This topic was one I had chosen as a priority for me to tackle, but when I shared the subject with Harper Lane, a Gen Z, she asked if I wouldn’t mind letting her tackle it. Climate anxiety, also called eco-anxiety, manifests itself differently in older generations than in young people. Two common themes come up in my discussions on this subject with young people: fear about the future, and a sense of powerlessness to affect the outcome.
I am a baby boomer. Although the mechanism for anthropogenic climate change, carbon emissions from the Industrial Revolution, was well known in the late 19th century, scientists and engineers working for fossil fuel companies were writing internal reports in the late 1970s linking the burning of their products to rising global temperatures. Human-caused trends indicated that by the early 2000s, warming in the atmosphere would be increasingly noticeable, with anticipated negative climate consequences. That’s why Gen Z is the generation that has grown up with the risk very much a thing. It’s personal.
One young Gen Z member, Greta Thunberg, began a protest movement, sitting across from the Swedish parliament in Stockholm every Friday, missing school to make a point. She began her protest to point out that if grownups weren’t going to do something about climate change, then it was the Gen Z generation that would have to take up the mantle.
If you haven’t read some of Harper Lane’s contributions to the 21st Century Tech Blog, I encourage you to do so by typing her name in the search window on the menu bar of the 21stcentech.com homepage. Harper has written on several important topics since she began offering her talent to this site. Harper resides near Birmingham and has been into technology for a long time. She is big on astronomy and many other scientific and engineering topics. Clearly, climate change is one as well. Comments from Gen Z would be welcomed.
Climate change is often discussed in terms of rising temperatures, extreme weather events, carbon emissions, and energy transitions. These are all important. But another crisis is unfolding along with all of those. It is one receiving far less attention despite its enormous potential consequences: the growing sense among young people that the future is slipping beyond their control.
Talk to enough members of Gen Z, and a pattern begins to emerge. Climate change is part of the conversation, but it rarely exists in isolation. It is bundled together with housing costs that seem permanently unaffordable, a job market that increasingly demands credentials while offering uncertainty in return, political polarization, social media burnout, and a constant stream of headlines forecasting disaster. The result is not always activism. Increasingly, it is apathy.
Ironically, that apathy may be one of the most dangerous outcomes of all.
Climate Anxiety Is About More Than Climate
In 2023, millions of people across North America saw smoke-filled skies and orange-tinted cityscapes, including areas far removed from the fires themselves. For many people, the Canadian wildfires that year cemented the idea that climate change was no longer some abstract scientific discussion. It wasn’t some number on a chart, or a prediction made decades into the future. It was right here, right now. This week brings 2023 back in spades with the same smoke-filled, orange skies over much of Eastern North America.
Climate anxiety is not a fringe phenomenon. In a global survey published in The Lancet, 59% of young people reported feeling extremely or very worried about climate change, with more than half reporting emotions such as sadness, anxiety, anger, helplessness, and powerlessness. Nearly half said those feelings negatively affected their daily lives.
What stands out is that climate change is rarely experienced in isolation. Many survey participants expressed frustration with government and society’s leaders. In other words, the distress being felt is not simply about rising temperatures but rather about the belief that the people responsible for addressing the problem are either unable or unwilling to act.
That distinction matters because psychology has long shown that people can tolerate extraordinary hardship when they believe their actions matter. What people struggle with most is the belief that nothing they do can influence outcomes.
The Diminishing Promise of Tomorrow
For previous generations, there was often an implicit expectation of progress. Technology would improve lives. Economic growth would create opportunities. Each generation, while facing its own challenges, generally believed its children would inherit a more prosperous world.
Today, that narrative feels less certain.
Many young adults are entering a society where college degrees do not guarantee stable employment, housing costs have dramatically outpaced wage growth in many areas, and economic mobility often feels harder to achieve than it did for their parents. Against that backdrop, climate change can begin to feel like not just another problem to solve, but additional evidence that the future itself is deteriorating.
The psychological impact is significant. When multiple systems appear to be failing simultaneously, people are less likely to focus on solutions and more likely to question whether solutions are even possible.
