Holy shit and I thought millennials and Gen X had it bad with how corporate our toys were.
I hate to be that person that's like "omg what kids like these days is poisoning them!" Especially because I come from the Mortal Kombat generation, but between Mr Beast, social media and shit like Roblox turning every hobby into a hussle I have to wonder what effect this will have on them.
Capitalism preying on kids was bad enough when I was a kid in the 90s and 00s (and from what I've seen from 80s cartoons, the generation before mine was pretty bad too), but it's a whole other level now.
Collapse is hitting hard and is only going to get worse though, so it is possible they'll go left.
Boomers, Xoomers, and Millennial conservatives and libertarians think they’ll become the merchant warlords of the apocalypse, but they only ever fell for grifts. Zoomers - and as you said, particularly alphas - have not only been grifted but have it engrained in them that it’s based to do it to other people. And not bullshit grifts like “the american dream,” but quite literally learning to use computers to pull the crypto rug on your friends.
The old men will have their play time cosplaying as mad max in their suburbs while the new generation will torture everyone in the squid game content hustle to win a water ration ticket.
Each generation has its upside and downside, but the downside of what's coming up does deeply worry me and no amount of "actually the ancient greeks said their kids suck too" platitudes dissolve that for me.
I want to believe there's a chance for a sort of collective immune system response, where too much grifting and "hustling" pushed on them at an early age makes enough of them push back against the overall messaging. I do. I really do hope they stand a chance against the ideological poison being dumped on them right now.
I don't know about collective, but this did happen to me as a gen Z member. I was influenced a lot in my teens and realised it was all a lie in early twenties. Things like cryptocurrency and the concept of social media.
That gives me hope. People older than you were going full Poochie about trying to convince people your age that they needed to get excited about ugly monkey cartoons with thousand dollar price tags.