Monsters of Their Own Making

Why is Gen Z so lost?

That is the question they keep asking, but never with tenderness.

When boomers and Gen X speak of us, they often do not speak as if we are human beings formed by history. They speak as if we are a technical fault. A weak generation. A glitch in the machine. Too sensitive, too distracted, too anxious, too strange.

The other day, I felt it in a meeting.

A power position. A computer portal. A trivial mistake. A non-tech-savvy authority figure bashing a Gen Z guy over something she did not even understand. The portal itself was fragile, vulnerable, probably stitched together with ChatGPT and corporate urgency. Yet the blame did not fall on the system. It fell on the young person standing nearest to it.

That is how power works.

It hides its own ignorance behind confidence, then calls our confusion incompetence.

This broken world was not made by Gen Z.

We did not invent world politics. We did not invent world wars. We did not build the economic machinery that eats people quietly. We did not create the governments improvising new strategies to control breath, thought, identity, speech, movement, and desire.

But somehow we are blamed for not breathing correctly inside it.

Somehow we are punished for not fitting into systems that were never designed with mercy.

And the school is my trouble.

The family is far.

I am stranded in my own thoughts, unable to speak plainly about any of this. At home, people are fighting over pennies and bricks. My parents are old, and still they fund my meals. I cannot find a decent job, even after reading hundreds of pages, even after surviving medical school, even after walking through corridors that asked me to become less human in the name of discipline.

I keep finding myself stranded inside a system that declares me broken, then blames me for not fitting.

They are exclusive at heart.

We are too soft to complain.

Or maybe we have complained so much in silence that language itself has become tired of carrying us.

Yes, we read poetry.

Yes, we read philosophy.

Yes, we read religion too, and sometimes in unbearable depth.

Not because we are fashionable.

Not because we want to appear wounded.

But because sometimes one line is enough to keep the night from swallowing us completely.

If they see us as deviant, perverted, distracted, unstable — then who gifted us these shapes?

Our attention span was turned into currency by the kings of the world.

They built empires on our scrolling.

They measured our loneliness.

They gamified our hunger.

They sold our focus back to us in fragments, then called us broken when we could no longer stay whole.

We were played like pawns, and now they say we are crazy.

Yes.

Maybe we are.

But we are monsters of their own making.

Back then, I thought I was the problem because I could not simply cram the books the school demanded. I thought there was something wrong with me, something bent, something morally weak in the way my mind resisted their rituals.

Now I am in a postgraduate medical course.

Now I see people who have crammed entire books into themselves. I see the depth of their discipline. I see their obedience to the system. I see how well some people fit into a world that made no room for me.

And I also see the older generation, comfortably installed in research, institutions, and authority — producing so much language, so many files, so many rituals of importance, yet often yielding nothing that saves a living person from his own room at night.

Maybe that is my bias.

Maybe it is my anger.

Maybe it is my hunger looking for a name.

What haunts me most is not only the present.

It is the absence of meaning in the near future.

We are torn apart by their beliefs and their consumer culture. They hand us religion, then markets. They hand us screens, then shame. They hand us ambition, then debt. They hand us a broken world and ask us why our hands are shaking.

I look toward God for solace.

But religion opens more doors than it closes.

Behind one answer, a hundred haunting questions stand waiting.

My existence does not seem to find a clean reply.

I wanted an escape into books.

Into self-sufficient systems.

Into a cause.

Into a life where I could disappear into the woods and live quietly, alone, with my notebooks and machines and a little dignity.

But beneath AI, beneath automation, beneath the shimmering promise of building systems that finally obey, there is another pit.

Another burgeoning insanity.

Another proof that even escape has infrastructure.

This world is unfair.

I am not the only one crazy here.

Everyone is crazy.

Some have learned how to dress their madness in titles, salaries, meetings, policies, and polite language.

Some of us only carry it openly.

And maybe that is why we are punished.

Not because we are lost.

But because we are honest enough to look lost in a world that has been lost for centuries.