"idc." Three letters that have become a generation's manifesto. It isn’t just a response anymore – it’s a posture. A way Gen Z moves through the world.
But what if not caring isn’t a choice at all? What if there’s simply nothing left worth caring about?
“If you work hard enough, you can achieve anything”, a phrase we’ve heard countless times: at our grandparents’ dinner table, from our parents, from our bosses. But is that still true today? What once functioned as a promise of reward for hard work now feels like an illusion. A sentence that increasingly sounds like a lie. Because the promise of the meritocratic system is starting to crack. Work no longer automatically leads to security, let alone prosperity. While previous generations could afford to build a house in their mid-twenties, many today are simply trying to cover their rent – despite working full-time. According to the Pestel Institute’s Social Housing Monitor 2026, people under the age of 25 spend on average more than 50 percent of their income on rent. This is not due to poor financial management, but rather because 60 percent of those who live alone earn less than €1,500 net per month. We live in a system where even maximum effort no longer guarantees stability.
In a society that constantly tells us we can become anything, not becoming something feels like a personal failure. Because those at the top are seen as deserving it and those at the bottom simply haven’t tried hard enough. If you can’t get a job, you’re supposed to try harder. Send more applications. Sell yourself better. But what happens when that is already your reality? When internships pile up, applications are sent out endlessly and still nothing comes back?
The meritocratic promise “work hard and you’ll make it” has not just grown outdated. It is broken. It ignores the fact that not everyone starts from the same point. Background, financial security, networks and connections often matter more than effort alone. And yet, the system continues to act as if it were intact – with a promise that sounds like encouragement but functions like a trap. Because within this logic, failure is not seen as the result of external circumstances, but as a personal defeat.
Structural problems are reframed as individual shortcomings: Poverty becomes a matter of personality. Burnout is reduced to a lack of resilience and failure is internalized as your own fault. Meritocracy shifts the blame to the place where it meets the least resistance: inward.
In this way, pressure becomes a permanent condition and self-optimization turns into a survival strategy.
This shift has long become part of the culture. More and more videos and memes are questioning the 9-to-5 model. Instead of hustle: retreat. Instead of self-optimization: self-preservation. Terms like “bed rotting” are becoming trends – spending the entire day in bed as an attempt to recover energy that is constantly drained by everyday life. Doing nothing takes on a new meaning: not as failure, but as a necessary pause in a system that leaves no room for regeneration.
So what gets labeled as not caring is, in reality, self-preservation. Because the real problem isn’t a lack of effort it’s that effort no longer reliably pays off. Why burn yourself out for something that might not lead anywhere?
We in Gen Z have watched an entire generation burn itself out. We saw what happened. And we stopped. Not out of laziness. Out of clarity.
Maybe Gen Z is not too cool to care – but too aware to keep believing in a promise that no longer holds. Maybe we don't care less, we just stopped pretending that it pays off.
“Not caring” may look like resistance, but more often it’s just retreat. One that doesn’t disrupt the system, but quietly stabilizes it. Because awareness alone changes nothing. Our generation knows what isn’t working. What’s missing is the next step: the moment when awareness turns into action. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s the only step that turns anything into change.
And maybe the real question is why that step is taken so rarely. That’s where things start to break down. Not in laziness – that would be too easy. But in a system that exhausts us to the point where we no longer have the energy to challenge it. Not a coincidence: An exhausted generation is an obedient one – that’s by design. And as long as we only name our exhaustion without translating it into movement, it remains exactly that: useful. For those who benefit from the silence of an entire generation.
