Gen Z Is Not Lost. It Is Learning What to Do with Its Tools

People often talk about Gen Z as if the diagnosis were already complete.

Distracted. Unmotivated. Addicted to the phone. Unwilling to take responsibility.

Adam Gerin does not reject every part of that description. He thinks there is a real problem. But he believes the stereotype points in the wrong direction.

The problem is not that young people are incapable of building things. The problem is that many of them are spending their attention on content that gives them nothing back.

Adam calls it brain rot, borrowing a phrase that has become common online. In French, he describes the same phenomenon as a culture of void: an endless stream of content that fills time without creating meaning.

That distinction matters. A generation can be surrounded by distraction and still contain enormous creative potential. In fact, it may be the first generation to grow up with an extraordinary combination of tools:

• instant access to knowledge;

• global communication;

• cheap software infrastructure;

• powerful AI assistants;

• the ability to publish and build without waiting for permission.

The internet can consume your attention. It can also help you learn a technical skill, publish research, contact a stranger on the other side of the world, or build a product from a bedroom.

The tool is not the destiny.

Adam’s story did not begin with a grand ambition to become a founder.

It began with Lego, electronics, and the pleasure of understanding how things worked.

As a child, he was fascinated by systems. He wanted to identify what could be improved and then try to create a better version. He played with Arduino electronics, learned from the internet, and discovered programming, design, business, and AI at a young age.

At some point, consuming information stopped being satisfying on its own.

Building became a test. If he had learned something, could he use it to make something real? If he understood a system, could he change it? If he saw a problem, could he try to solve it without waiting for an instructor to give him the next step?

That is where the internet changed character. It stopped being only a library or an entertainment system. It became a workshop.

Adam describes software as a form of leverage. You can spend weeks building a product, then allow it to help thousands of people without repeating the same manual work every day.

There is something almost magical about that idea, especially when you are young. A project becomes a sandbox. You can build an operating system, an app, a social network, or a tool for a problem that has been bothering you personally.

Adam’s first project was a social network. He knew that competing with Meta or TikTok was unrealistic. That was not the point.

The point was to discover how things are made.

The first project is not necessarily the one that will succeed in the market. It may be the one that creates a spark. It gives you a reason to keep learning and a place to turn knowledge into skill.

This is where Adam’s view differs from the usual startup advice circulating on social media. He is skeptical of young people copying whatever business model is currently fashionable. A few years ago, it was dropshipping. Today, it may be an agency, an AI wrapper, or a collection of websites for local businesses.

The format changes. The underlying mistake stays the same: building somebody else’s story.

His advice is more personal:

1. Start with a problem you genuinely care about.

2. Build something small enough to finish.

3. Let the project teach you what you do not yet know.

4. Measure the skills you gain, not only the attention you receive.

The reward is not always money or prestige. Often, it is competence.

AI has made the distance between an idea and a prototype much shorter.

A few years ago, building an app could require weeks or months of development. Today, someone can open a cloud environment, describe what they want, and get a working starting point almost immediately.

That access changes who gets to experiment. It gives young people a way to test ideas that would previously have required money, a technical team, or a formal position inside a company.

But the shortcut creates a new responsibility.

Adam compares modern tools to a hammer. You can use one to destroy something, or you can use it to build something beautiful. The tool does not decide which one will happen.

AI can produce an impressive interface. It can generate features at astonishing speed. It can also create a fragile system full of hidden problems.

Adam learned this through experience. Early versions of his products were built heavily with AI. That helped him move quickly, but it did not remove the need for architecture, DevOps, experienced developers, or careful review. Once a product begins serving real users, technical shortcuts become somebody else’s problem.

The transition from a few friends using an app to several thousand students relying on it changed the meaning of a bug. At the beginning, a bug was an interesting technical puzzle. Later, it could prevent a student from accessing something important or leave an education centre waiting for a feature.

That is the point at which a project becomes a responsibility.

Adam does not think adults should trust a young founder simply because the story is inspiring.

Being young may attract curiosity. It does not create trust.

Trust appeared when the product worked, when the numbers demonstrated real use, and when Adam did what he said he would do. He had to respond, meet deadlines, solve problems, and accept the consequences of technical decisions.

Ambition is easy to describe. Reliability is easier to observe.

At one point, his work included product decisions, software development, infrastructure maintenance, and technical priorities that directly affected students and education centres. Fixing a database problem could mean working through the night. Giving an AI agent broad access to a system could make progress faster, but it also introduced risk.

The experience taught him a lesson that applies far beyond technology:

A prototype can be a personal experiment. A product used by other people is a promise.

AI can help a founder think. It can challenge an idea, compare competing products, and reveal whether a similar solution already exists. Adam sees it as a useful devil’s advocate.

But AI cannot create the first human relationship.

It cannot call a partner, earn trust in a difficult conversation, find the right person for a team, or develop the product taste needed to understand how a user will experience the result.

Those are still human tasks.

Adam believes the biggest challenge for a young founder is often not building the first version. It is finding the first partners, collaborators, and experienced people who can help turn a fast prototype into a durable product.

That distinction will become more important as AI makes creation cheaper. When everyone can build something, the scarce resources may shift toward judgment, distribution, responsibility, and relationships.

The public version of Adam’s story is inspiring. He is 17, he has built products used by thousands of students, and he is working on a project related to the safety of AI agents.

The private version is more complicated.

Ambition can be lonely. Adam says that he does not always feel challenged by people in his immediate social group. Video calls with other entrepreneurs help, but they do not replace real relationships. Sometimes the only person who truly understands the work is a co-founder, or even an AI agent.

There is also the pressure of living several lives at once: school, product work, technical problems, academic ambition, and the desire to build something significant before university.

The danger is not only failure. It is burnout, impatience, and the temptation to abandon a difficult project for the excitement of a new one.

Adam admits that leaving a previous company may have involved impatience. He and his co-founder wanted different things. One wanted to keep serving the Moroccan market. Adam wanted to pursue a larger international vision and move toward agentic AI.

There may be no perfectly clean answer. Sometimes changing direction is growth. Sometimes it is an escape from the patience that meaningful work requires.

The most generous idea in the conversation is also the simplest.

Young people do not need to reproduce the latest online success story. They do not all need to build startups, become influencers, or create the next unicorn.

They need to find a problem that feels real enough to work on.

The first project may fail. It may never attract investors. It may remain useful only to its creator and a few friends. That does not make it worthless. It can still provide skills, patience, judgment, and a clearer sense of direction.

The goal is not to become famous for building something. The goal is to become the person who can build, learn, repair, and take responsibility for what they create.

Gen Z is not lost. It is growing up inside an environment designed to capture attention. The challenge is to turn the same tools that encourage passive consumption into tools for agency.

The internet will keep offering an endless supply of other people’s stories.

The question is whether we will keep scrolling through them, or start building our own.