Gen Z are scaling back on eating out because they have 'menu anxiety' | Hacker News Reader

Gen Z are scaling back on eating out because they have 'menu anxiety'

fortune.com

3 pointslagniappe11 comments

I'm Gen X. I know what I like, I'll talk to anyone and I love eating out, but I'll be damned if the costs of eating out don't freak me out these days. Menu prices are totally crazy. It's not Gen Z, the restaurant model broke after COVID and inflation.

They usually have 1 or 2 items that are a really good deal if you are flexible

If ever there was a generation that's primed - groomed? - for The Matrix, it's Gen Z. The lack of paat adversity is mitigating future adversity and eventually they'll be unable to leave that house. There is such a thing as too much comfort.

Meh. When I was a wee Gen-Xer, old people said roughly the same about us slackers, and a generation before they said same about the spoiled Spock babies of the Boomer generation.

Perhaps, but that's not my point.

Imagine The Matrix and matrix it to today's current problems. Today's individual problems (e.g., can't handle adversity). Today's societal problems (e.g., violence, homelessness, poverty, etc.). And even today's ecological problems (e.g., economic growth is based on consumption, and that taxes Mother Nature).

Not joking...The Matrix solves all of them. But you need people to want the safety of "the pod".

My point is that invariably some people over the centuries say that the current generation of young adults have been coddled and can't handle adversity.

Here's an editorial from 1916 on "The Youth of Today" at https://archive.org/details/fort-wayne-sentinel-1916-03-04/p... which I found in a quick archive.org search, suggesting the youth of the 1910s wanted the safety of "the pod" too much and weren't prepared to handle adversity, because their parents coddled them:

> Dr. J. G. Hibben, president of Princeton university, holds to the opinion that too much luxury, even too much comfort, is a bad thing for the youth of the country. ...

> "The great danger lies in the fact," says he, "that our young men should have on all sides of them comforts and pleasures which make them consider themselves alone. Many of our youths are indifferent to everything under heaven except how they can maintain their comfort and convenience. They have done or experienced nothing that would make them ready for service and sacrifice." ...

> ... our young men seem to be less sturdy and robust in character [than the young man of yesteryear]. Our forefathers did not find life easy. Existence for them was a struggle. They were acquainted with hardship: they touched elbows with privation. Experience tempered them. "There must be an awakening of the Old spirit of our fathers and our father's fathers," says Dr. Hibben, "who did not have all the luxury which we have but who had an integrity of spirit which we do not have. Military preparedness will be of no avail in time of danger unless we have this spirit of consecration." Here are criticism and counsel, hand in hand. Both might be pondered to advantage by parents who, in mistaken affection, make life too easy for their sons, and by sons who, in narrow selfishness, are thus saved from inconvenience and discomfort."

On the other hand I also found this nice quote from 1968 at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.112052/page/n3... :

> If today’s youth are substantially different from those of earlier days, as I think they are, it is because they have grown to maturity in a different world.

Have we been trending in this direction? Yes, of course. It's not going to happen overnight. Technology has also played a role. The type of technology that wasn't around in the early 1900s.

Have we finally crossed a tipping point, for a number of reasons, and that's manifesting in a number of different ways? Yes, again.

The obvious aside, the major difference now is that the possibility of "the pod" is no longer sci-fi theory, it's becoming real. That means there are actors who are very interested in seeing that happen (and profiting from it). Those actors will use their influence to nudge in that direction. I don't think I need to point out who some of those actors are, but the most obvious one controls a VR goggles company, and a couple of social networks.

> the possibility of "the pod" is no longer sci-fi theory, it's becoming real

It is completely fictional and hypothetical.

For one, look at how poorly people handled being cooped up at home during COVID isolation.

We have no way to keep a body in good health in a pod. That's why there are people to help take care of those who are bed-ridden.

What a bs "explanation".

"Menu anxiety"? Seriously?

How about they're stuck on the short end of the economy and have no money for eating out?

When McD's now costs as much as a sit-down restaurant used to, who rightly expects younger generations to be able to afford to eat out?

I've heard a lot of poor excuses designed to distract from the ruling class and their exploitation of everyone and everything, but this one is just lazy.

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