Rethinking fragility: A signal of change, not a sign of weakness

What younger generations can teach us about living in uncertain environments

Generation Z, (or ‘Gen-Z’), commonly defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, are often referred to as the ‘snowflake generation’, characterised as unusually fragile, lacking resilience when faced with difficulties. Alongside this, rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people appear to have reinforced this perception. Explanations are often around topics such as overprotective parenting, too much exposure to social media or simply a broader decline in social discipline.

However, as we shall set out, this view typically relies on a notion that fragility is mainly an individual attribute and that we should all be able to maintain mental resilience in the face of a wide range of conditions. But this is a generation that came of age during an ‘age of danger,’ a period of climate emergency, technological disruption, economic precarity, and political volatility. And this raises a fundamental question: what if the emotional patterns we attribute to generational ‘weakness’ are in fact a rational response to the instability we see in the world?

To explore this possibility, we need to challenge the often unspoken assumption that runs through much of behavioural science: that humans function as atomised, sealed entities. We instead make the case that we are, in fact, much more porous to the world around us. What might look like fragility is not simply emotional vulnerability, but the signs of heightened sensitivity to unstable or demanding environments. We make the case that it is not a fixed trait but a condition that emerges from the interaction between individuals and the increasingly unstable systems they inhabit.

We will also set out the case that fragility has an overlooked value: it can serve as an early warning signal of the ways in which the environments and institutions we rely upon are under strain. And it is the younger generations, most exposed to this strain, from whom we have most to learn.

How early adaption looks fragile

To start our examination of fragility, we can look at the way societies adapt when confidence in the structures and institutions that were the scaffolding for their functioning starts to weaken. Anthropologist Anna Tsing writes about the way this leads communities to develop new ways of organising within what she calls ‘capitalist ruins’. In these environments, she sets out how people frequently ‘assemble’ smaller, more flexible networks of cooperation that allow them to operate within the conditions of uncertainty that inevitably arise. So rather than relying on stable institutional structures, people piece together temporary forms of organisation through short-lived alliances and informal, distributed networks of support

Historian Jake Smit sets out how the historical precedents for these sorts of adaptations can be found in the countercultural movements that emerged in post-war West Germany. In the decades following the Second World War, the Federal Republic experienced rapid economic expansion and political consolidation. Whilst the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, at the time created a narrative of stability and progress, Smit argues that critics in the 1960s and 1970s believed the prosperity rested on foundations that had not been properly dealt with. Politically, many younger citizens questioned how much democratic transformation had really taken place, given the continued presence of individuals and practices associated with the previous authoritarian regime. At the same time, the environmental consequences of the ensuing rapid industrial expansion, such as polluted rivers and deteriorating air quality, began to challenge the notion that growth could continue indefinitely and that it was an unquestionable ‘good thing’. Many also criticised the social effects of consumer capitalism, arguing that rising prosperity often produced alienation rather than community or social participation.

Taken together, these concerns led many in the counterculture to question whether the apparent stability of industrial society was as secure as it appeared. But rather than simply criticising existing institutions, Smit sets out how many activists began experimenting with alternative ways of organising everyday life. Cooperative housing projects, communal living arrangements, ecological agriculture, and experimental cultural spaces developed in abandoned buildings and spaces in neglected urban districts, outside the core infrastructures of the post-war economic system.

These environments were referred to as Zwischenräume, or ‘in-between spaces’, that is, between established institutional structures, which are neither fully inside nor entirely outside dominant systems. Of course, these initiatives appeared fragile and unrealistic as they were small, improvised, and lacked the permanence associated with established institutions. But perhaps it is this apparent fragility that also allowed them to function in the uncertainty. Because these communities were not organised around institutional frameworks that had been developed over time (and therefore were hard to deviate from), they could adapt more easily to changing circumstances. Their fragility was, in fact, their feature and strength, not a bug.

Smit describes those involved as ‘ruin dwellers’, people who believed that their experiments were not simply acts of protest but thoughtful efforts to develop ways of living within landscapes they saw as increasingly uncertain.

This illustrates an important point: adaptation often begins at the margins of established systems, where those who perceive instability first experiment with alternative arrangements. Because these responses emerge before institutional change becomes unavoidable, they typically appear fragile or eccentric to those still invested in the stability of the existing order.

We could make the case that a similar pattern is visible today. Younger generations are increasingly experimenting with decentralised forms of economic and social organisation. So cooperative digital platforms, community-owned housing initiatives, and distributed creative collectives have grown in prominence as alternatives to traditional institutional structures. For example, research on the emerging platform cooperativism movement documents efforts to build digital services owned and governed by the workers who use them, rather than by external investors or corporate executives. The aim is to retain the efficiencies of digital platforms while distributing ownership and decision-making more collectively among participants.

At the same time, many contemporary movements that operate through digital platforms, especially those involving younger participants, tend to organise through loose, distributed networks rather than centralised leadership structures. This makes it possible to mobilise quickly, coordinate campaigns across locations, and maintain flexibility as circumstances change.