The Doomscrolling Machine
Technology has transformed how information spreads, but it has also transformed how humans experience problems.
Historically, people learned about major events through newspapers, television broadcasts, or community discussions. Information arrived in discrete packages. There was still bad news, but there were natural limits to consumption.
Modern social media platforms operate differently.
Algorithms are designed to maximize engagement. Unfortunately, human attention is naturally drawn toward threats and uncertainty. From an evolutionary perspective, ignoring danger was costly. Social media exploits this tendency at an unprecedented scale.
Every day, users encounter:
- Climate disaster predictions
- Economic recession warnings
- Layoff announcements
- Political conflicts
- War coverage
- Public health concerns
- AI-related job displacement fears
- Viral content amplifying societal failures
Even when these stories are legitimate, when millions of people are consuming them by the dozens daily without meaningful context, they lose impact. Our brains evolved to respond to threats within local communities, not to absorb a continuous feed of global crises from across the planet.
The result is what some researchers are calling an availability cascade. Negative stories tend to be more visible and, therefore, are easier to recall. That’s why they can dominate the narrative.
If you spend two hours daily consuming climate-related content, your mental model of the future, therefore, becomes based almost entirely on catastrophes. You tend to be unaware of positive developments such as declining solar costs, expanding battery storage deployments, grid modernization efforts, or advances in carbon removal technologies. Although the information is out there on the web, search algorithms simply do not prioritize it.
The Optimism Gap
One of the strangest features of modern society is that public gloom often coexists with measurable progress.
For example:
- Solar energy costs have fallen dramatically over the past decade.
- Utility-scale battery storage deployment continues expanding worldwide.
- Electric vehicle adoption has accelerated in many regions.
- Air quality has improved substantially in numerous developed countries compared to previous decades.
- New nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors, are receiving increased investment.
None of these developments eliminate climate risks, but they complicate the simplistic narrative that humanity is doing absolutely nothing.
The problem is that technological progress generally arrives incrementally, while disaster narratives arrive instantly. A new battery chemistry breakthrough rarely generates as much engagement as footage of a wildfire.
Information Without Agency Creates Helplessness
One of the underappreciated consequences of the digital age is that information has become disconnected from action.
Imagine receiving hourly notifications about a wildfire thousands of miles away, a glacier melting in another country, political disputes occurring elsewhere, and economic developments affecting industries you have no influence over.
You are informed, but are you empowered?
Not really.
Psychologists have long studied learned helplessness, a condition in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events reduces motivation to act. While modern climate anxiety is not identical to learned helplessness, there are striking parallels.
When young people are constantly told that climate change is worsening, democracy is under strain, automation may replace jobs, housing is unaffordable, and economic inequality is increasing, many eventually arrive at the same conclusion:
“If all of these enormous systems are broken, what exactly am I supposed to do about it?”
This question is rarely answered effectively; after all, public discourse excels at identifying problems, but it is often far worse at communicating practical pathways forward.
As a result, concern frequently mutates into resignation.
The average person can consume dozens of global crises before breakfast yet possess no practical mechanism for influencing most of them.
This creates what psychologists call a diminished internal locus of control: the perception that outcomes are determined primarily by forces outside one’s influence rather than by one’s own actions.
Why Apathy May Be More Dangerous Than Fear
Fear can motivate action, but apathy rarely does.
History is full of examples where societies overcame serious challenges through collective effort, technological innovation, and political compromise. Progress does not require universal optimism, but it does require enough people believing improvements are possible.
Once that belief disappears, participation tends to decline. People stop voting because they assume nothing will change. They stop engaging with environmental issues because they assume catastrophe is inevitable. They stop investing in communities because they assume decline is unavoidable, and they stop pursuing ambitious careers because they assume opportunities will increasingly become inaccessible.
In other words, an expectation of failure can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is why the mental health dimension of climate change deserves much greater attention. The danger is not merely that young people are worried about the future. The danger is that many are beginning to detach from it altogether.
A society that convinces its youngest members that progress is impossible creates conditions where progress actually becomes impossible.
