The Performance of Caring 

I think we’ve all seen the posts. The Instagram stories with the sad polar bear filter. The TikToks of someone in a thrift-store hoodie lecturing us about single-use plastics while their ring light glows in the background. The never-ending barrage of climate change information and climate anxiety aimed at young people.

Despite the constant complaints of boomers, Gen Z has grown up and entered the conversation as the self-appointed saviors of the planet. Watch out, world. We are armed with reusable straws, reusable bags, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of moral certainty and fancy words learned from our Intro to Ecology class. We’re not like those older generations, the boomers and Gen Xers who drove gas-guzzling SUVs, and the millennials who… well, let’s leave those poor fools out of it. They’re still trying to wrangle their feral iPad children.

But my point still stands. We know better. We care more. We are the generation that’s going to save Earth.

And I’m here to tell you that this is a lie.

We are not better. We do not care more. At least not in any meaningful way. We are simply better informed about the damage we’re doing, and exceptionally good at posting instead of changing anything.

Awareness Without Sacrifice

One thing our generation should consider before lambasting previous generations about their treatment of the planet is that they didn’t have the same deluge of information that we do. They weren’t bombarded 24/7 with data about melting ice caps, ocean acidification, and microplastics hidden in their food. Their ignorance wasn’t bliss; it was simply ignorance.

Nowadays, it’s hard to find a child whose education didn’t include documentaries and activities about climate change and pollution. It’s hard to find somebody who hasn’t stumbled across climate activists and environmentalists during endless nights of doomscrolling.

And what has our generation done with all that knowledge?

Mostly, we’ve monetized the guilt.

Take fast fashion. SHEIN isn’t just popular with Gen Z; it’s practically part of the uniform. Cheap clothes arrive within days, get worn once or twice, and are discarded just as quickly. Young consumers today buy much more clothing than people did 30 or 40 years ago. And it’s not a small difference either. In the 1980s, the average American bought 12 to 14 new items of clothing a year. Today that number has jumped to 68. And the only retailers that are able to make enough clothing to provide for our never-ending shopping spree are fast fashion brands like SHEIN, Zara, and H&M. 

I will be the first to admit that I am not someone who likes to shop. This doesn’t mean that I don’t partake in things that are horrible for the environment. I am no angel. However, as somebody who doesn’t spend their life constantly shopping for new articles of clothing in person or online, I feel a need to talk with my friends who do compulsively buy clothes. Because I mean this with love: these polyester and rayon monstrosities you seem so eager to get your hands on disintegrate if you so much as look at them wrong. They are held together by prayers and petroleum-based polyester. Polyester dominates modern fast fashion and sheds microplastics into waterways with every wash.

But sure, post the haul video. We know it’s bad. We’ve read the articles. But why stop buying when the shirt costs $9.99 and matches the shoes you bought at Zara? After all, you’ll donate the clothes once you’re done with them later, even though the vast majority of those clothes you donate end up in landfills in developing countries.

And don’t even get me started on the phone in your hand right now, the one you’re probably using to read this. Smartphones are environmental catastrophes. Manufacturing one requires mining rare earth metals, global shipping, and energy-intensive production before you even turn it on. You would think that these contraptions would be an environmentally conscious generation’s worst nightmare.

And yet we are addicted to them.

I know people who can’t go a day without their phone before they start getting visibly anxious. Our entire generation has nicotine shakes like it’s 1950 for glowing rectangles. And there is always an excuse. And I don’t mean an excuse for giving it up. I mean an And I don’t mean an excuse for giving it up. I mean an excuse simply to spend less time on it. Somebody always needs it for school or activism or to “stay informed.”

Sure. Just like every generation needed whatever shiny new convenience came along.

Celebrity Activism and Luxury Emissions

Nothing captures the absurdity of modern climate activism better than celebrity climate champions. For some inexplicable reason today’s modern climate activists still hold these smug, narcissistic, virtue-signalers up as examples of the type of climate warrior we should aspire to. They fly private, sail mega-yachts, and lecture the rest of us about carbon footprints from 30,000 feet while somebody serves them a martini.

