Gen Z but two centuries ago

To think that Generation Z is the first to feel out of place, anxious, and without a future is a historical blunder: two centuries ago, in France, young people already described themselves as "full hearts in an empty world." This is the phrase that Chateaubriand used to describe the mal du siècle, the "disease of the century" — a feeling of boredom, dissatisfaction, and widespread anguish, which today we would call a generational crisis. Today's thesis is this: what we experience as personal discomfort — anxiety, apathy, depression — is not just an individual problem, but a collective reaction to an era that seems to have stolen our future. Two hundred years ago, young French people looked to their fathers, who had experienced Napoleon, the Revolution, and the possibility of truly changing the world. They, on the other hand, felt they had been born too late, condemned to live among the ruins of something great, while the promise of a better tomorrow was always postponed. Musset, a poet and novelist, recounted all this in the "Confession of a Child of the Century", where the protagonist Octave finds himself without purpose after a heartbreak, unable to find meaning in work, in religion, in the bourgeois society that had replaced glory and ideals with calculation and mediocrity. The striking detail is that Octave, like many of his peers, sought comfort not so much in action, but in irony, in cynicism, in escape into strong emotions, or in nostalgia for ancient and lost worlds. It's a bit like how today we take refuge in doomscrolling, in online sarcasm, in a sense of permanent apocalypse that almost becomes a lifestyle. There is a biographical scene that seems written for Gen Z: Musset and his lover, George Sand, go to Venice to escape from everything, they fall ill, he feels betrayed and returns to Paris to write about a generation that feels "born too late in a world that is too old." Octave's friends offer no comfort, only bitter jokes and detachment. The point is that this discomfort doesn't just stem from personal trauma — it's the response to an era that no longer offers great narratives, but only routine and information without experience. One fact: already in the 19th century, it was noted that the abundance of books and stories did not coincide with a fuller life. On the contrary: "Our imagination is rich and full of wonders, but our existence is poor, insipid, without charm," wrote Chateaubriand. Today, this phrase seems to speak of TikTok and Instagram, where we see everything without experiencing anything. And there's more: then as now, the symptoms of the mal du siècle spread like a social virus — novels and poems circulated among young people, amplifying the discomfort and sometimes even causing waves of copycat suicides, as happened after Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther." Today, the mechanism is repeated with echo chambers and the viralization of collective anxiety online. But stopping here is risky, because both Musset and George Sand warned against the temptation to wallow in unhappiness, to use malaise as an excuse for not taking action. Sand, in particular, chose to transform her restlessness into concrete action: she founded newspapers, supported workers, and challenged the social and political norms of her time. After all, the real antidote to the mal du siècle — yesterday as today — is not apathy or cynicism, but recognizing that sadness and anger are healthy responses to an unjust world, and can become the impetus to change things. So the next time you feel that "everything has already been done," remember that others before you have experienced the same thing, and that history does not reward those who take refuge in bed in front of a screen, but those who find the courage to act. The future always seems closed, until someone decides to reopen it. If you recognized yourself in these emotions, you can press I'm In on Lara Notes: it's not a like, it's your way of saying that this story is also about you. And if you happen to discuss it with someone — perhaps by telling them that as early as the 19th century there was talk of "full hearts in an empty world" — on Lara Notes you can tag them with Shared Offline: that way, the conversation stays alive even afterwards. This Note comes from Aeon and has just given you 9 more minutes to think.