Understanding why the apparent fragility of people might be key requires reconsidering a deeper assumption that often goes unquestioned: the idea that human beings function as separate, autonomous ‘units’. If the social experiments described above emerge from sensitivity to environmental instability, then we must ask how such sensitivity arises in the first place.

To answer that question, we need to delve into what we know about the nature of human subjectivity itself.

A history of the fragile self

Historians have also shown that the era we live in today, where we assume the self is sealed and autonomous, is in fact historically unusual. Historian Peter Brown’s work shows that people in the late Roman and early Christian worlds did not imagine the individual as a contained psychological unit. Instead, the self was understood as open to flows of influence; emotions could move through communities and disturbances in collective life were thought capable of entering the body and shaping inner experience. On this basis, rituals and communal activities were not simply moral exercises, but techniques designed to regulate the currents passing through communities.

On this basis, psychological disturbance was rarely seen as an internal failing, as it is today, because the cause would be located in the wider social or spiritual atmosphere rather than within the individual alone. Emotional life was understood more relationally than individually, with a troubled mind flagging disturbances in the wider environment, such as a conflict within the community or the pressures of political upheaval.

But from the Enlightenment of the late 17th century onwards, political theory increasingly encouraged a notion of the individual as autonomous and self-governing. Philosophical figures such as Descartes emphasised rational selfhood and personal autonomy. Over time, this vision of the self influenced cultural expectations about psychological maturity - hence, to be an adult meant demonstrating emotional control, independence, and the ability to remain steady despite the wider turbulence of the world we might be inhabiting.

If earlier societies were correct in recognising the way we are all entangled with our environments, then the modern demand for impermeability places us in a difficult position. Information, social cues, and collective moods still move through communities and shape individual experience, and yet modern culture often insists that we should remain unaffected by these forces. When we cannot, the resulting distress is frequently interpreted as personal fragility rather than as evidence of environmental strain.

If the self remains fundamentally porous, then the expectation that individuals should remain psychologically insulated from increasingly unstable environments becomes difficult to sustain. What is labelled as fragility may therefore reflect the persistence of this permeability under conditions where environmental pressures have intensified.

The realities of institutional fragility

So, what is the context we are living in today that might be shaping us? Work by historians suggests that we are living in a period in which hard-won social, political and economic rights are being eroded.

That this is evident at various points in history is something that historian David Blight has examined – he set out the way that in the aftermath of the American Civil War the expansion of civil rights initially appeared to represent a transformation in American democracy that seemed irreversible. Newly freed Black citizens voted, held public office, and participated in political life on a scale previously unthinkable. Yet Blight showed that within a generation, many of the advances achieved during this period were dismantled. The rights that had seemed foundational were, in fact, shown to be contingent upon political and social support that could quickly dissipate.

A similar argument is made by Timothy Snyder, whose studies of twentieth-century authoritarianism emphasise how democratic institutions can erode when citizens assume their permanence. He argues that when people treat political rights as guaranteed rather than contingent, they become less attentive to the social and political conditions that sustain them. This leads to institutions then hollowing out long before they visibly fail.

For many younger people in particular, the fragility of social and political institutions has become increasingly visible. Those born from the late 1990s onward have come of age during a period marked by financial crisis, democratic backsliding, accelerating climate change, and rapid technological disruption. As a result, the assumption that modern societies move steadily toward greater stability and prosperity has been difficult to sustain. For younger cohorts, these developments are not distant threats but conditions that will shape the majority of their adult lives. What may appear to older observers as heightened sensitivity can therefore also be interpreted as a response to a social environment in which structural insecurity has become more visible.

Seen through this lens, the heightened sensitivity often attributed to Gen Z may partly reflect the experience of growing up in a period when institutional solidity itself appears uncertain. Where earlier generations could assume that progress would continue along familiar lines, younger cohorts are witnessing, in a very salient way, the possibility that political and social gains may prove reversible. Their responses may therefore represent less a collapse of resilience than an early recognition of the fragility that has always underpinned historical change.

The behavioural backbone to fragility

Of course, there is a vast literature in sociology and social psychology documenting the extent to which our well-being, beliefs, and behaviours depend on relationships with others. These perspectives collectively suggest that emotional and cognitive responses are not simply internal states but emergent properties of shared social systems. Under conditions of instability, these systems can amplify perceptions of risk and uncertainty, shaping how individuals experience the world. Yet despite this extensive work, much of traditional behavioural science continues to portray decision-making as primarily an individual cognitive process.

Influential models of judgement and decision-making, popularised through the work of Daniel Kahneman, for example, often frame behaviour as the product of internal information processing occurring within the mind of a single decision-maker. While these models acknowledge that individuals may be influenced by social context, the underlying assumption remains that cognition itself is located within the boundaries of the individual.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have more recently argued that many forms of knowledge and reasoning are in fact distributed across groups rather than contained within individual minds. Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach describe this phenomenon as the ‘division of cognitive labour.’ In complex societies, individuals rely extensively on the expertise and understanding of others, with no single person possessing the knowledge required to navigate modern life independently. Instead, communities collectively generate and maintain bodies of knowledge that individuals can draw upon as needed.