Now, to be fair, there are legitimate reasons celebrities use private planes and jets. Imagine somebody like Taylor Swift trying to board a commercial flight. It would be chaos. Fame comes with stalkers, security risks, and logistical nightmares. In many cases, private travel is genuinely safer, not only for celebrities, but for the ordinary people who might be affected if celebrities were to try to use commercial airlines and other more conventional means of travel.

But that doesn’t excuse all of it. Some of this is simply gluttonous self-indulgence.

Kylie Jenner famously made headlines in 2022 when she and her then partner, rapper Travis Scott, took a private jet from Van Nuys to Camarillo. To put that into context for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Southern California area, the time it would take for you to drive that is roughly 40 minutes by car. She chartered a jet for a 17-minute flight. What level of modern vanity and shameless narcissism produces that kind of decision-making? I’m not saying that if I had her money I would be flying commercial cross-country. But a 40-minute drive? Seriously?

And she’s hardly alone. Even if you excuse the jets, what about the mega-yachts that burn more fuel in a weekend than some towns use in months? Why does Jeff Bezos need a floating palace large enough for multiple families when it’s just him and his wife? Why, in the middle of a historic drought in California do the homes of the ultra-wealthy still have beautifully manicured lawns that use up tons of water ordinary Californians are forced to ration? 

These unanswered questions are unanswered for a reason: the rich love to lecture us about changing our lifestyles, but the idea that they might actually need to be inconvenienced is something that they will not entertain.

Data on celebrity jet usage reads like a UN researcher’s worst nightmare: massive emissions from short convenience flights, massive energy usage from mega yachts, gluttonous hoarding of water during statewide crisis. All this while they publicly advocate for climate awareness. These people do not truly care about the planet as much as they claim. They feel guilty, and they use activism as a moral indulgence that justifies their lifestyles. Or worse, they use the climate as a PR tool to help bolster their image. 

Think of them as the medieval Catholic Church of climate activism. They would rather buy indulgences than commit to real change.

And then comes the real insult: how they treat ordinary people.

While elites live in luxury, the script they hand to the rest of us is sacrifice. We’re the ones told to eat bugs, take unreliable public transit, buy expensive hybrid or electric vehicles, lower the thermostat, and shrink our lives while they circle the globe in luxury.

I’m not saying any of the sacrifices I mentioned above are necessarily bad on their own (except maybe the bug thing). Turning the lights off when you leave the house is just basic responsibility. But people are becoming so fed up with rich people moralizing at them that they’re beginning to stop caring altogether. And that’s bad for everybody, including the planet.

The idea that Gen Z can idolize celebrities and dream of leading similar lives as they bemoan the detestable treatment of the planet is laughable. However, in the age of parasocial celebrity relationships, delusion is no longer the exception, it is the rule. So expect to continue to see this generation turn a blind eye to some of the most exploitative environmental practices perpetuated by the ultra-rich. 

Every Generation Loves Its Own Hypocrisy

Let’s be real. The world is divided into two groups: people who fly private and people who would if they could. Being in the second camp does not make you morally superior. It just means you can’t afford it.

So let’s drop the act.

Let’s admit that every time you fire up AI to cheat on an assignment because you were too lazy to study, massive data centers are consuming enormous amounts of energy and water to generate your answer. Let’s also admit that the Lululemon you purchased by bulk through Amazon Got here through gas guzzling ships and trucks and that the polyurethane clothes themselves were made with oil (and will one day end up in a developing country’s landfill).

The truth is, our generation wants the appearance of caring. Especially in an age where social media means that everyone has a birds-eye view into each other’s lives. We love posting about climate protests. We love announcing we’re vegan. We carry giant reusable water bottles covered in stickers. We invented the paper straw, one of the dumbest inventions ever conceived, and yes, I will continue my personal war against them until the day I die. 

But if we actually had to follow through on everything we preach, flying less, consuming less, slowing down, sacrificing convenience, most of us would never sign up for it. We want smartphones and SHEIN and Sephora hauls and infinite scrolling and AI-generated homework answers.

Oh, and we also want a stable climate.

But this hypocrisy isn’t unique to Gen Z. Far from it. Every generation romanticizes its own virtue, decrying their parents for what they perceive as moral failures while indulging in the excesses of its era.

