortunate decline. Very careful that the butt does not fall on the ground. That fathers don’t spoil his world. Aware of everything but not the fact that it is from the waste of meat that meetings, children, new facts are born. And from the waste of existences – sometimes in the nervous smoke of a cigarette – the works, the days, the masterpieces are born.

Tell him to explain to the anerotic and sustainable Gen Z that thrift is the antechamber – or perhaps the antehell – of extinction. But hell will be just the fate of a bigot (because hell must be deserved). It’s that anodyne vestibule that awaits those who don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t love and even smell of mothballs.