As Sloman and Fernbach observe,

‘Humans are the most complex and powerful species ever, not just because of what happens in individual brains, but because of how communities of brains work together’

From scientific research to everyday practical knowledge, much of what individuals believe depends upon shared cognitive infrastructures maintained by social groups.

Going a little further back, social psychologist Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representation argues that societies develop shared frameworks that enable individuals to make sense of unfamiliar or complex phenomena. These representations circulate through conversation, media, and institutions, gradually shaping how groups collectively understand the world. Rather than forming beliefs independently and then sharing them with others, we often participate in the creation and reinforcement of shared cognitive maps.

More recent research in social psychology has extended this perspective by examining how beliefs and behaviours spread through social networks. Betsy Paluck and colleagues have shown that attitudes and norms often diffuse through communities via influential social actors rather than through purely individual persuasion. We frequently look to trusted peers or respected figures to interpret ambiguous situations, particularly when navigating complex or uncertain environments. As a result, shifts in belief can occur not simply because we independently revise our views but because social networks collectively reinterpret events.

Paluck’s work highlights the importance of ‘social referents’, people whose behaviour signals what others in a community consider acceptable or legitimate. When these adopt new attitudes or practices, the shift can ripple outward through networks, reshaping collective norms. This process highlights the extent to which beliefs and emotional responses are embedded within shared social systems rather than confined to individual cognition.

Seen in this light, we can see how our beliefs and emotional responses are permeable to the cognitive and interpretative structures of the groups to which we belong. Ideas move between individuals, becoming stabilised through social interaction rather than through solitary reflection.

This has important implications for understanding fragility. If emotional and cognitive life is deeply embedded within collective systems, then shifts in shared representations, such as those about the future and risk, can quickly reshape how individuals experience the world. Under these conditions, what appears as individual fragility may instead reflect the dynamics of shared mental ecosystems. Fragility, in this sense, becomes less a property of individual psychology than a signal emerging from the collective mind.

The ‘Coddling’ thesis and its blind spots

Despite these explanations that examine the structural basis for fragility, a widely influential account instead attributes this primarily to changes in childhood socialisation. Jonathan Haidt’s notion of ‘safetyism’ argues that modern parenting practices and educational settings shield children from risk and emotional discomfort. According to this notion, declining opportunities for unsupervised play and increasing adult intervention discourage young people from developing the resilience that was once cultivated through childhood experimentation.

The argument draws partly on developmental psychology. Children often acquire coping skills through repeated exposure to moderate challenges such as negotiating conflicts or managing minor injuries. When these experiences diminish, the argument is made that people may struggle to calibrate responses to stress later in life.

While this certainly has some appeal, some critics have suggested that the coddling thesis risks overstating the role of parental behaviour and underestimating broader structural transformations. Parenting practices themselves are shaped by social environments, not simply by cultural preference. And rising inequality, educational competition, not to mention the increasing legal liability of institutions, have all led to shifts in childhood supervision.

In addition, the environments facing younger people differ significantly from those experienced by previous generations. Opportunities for low-stakes risk may have declined (e.g. decline in youth clubs in the UK for semi-supervised space), but exposure to high-stakes uncertainty has surely increased substantially. For example, adolescents and particularly girls now have to navigate digital reputation where social feedback occurs continuously and publicly.

The ‘coddling’ thesis, therefore, appears to sit within a longer tradition of explaining social strain in psychological terms. Yet a wide range of contemporary research suggests that rising sensitivity among younger generations is better understood as a response to changing structural conditions.

Evidence from public health and economics links rising distress to long-term shifts in inequality and economic security. In parallel, research on digital environments shows that the effects of social media are small, variable, and strongly mediated by prior vulnerability, rather than uniformly harmful. Meanwhile, sociological work demonstrates how modern governance increasingly frames distress as an individual psychological issue, even when its drivers are systemic.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that what is often described as fragility may instead be a reasonable response to environments that have become more complex, uncertain, and demanding. On this basis, Gen Z’s experiences highlight the widening gap between inherited expectations of stability and the realities of living within rapidly transforming environments.

Conclusion: Fragility as a diagnostic signal

The idea that Gen Z are uniquely fragile misses something important about how social change works. Rising emotional sensitivity reflects not just how people are raised but also the conditions they live in. Humans have always been shaped by their environments, so rather than asking people to toughen up, it may be more useful to look at the kinds of worlds we are asking them to navigate.

In many ways, people are already responding. As institutions struggle to provide stability, individuals and communities are finding new ways to support each other: these are often smaller, more flexible, and built around uncertainty rather than long-term security.

Seen this way, what looks like fragility may actually be part of a wider process of adaptation and, in fact, is what adaptation feels like from the inside. This shifts how we think about generational change. Fragility is not simply a sign of decline but can point to the fact that people are beginning to live differently in response to changing conditions. In that sense, there is much to learn from this generation as they are the part of our society navigating these conditions most directly. Understanding how they are developing ways of living that are better suited to uncertain, disrupted environments is surely important for society as a whole.

Rather than dismissing fragility, we might ask what it reveals about how to live in landscapes that no longer offer the stability they once did.