At the beginning of the 2000s, a publication in the United Kingdom popularized the term NEET, causing it to spread globally to bring attention to a situation that, despite being a cry for help, soon turned into an insult against Millennials. Now, the Generation Z is facing the same problem.
Back then, the United Kingdom’s call to offer new opportunities to NEET youth, who were not in education, employment, or training processes, was heeded by countries like Japan, China, and South Korea. However, in other regions, it became a subject of mockery.
Generation Z are the new NEET
Although we seemed to have moved past it, the equivalent term we embraced in countries like Spain as Ni-Ni is now resurfacing with the same intention of labeling Generation Z as a group that neither studies nor works. Just as it became a defining feature of a whole generation in the 2000s, the challenges of entering the job market for Gen-Z have reignited the issue.
The International Labor Organization states that one-fifth of the Generation Z are NEET. This translates to 3 million young people in the case of the United Kingdom and over half a million individuals aged 15 to 24 in Spain. While the numbers are equally alarming, it’s important to remember that we are still far from the situation Millennials faced a decade ago, when the economic crisis led to 22.5% of the youth falling into that category.
The main reason for the resurgence of the Ni-Ni phenomenon is primarily due to inflation that has skyrocketed the cost of living to basic levels, from food to gasoline. The fact that housing and rental prices are increasing twice as fast as incomes poses an uncertainty that seems easy to give in to.
If the issue for Ni-Ni in the early 2000s was the difficulty of entering a job market with more demand than supply, the problem with NEET in the Generation Z lies in the fact that, with the mental health challenges at play, many are considering that saving or working may not lead to anything.
After all, why deal with the stress and challenges of the present if the future doesn’t seem to promise a reward? It’s essentially a vicious cycle, but one that particularly worries mental health associations: “The lack of youth employment due to health issues is a real and growing trend; it is worrisome that young people in their early twenties, just starting their adult life, are more likely to be unemployed due to health problems than those in their forties.”
Image | Andrea Piacquadio
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