WHAT WE NEED RIGHT NOW IS MORE UNHAPPY AMERICANS.

👉 Because in my experience, only unhappy people are willing to go through what it takes to make real change happen.

Not slow, tweaking around the edges kind of change, but serious, profound change.

Now, as of the next presidential election, the people who’ll be in charge of where we go from here are Millennials and GenZers.

By that date, they will account for over 50% of the vote.

And 64% of ‘em already believe that American democracy is failing.

So buckle up, because the America they see isn’t Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill, and for them, the status quo is not an option.

America in its postwar golden age was a nation riding an extraordinary wave of moral clarity and collective triumph — having defeated the most monstrous evil the modern world had produced.

It’s returning soldiers built suburbs, families, and a booming middle class, while a young, charismatic president stood in the cold January air and dared an entire generation to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country.

And that same generation answered by marching for civil rights, dreaming of a Great Society, and then watching with tear-streaked awe as two men from Earth stepped onto the surface of the Moon and proved that when America set its mind to something — truly set it — the impossible was merely a matter of time.

The America that millennials and Gen Z inherited is one where the first vivid memory for many is watching two towers fall live on television, people leaping to their deaths, before they were old enough to drive, followed by two endless wars that solved nothing.

An America where the economy collapsed just as millennials handed in their diplomas and entered a job market that had evaporated, where they carry more student debt than any generation in history for degrees that no longer guarantee the middle-class life their parents promised.

Where they watched another financial crisis loom during a pandemic that killed over a million Americans, while a polarized government turned mask-wearing into a culture war, where they grew up with social media rewiring their brains and their self-worth.

An America where school shooter drills became as routine as fire drills, where they check their phones for news and find an endless scroll of climate disasters, mass shootings, political dysfunction, and algorithmic outrage designed to keep them anxious and clicking.

An America where homeownership feels like a fantasy and retirement feels like a joke, and where, instead of a young president promising the moon, they watched their democracy itself being attacked on January 6th.

And yet, remarkably, this generation remains among the most educated, most socially conscious, and most determined to build something better from the rubble of a promise that wasn’t kept for them. (👇in case you missed the video on Instagram👇)

By 2028, those same disillusioned, disconsolate Millennials and GenZers will account for way more than 50% of the vote.

Which means what becomes of America will be in their hands.

Millennials and Gen Z want an America where the economy is rebuilt from the bottom up rather than the top down.

One where a college education or a trade school certificate doesn’t saddle a young person with decades of debt, where a full-time job actually pays enough to rent an apartment, save money, and imagine owning a home someday, where healthcare isn’t a financial catastrophe waiting to happen and doesn’t depend on whether your employer likes you.

An America where the obscene concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few is treated as the civic emergency it actually is, and where the political system is reformed enough that ordinary people feel their vote and their voice carry at least as much weight as a corporate lobbying check.

They want an America that takes climate change with the same dead-serious urgency their grandparents took Nazi Germany — as an existential threat requiring mobilization, innovation, and sacrifice — and they want to be the generation that builds the green economy rather than inherits the scorched earth.

And perhaps most deeply.

They want an America that finally, genuinely closes the gap between its stated ideals and its lived reality — a country that looks at its own diversity not as a problem to be managed but as its greatest strength, that makes peace with its complicated history without being paralyzed by it, and that recovers something their grandparents had that no algorithm can manufacture: the unironic, clear-eyed belief that tomorrow can actually be better than today.

Despite everything, most young Americans haven’t given up on America.

They’re not burning the flag, and they’re not bowing to it either.

What drives the best of these generations isn’t resignation, and it isn’t even rage.

It is something older and more promising than rage.

It is a refusal, quiet, absolute, and resolute.

It’s the refusal to pretend that what we’ve built is finished.

The refusal to accept that the arc of history bends on its own, without them.

The refusal to be the generation that inherited this mess and decided it wasn’t worth fighting over.

The greatest generation didn’t build this country by accepting what was handed to them.

Neither did the civil rights generation.

Neither did the suffragettes.

Every expansion of American democracy in history has come from people who refused — who looked at the gap between the promise and the practice and said no, this isn’t enough, we’re not done.

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