Take Gen X during the grunge movement of the 1990s. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains built entire identities around not just music that blended influences of heavy metal, punk, and alternative rock, but also social identities that advocated for anti-establishment politics and progressive social activism. Some of them lectured endlessly about abortion, religion, healthcare, gun control, environmentalism, and consumerism. And yet they still cashed corporate record-label checks, flew private, bought massive homes, hired armed security, and indulged in lifestyles every bit as excessive as the people they criticized. Not to mention many of them took a massive amounts of drugs, such as cocaine and hallucinogenics, many of which are polluting lakes around the world because illegal drugs are often dumped into the water supply. Today there are whole bodies of water in Ireland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, England, and yes, even here in the United States in places like the Chicago River and the Four Rivers Regions, where significant traces of cocaine and MDMA can be found (so significant in fact that fish and other wildlife that rely on these rivers have been dying because of it). But that doesn’t matter to your favorite alternative rock heroes. Today many of those same “rebels” are simply wealthy celebrities posting political opinions from Instagram accounts managed by PR teams. 

So no, Gen Z did not invent hypocrisy. Humanity has been doing this forever.

We Are Not Morally Evolved

Look, I’m not writing this from a cabin in the woods while rejecting modern technology. I am not an environmental warrior, and I wear that badge proudly. This isn’t to say that I don’t care about our planet. I do; I live on it. But I’m glad to look in the mirror every day and know that I am not a massive hypocrite.

I enjoy modern life. I use a phone without guilt. I order books from Amazon. I benefit from technological advancement just like everybody else. What I don’t do is pretend I’m morally superior to my parents or grandparents because I watched a Netflix documentary about the rainforest and changed my profile picture for Earth Day.

Yes, previous generations made mistakes. Big ones. I don’t think anyone 45 or older feels particularly good about watching a documentary now and seeing videos of people just chucking their trash out the windows of their cars back in 1985 while going 60 miles an hour on the highway. But those are also the generations that built the modern world: improved antibiotics, vaccines, medical technology, the internet, and the prosperity that allows us to worry about polar bears instead of starving to death. Despite our insistence that those older than us are complete Neanderthals, they sure did contribute a lot to the world including some of the first active reforms to help save our planet. 

They made mistakes with limited information.

We have unlimited information and continue making many of the same mistakes anyway.

The arrogance of believing our generation has somehow reinvented human nature is astonishing to me. We are not morally evolved. We are the same species we’ve always been: comfort-seeking, status-obsessed, and hopelessly addicted to convenience. The only difference is that our damage is more visible.

So maybe we should stop turning our parents and grandparents into cartoon villains. We are not building some enlightened new humanity. We are just preparing material for the Hulu parody our children will eventually make about us.

Real Environmental Progress Is Boring

Here’s the good news and the point we emphasize far too little: there is actually hope.

Over the last 50 years, the environment has seen real victories. Rivers and lakes that were ecological dead zones in the 1970s have recovered. The Clean Water Act helped restore waterways like the Cuyahoga River, which famously used to catch fire (multiple times, may I add). Even Lake Erie has dramatically improved compared to decades ago.

And these improvements did not come from hashtags. They came from engineers, scientists, wastewater treatment systems, regulations, habitat restoration, and decades of technical work. Real environmental progress is incremental, technical, and often painfully boring. The people doing the real work usually are not the ones posting aesthetic protest signs online. They’re too busy doing actual jobs.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t more work ahead. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution are all still serious issues. We should absolutely care about the planet and pursue realistic solutions.

But pretending that a generation of chronically online teenagers and twenty-somethings is heroically leading the charge to save Earth is fantasy. We are not giving up same day delivery or Lululemon or cell phones or the next newest convenience. Our awareness is radical, but not our actions.

The adults—scientists, engineers, policymakers, and yes, even corporations under pressure, are doing most of the heavy lifting. So either let them work, or better yet, put down the phone and become one of them. Believe me when I tell you that just one young person studying the hard sciences and contributing to actual environmental change through their career does much more than 20 people who sometimes care about the environment enough to post a half-hearted message of support.

We do not need more climate warriors obsessed with looking like they care. We need fewer hypocrites and more honest people willing to recognize trade-offs, support serious solutions, and stop confusing social media catharsis with environmental progress. The planet does not need our performative salvation. It might actually do better if we dropped the act.