Gen Z Talks About This Kind Of Anxiety More Than Anyone Else — But We're All Starting To Feel It

When Ayana Williams, 23, hears older people talk about temperate weather in “the good old days,” she has to knock back the jealousy she feels. She’s envious that older generations got to experience summers that were breezy and bearable, not suffocatingly hot.

“And I definitely feel envious that my kids will never get to experience the joys of a happy Earth,” said Williams, who’s a digital marketer from Virginia.

“There was once a time these natural disasters helped the earth heal itself; wildfires would make room for new plant life to grow, floods would nourish barren lands,” she said. Now, Williams said, it feels like these disasters continuously erase and erase.

In fact, the number of natural disasters has increased by a factor of five over a 50-year period, driven by climate change, more extreme weather, and improved reporting, according to a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change report.

As a kid, Williams would experience tropical storms in the summer and snow storms in the winter. “My family would hold up just fine with tropical storms in the summer and snow storms in the winter, getting our food and supplies in advance and gearing up to stay inside and ride out the storms,” she said.

Now things feel more out of control, Williams said: “We get surprise torrential rain showers and extremely hot summers that cascade into the fall months. We get anxiety about when a long-overdue snowstorm will come. It feels like, how do you prepare for these conditions when they’re constantly changing?”

Williams isn’t alone in her worries. According to a September poll from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, over one-third of Gen Zers are concerned they’ll need to move away from their hometowns due to climate change, and