The Solitude Generation

How We Broke Gen Z’s Social Circuits—and How We Can Fix Them

This isn’t a tidy talk. It doesn’t leave you with a neat framework or a catchy acronym. It doesn’t “uplift.” For the first 30 minutes, it just… breaks you a little. And that’s intentional.

Because we need to look directly at what we’ve done.

We handed Gen Z a broken map: social systems in ruins, community infrastructure gutted, and a culture that swapped connection for convenience. We gave them solitude dressed up as freedom, hyper-connectivity without real contact, and then we acted surprised when everything started to unravel.

This talk has been brewing for a while. Derek Thompson’s The Anti-Social Century cracked something open for me (seriously, go read it). My ongoing work with the Walton Family Foundation on Gen Alpha has been digging into pandemic learning loss, emotional development black holes, and the weird, wonderful communities kids are now building inside creation-based gaming platforms. And then there’s the work I’ve been doing with Luka Dončić and his foundation, exploring how youth basketball and mental health collide across North America and the Balkans.

Different angles. Same problem.

This talk pulls all of that together—and then throws it straight into the faces of leadership teams who desperately need to hear it. I’ve delivered it to Universal Music, Coca-Cola, and most recently at the Marketing Festival in Brno. And every time, the same thing happens: silence, then shifting in seats, then a sort of collective fuck. Because it’s dark. But it’s also real. And frankly, we’re long overdue for some real.

These slides were made for voice-over, not standalone reading, so you’ll miss a few layers. But the core is here. The rot is visible. And if any part of this hits you, if it moves you, unsettles you, makes you want to scream or build or both, please share it.

Because the only way out of this mess is through. Together. Eyes open.

Thanks for reading. Let’s stop bullshitting and start fixing.

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Full presentation here.