By Eddie Barnes.
The hit Netflix drama Adolescence will undoubtedly go down as the of best TV drama of 2025, and rightly so; the depiction of a 13-year-old boy who murders a girl in his school was a blistering and raw piece of storytelling.
But as has been noted by writers such as Ian Leslie, it’s wise to see it as fiction. The truth about Adolescence was that it was less a reflection of the reality faced by teenagers in schools than a laser-guided missile precision aimed at the anxieties and neuroses of parents and older generations who don’t understand the online world their children inhabit, and therefore fear the worst.
Adolescence didn’t really seek to find out the facts about the condition of young boys in Britain. Rather it fed the terrors of older generations. It was the TV equivalent of a car crash that you can’t not look at. And we – older people – all found ourselves transfixed.
I raise Adolescence to make a point. The rapid technological changes in society over the last 15 years have created an understandable anxiety about the generation that is growing up in this new world. Plenty of it is justified, as researchers such as Jonathan Haidt have shown. But that anxiety can also lead to moral panic. If we – the older generation that is – truly want to understand younger generations, we need to be wary not to allow that panic warp our perception of what’s actually going on in their world.
All of which brings me to a new piece of research released last week that, I think, nails this point excellently. Published by the think-tank Demos, Inside the Mind of a 16-Year Old is based on the kind of deep listening exercise that the writers of Adolescence didn’t bother with. Researchers Shuab Gamote and Peter Hyman interviewed 700 young people across the country, asking them about social media, politics, the state of Britain and their futures. Their insights push back against the received narrative about young people.
The claim that young people are being misinformed by social media algorithms?
After talking to 16- and 17-year-olds, the researchers argue that young people are actually better informed than older generations who have relied on politically slanted newspapers.
The fear that Andrew Tate has a generation of young boys at his fingertips?
Get with it: Tate, they found, is irrelevant. Instead there are a range of influencers, with varied opinions, who hold sway.
The generation war between young boys and girls?
It’s over-played, they argue. “Each knows the other has it hard”, the report says.
The pair conclude as follows:
We quickly found that the picture of young people painted in the media, and screeching out from the ‘polling evidence’ didn’t begin to tell the real story.
The received wisdom says this is a generation captured by Andrew Tate and lost to the algorithm. Wrong. Their media worlds are busy and fragmented. Entertainers, streamers, adult content creators, news explainers, rightwing thinkers and leftwing voices all jostle for space, often on the same feed, often just a swipe away. Young people know TikTok gives them the headline not the depth, and many cross-check elsewhere.
The headlines suggest they had given up on democracy. Wrong again. They are disillusioned with how it’s practised, not with the idea. They want competence over performance and consequence over spin. If traditional politics cannot deliver visible wins on the things they keep naming; safety, housing and the cost of living, others will surely fill the gap.
We are told young men are the villains and the victims. The reality is untidier. Boys are navigating a minefield of messages about masculinity, be tough but not aggressive, open but not weak. At the same time girls still face structural barriers and the daily grind of harassment. Our students resisted the zero-sum game. They asked for space to say two things at once: women still have it hard and boys need support. They did not see it as fence-sitting, they saw it as a moral obligation.
We are told Gen Z is one thing. It is clearly not. Given the pace of change, do we really expect a 16-year-old and a 28-year-old to have the same outlook?
In short, it’s complex. To try and lump together Gen Z as one block is absurd. This is a generation contains multitudes.
For us at the John Smith Centre, this corroborates some of our own findings earlier this year when we published our first UK Youth Poll.
We too concluded that Gen Z is highly heterodox. Just like the fractured media it consumes, Gen Z defies a simplistic characterisation – for example, we found a highly energised minority group who defined themselves as on the conservative right, as well as those of a more liberal bent.
We were surprised too by just how optimistic Gen Z feels: nearly two-thirds (63%) say they feel optimistic about their personal future, versus only 20% who feel pessimistic.
And like Demos, our polling also concluded that while young people are concerned about the future of democracy, they still support it over the idea of ‘strong man’ autocracy. And, again as with last week’s report, while we did see differences between young boys and young girls, these weren’t as stark as what they shared in common.
Our foremost conclusion was that we, as a society, need to stop catastrophizing Gen Z. Young people have always been going to the dogs. We concluded:
Nobody should be complacent about the condition of the UK’s young people, particularly those who are socially marginalised. But we believe UK society must resist allowing its own anxieties about Gen Z to feed a doom-loop narrative which, if young people come to believe in it themselves, will end up being self-fulfilling.
The Demos report contains so many pearls of wisdom. I particularly enjoyed this comment from a student from Redland Green: “Social media is like a magnifying glass. Small things get blown up and it starts to feel like a war between men and women, even when it isn’t.”
And this from a sixth form pupil in Sunderland: “We need to stop comparing pain and start listening to each other.”
Debating. Talking. Above all, listening. The Sunderland student has it right. It’s a good place to start.
