📻 Z: THE GENERATION OF NOSTALGIA

In a world saturated with screens, young people are rediscovering the pleasure of reading on paper, writing in notebooks, listening to vinyl records, or cooking family recipes. Retro becomes a refuge: an act of resistance against digital immediacy and a bridge to the memory of their ancestors. This recovery of “outdated” practices is not only about aesthetics—it is also a search for more human life rhythms, less driven by consumption and the accelerated pace of progress.

Among siblings, we don’t understand each other

But what happens when innovation surpasses the biological clock? The gap between generations widens. Family members no longer share the language of their siblings or their parents. A family that demands quick adaptation abandons the table for lack of understanding. Integration between grandchildren and grandparents decreases: among the elderly, approaching younger generations is experienced with anxiety and shame. Older groups are stripped of the possibility of communicating fluidly within a society that spins with vertigo between tradition and modernity: exile begins to be felt through almost imperceptible transformations, such as the extinction of analog devices in everyday life. The expropriation of the social ground is not geographical, it is spiritual.

In reaction to this phenomenon, several generations begin to feel disconnected from current culture and look to the past as an authentic and safe space. One angle of this shift is Generation Z’s perception of millennials: the generation most immersed in technology consumption, the generation with the highest alcohol consumption issues, the generation of anxiety. For Generation Z, millennials reflect a period where cultural changes were profound and radical—and in that process, they are seen as a generation deprived of the educational guidance for tomorrow.

New generations view a return to conservatism as a solution, for better or worse: forgotten values are rescued to uphold the spirit of culture, but there is also a conservative hardening against essential social changes for the integrity of all human beings. Zooming in, the media conflict is lived between two main fears: uncertainty about the future and cultural shifts on issues of gender.

Religion and spirituality: between criticism and longing

Within this context, the relationship with religion becomes ambiguous. Generation Z distrusts the Catholic Church because of historical scandals within the institution, yet at the same time, some young people seek in spirituality a sense of community and meaning. This nostalgia for the sacred is expressed in small rituals, in personal meditations, in philosophical readings. But how do we bring this into Sunday masses, catechism teachings, and classrooms?

It is a phenomenon that combines rupture and continuity: religious authority is questioned, but the communal rootedness it offers is missed.

What is urgent is not to question the aim of nostalgia, but to provide it with an emancipatory horizon. A space not yet explored that could become an opportunity to create more diverse and inclusive spaces led by the Church, and to represent a new generation of young Catholics seeking meaning in this uncertain, future-nostalgic world.

📌 The challenge is to understand these youths not as contradictory, but as an expression of a complex time: a generation that, while rescuing the past with a certain harshness, also demands a more just, plural, and ethical country.