The Technology Perspective: Why Doom Is Not the Full Story
Human history is filled with examples of seemingly insurmountable problems that were eventually mitigated through innovation. Disease mortality has fallen dramatically. Agricultural productivity has expanded enormously. Renewable energy costs have declined at rates that many experts did not predict two decades ago. Advances in battery storage, grid modernization, materials science, carbon capture research, and nuclear technology continue to accelerate.
None of this means climate change is not serious. Rather, it means the future remains uncertain rather than predetermined.
Many online narratives treat worst-case scenarios as inevitabilities rather than possibilities. Yet technological development rarely follows straightforward trajectories. Unexpected breakthroughs frequently reshape what societies believe is achievable.
This same generation exposed to unprecedented climate anxiety is also witnessing the fastest rate of technological innovation in human history.
Artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics, synthetic biology, nuclear fusion research, and next-generation energy systems all present new opportunities that did not exist a generation ago.
The future contains risks, but it also contains tools.
What Can We Actually Do Right Now?
The evidence increasingly suggests that action itself is one of the most effective antidotes to climate anxiety. The American Psychological Association has been focusing on helping young people move from anxiety toward meaningful participation and climate action rather than leaving them trapped in cycles of worry. It advocates:
1. Rebuilding Collective Efficacy
An individual alone cannot solve climate change, but communities, industries, and institutions can.
Research consistently shows that people experience less helplessness when they participate in collective efforts where outcomes are visible and measurable.
That could mean:
- Local environmental initiatives
- Citizen science projects
- Community resilience planning
- Civic engagement
- Policy advocacy
The goal is not merely environmental impact, but restoring a sense of agency as well. Additionally, when the focus becomes more localized rather than national or global, the solutions become much more actionable rather than simply vague policy prescriptions.
2. Shifting from Consumption to Creation
Many young people spend hours consuming news about problems they cannot influence.
This is especially relevant for technically minded readers.
Software engineers, researchers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs have opportunities to contribute to energy efficiency, climate modelling, resiliency planning, transportation systems, and environmental monitoring technologies.
Creation provides feedback, but consumption rarely does.
3. Practicing Information Hygiene
If nutrition science teaches us to think critically about what we eat, information science should teach us to think critically about what we read and watch.
This can look as simple as verifying sources and avoiding misinformation, but there’s also value in tuning out stressful noise. Not every notification deserves attention, and not every viral story deserves emotional investment.
Limiting algorithmically curated news feeds and intentionally seeking long-form, evidence-based sources can help reduce the perception that disaster is the only possible future.
4. Reclaiming a Sense of Self-Efficacy
Perhaps the most important challenge facing Gen Z is not reducing anxiety itself. It is rebuilding self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they can perform actions that successfully influence outcomes. In simple terms, people need to believe that effort matters.
Without effort and participation, nothing changes. Economic reforms without advocacy may never happen. Technological solutions that could matter never get built. Whereas social media tends to make us think like spectators, real-world progress depends on active participation.
That does not mean individuals must solve climate change single-handedly. It means recognizing that meaningful change has always emerged from millions of imperfect contributions rather than a single revolutionary event.
The Future Is Not Written Yet
Climate change is undoubtedly one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. But the greatest threat facing young people may not just be rising temperatures. It may also be the growing belief that the future is fixed, that society’s problems are too big to solve, and that individual action no longer matters.
That is the real challenge confronting Gen Z and the generations that follow. Climate anxiety, economic pressure, political polarization, and the constant noise of algorithm-driven media can make the future seem smaller, darker, and more constrained than it really is. But uncertainty cuts both ways. The same future that contains risks also contains rewards: breakthroughs, innovations, policy changes, new technologies, and solutions yet to be imagined.
The question, therefore, is not whether climate change will shape the decades ahead. It undoubtedly will. The question, rather, is whether we allow fear, helplessness, and pessimism to shape our response.
A healthy Gen Z response to the climate change challenge is neither blind optimism nor hopeless despair. It is informed determination. The recognition that while no individual can solve the problems of climate change alone, millions working together can. Gen Z and following generations may not control every outcome, but they can direct the narrative. The future is not written in stone. It is something that Gen Z and subsequent generations can shape.
