Maybe It’s Not Gen Z — Maybe It’s Just Us

Lately, I’ve been seeing the same joke over and over again.

A dimly lit office.

A group of relatively young employees sitting quietly at their desks, each absorbed in their own little world.

Then someone older walks in.

They turn on the lights.

Everyone immediately reacts as if they’ve just been exposed to the sun for the first time in their lives.

The joke, of course, is about Gen Z entering the workforce.

Apparently, we’re the generation that doesn’t believe in electricity.

And honestly?

I can relate.

I can prepare an entire meal in my kitchen without turning on the lights. I’ll happily work with whatever sunlight manages to sneak through the blinds. At night, apparently the light from the microwave, the television, or whatever tiny electronic device happens to be glowing is perfectly sufficient.

My father, on the other hand, walks into the same kitchen and turns on every light available.

All of them.

At once.

If there were stadium lights installed in the ceiling, I suspect he would use those too.

And yes, my phone is permanently on Night Mode.

So perhaps the internet is right.

Maybe this really is a Gen Z thing.

Except…

I’m not entirely convinced.

Because when I ask myself why I prefer dim lighting, my answer isn’t particularly generational.

It’s much simpler.

Fear.

I Learned to Live in the Dark

I grew up with parents I love and respect deeply.

They were also… let’s call them very committed to rules.

My siblings and I had limits on how much television we could watch.

Two hours of screen time a day.

We would actually check the television schedule in the newspaper to see when our favorite programs were on.

Sugary drinks were mostly reserved for Saturdays.

Smartphones didn’t enter our lives until we were around thirteen.

There were words we weren’t supposed to say.

There were rules about how we behaved.

And then there was the most important rule of all:

Don’t wake the parents.

It didn’t matter whether it was nighttime or an afternoon nap.

If we turned on a light and woke them up, we heard about it.

If we made too much noise walking around the house during those sacred afternoon hours, we heard about that too.

So we learned.

We learned how to move quietly.

We learned how to find our way around the house without turning on the lights.

We learned which doors creaked and which ones didn’t.

We learned how to open things carefully.

Eventually, darkness stopped being an obstacle.

It became a skill.

And I think that distinction matters.

Because from the outside, someone could look at me sitting in a dark room and say:

“That’s so Gen Z.”

But they would be wrong.

At least about me.

This isn’t something I learned from my generation.

It’s something I learned from my childhood.

The Sound of a Car Door

There is another strange skill my siblings and I developed.

We can recognize our parents’ car doors.

No, seriously.

A television can be playing.

Music can be playing in the background.

There can be people talking.

And somehow, the sound of the car door closing outside still registers immediately.

That particular sound can cut through everything.

It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since I lived under the same rules.

Some part of the brain still seems to recognize it.

They’re home.

It’s almost funny when you think about it.

We developed these tiny survival skills that were completely normal in our childhood.

And then we carried them into adulthood without necessarily realizing it.

That’s how habits work.

They don’t always announce themselves.

Sometimes they simply become part of you.

So Is This a Gen Z Trait?

Maybe.

There may genuinely be generational differences in the way younger people interact with light, technology, screens, and physical environments.

Perhaps growing up surrounded by glowing screens has changed our relationship with brightness.

Perhaps younger people are more comfortable spending hours in dimly lit environments.

Perhaps there really is something generational happening.

But even if there is, that doesn’t explain every individual.

And that’s where I think we sometimes make a mistake with generational labels.

We notice a pattern and immediately assume we’ve found the explanation.

Gen Z does this.

Millennials do that.

Boomers think this way.

And suddenly, an entire group of millions of people becomes an explanation for individual behavior.

But a pattern isn’t necessarily a cause.

Two people can behave identically for completely different reasons.

One person might prefer a dark room because they’ve spent their entire life staring at screens.

Another might have sensitive eyes.

Someone else might simply find bright light unpleasant.

And someone like me?

I might just have spent my childhood learning that turning on the kitchen light at midnight was a very bad idea.

The behavior is the same.

The story behind it isn’t.

We Are More Than the Labels We Give Ourselves

This is what makes me hesitant about the way we use generations.

Generational categories can be useful.

They can help researchers identify broad social changes.

They can help us understand how technology, economics, politics, or cultural shifts affect people who grew up during the same period.

But they become misleading when we start treating them as personality types.

Being born in a particular decade doesn’t give someone a single shared childhood.

Family matters.

Geography matters.

Economic circumstances matter.

Parenting matters.

Culture matters.

Religion matters.

Personality matters.

And sometimes, something as small as whether your parents were sleeping in the next room can matter.

That last one probably won’t make it into a demographic report.

But it shaped me.

Maybe We Should Stop Explaining People So Quickly

I think that’s what bothers me most about these trends.

Not the jokes themselves.

They’re funny.

I even recognize myself in them.

What bothers me is how quickly we turn a funny observation into an explanation.

“Gen Z does this because they’re Gen Z.”

And that’s it.

Question answered.

Except it isn’t.

People are complicated.

We carry childhood habits we don’t remember learning.

We react to things because of experiences other people know nothing about.

We develop preferences for reasons that may be invisible from the outside.

Sometimes we don’t even know why we do something until we stop and ask ourselves.

That’s what happened to me with the lights.

I could have simply accepted the joke:

Of course I prefer darkness. I’m Gen Z.

But when I actually thought about it, I realized that my relationship with darkness had very little to do with my generation.

It had to do with a childhood where silence and darkness were skills.

And maybe that’s the larger lesson.

We love categories because they make people easier to understand.

But people aren’t categories.

A generation can describe a pattern.

It cannot tell you someone’s story.

So the next time you see someone doing something that seems stereotypically “Gen Z,” “Millennial,” or “Boomer,” maybe pause before deciding you know why.

Maybe they’re doing it because of their generation.

Maybe they’re doing it because of their family.

Maybe because of their culture.

Maybe because of something that happened twenty years ago.

Or maybe they just like sitting in the dark.

You don’t always need a generational explanation.

Sometimes, you just need to ask:

What happened to this person that made this feel normal to them?