Is Gen Z the root of our cultural exhaustion or its most visible effect?

Blaming Gen Z for shallow culture misses the point: algorithms, nostalgia and risk-averse institutions have drained depth long before the youngest generation logged in

There are a few phrases that we of late have come to increasingly hear, and even use. “Oh, these GenZs”! “They don’t take anything seriously. They are too blunt. They get worked up over the smallest things.” These are some of the usual things we all have started hearing about everywhere, be it at parties, in offices, inside metro coaches, or during family dinners. Some years ago, what passed off as casual generational banter has now increasingly begun to resemble a quiet war of identities. And like most such wars of identities, it feels deeply misplaced. 

The accusation that GenZ lacks depth is simplistic. The generation scrolls too much, reacts too quickly, consumes culture in fragments, and turns everything, from politics to poetry, into mere aesthetic without engaging with it in depth. But beneath this complaint lies a more uncomfortable truth, one that the “non-GenZs” are rarely pausing to confront. What if GenZ is not the cause of our cultural exhaustion but merely its most visible inhabitant? 

Culture, for some time now, has functioned in a way where it has been repetitive and algorithm-driven. We know nostalgia is being endlessly reheated and sold back to us as comfort. We know outrage is monetised, depth is penalised, and complexity is uncomfortable. The warnings have been issued for decades now and yet the consumption continues. 

Cinema makes the scapegoating easiest to see. Films like Dil Se..., Devdas, DDLJ, or The Lunchbox return into people’s social media feed, not as objects of interrogation but as relics, where they are stripped of their context and sold as “the” emotional truth. Contemporary cinema too barely hides this inheritance. From Rockstar to Aashiqui 2 to Saiyaara, the template remains the same, where pain is mistaken for depth and sameness is sold as sincerity. And mind you, these repetitions are not audience-led accidents. They are institutional decisions, safe bets made by studios, financiers, and platforms that know nostalgia travels further and faster than risk. The examples are too many, the space too little! 

Music follows the same logic. What is marketed today as the advent of techno Bhajans, or revival of electronic cool remixes, or endless versions of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sa’ab, is often little more than a return to old material. Remix culture did not begin with reels or algorithms of today. It flourished decades ago, when old superhit songs were stripped of context and rebuilt for dance floors. The “millennials” would remember DJ Aqeel, Bombay Vikings, Bally Sagoo, etc who birthed the remixed versions of Asha Bhonsle, Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore, and Rafi. That cycle never ended, it only grew more confident. It’s just that today — repetition no longer pretends to innovate, it just declares itself a “vibe” and moves on. 

And when seen this way, it is at this inflection point that GenZ is often placed in the witness box as the primary offender, the generation accused of demanding culture that is instantly digestible, endlessly scrollable, yet emotionally lightweight. But this is also where the argument collapses. 

GenZ did not design the platforms that reward brevity over depth. They did not build the algorithms that punish attention and monetise outrage. These systems were constructed, refined, and normalised by older generations of editors, executives, producers, and advertisers who understood precisely how to turn repetition into profit. GenZ did not design this menu, it simply consumes what has been endlessly served. 

And let’s be clear here. There never was a golden era where culture was universally braver, deeper, or more honest. The literary critic Terry Eagleton once warned that capitalism has an extraordinary ability to absorb rebellion and turn it into style. Postmodern culture, he argued, creates rebels without causes, individuals who feel oppositional but never locate the system they are opposing. That diagnosis feels uncomfortably true even today, and maybe more so vehement. The result is a generation that appears radical in tone but constrained in outcome, great at performance but extremely cautious about rupture.

But blaming the next generation is easier than confronting one’s own surrender. It is easier to accuse the youth of not creating something new than to admit that those in power stopped insisting on better. 

This is why blaming GenZ feels misleading and extremely convenient, more so like a rant of a “bitter old uncle”. It suggests age-driven change when the real engine is cultural exhaustion. So the question remains, is the whole identity war in itself an old genie but perhaps in a new bottle?