ZAK / SELFHOOD

The questions that started this weren't the ones we set out to ask. They were the ones that kept going wrong in other briefs.

I was running research for various clients; standard qualitative work, the kind of ethnographic interviews I'd done hundreds of times. And the answers I was getting to what I thought were the simplest, most straightforward questions had started to not make sense.

"What do you do for a living?" Silence. Then: "Umm, I don't really know." This from someone who, over the next forty minutes, would describe running a Depop store, creating TikTok content for a small but devoted audience, doing freelance illustration, and occasionally picking up shifts at a café. She wasn't unemployed. She wasn't confused. She just didn't have a word for what she was, because the categories I was offering (employed, self-employed, freelance, student) didn't describe her reality.

"What's your biggest income stream?" "No idea, honestly. It changes every month." Not said with anxiety or embarrassment. Said with a shrug, the way you might describe the weather. Some months it was Patreon. Some months it was resale. Some months it was a brand deal that came out of nowhere. The idea of a primary income source; a stable, identifiable thing you could point to and say "this is how I make my money"; simply didn't apply.

"Where do you shop?" "I mean, I buy and sell on the same platforms, so…" The question assumed a distinction between buying and selling that didn't exist for her. Depop wasn't a shop she visited. It was an economy she participated in, simultaneously as buyer, seller, curator, and customer.

"Do you consider yourself a content creator?" A long pause. "I make content, but I wouldn't say that's what I am." The label implied something more fixed and more central than the reality. Content creation was one of several things she did, none of which individually constituted a career but which collectively constituted a life.

"What's your monthly budget?" Laughter. "That's not really how it works."

I was asking twentieth-century questions and getting twenty-first-century answers. The frameworks I was using (job titles, income streams, consumer segments, the basic vocabulary of market research) had been built for a world where people had a job, earned a salary, and spent it on things. The young people I was talking to had quietly exited that world and built something else in its place. They just hadn't told anyone, because nobody had thought to ask the right questions.

These weren't isolated encounters. They were happening across briefs, across clients, across markets. And our clients were noticing the same dissonance from their end; engagement patterns that didn't match their models, purchasing behaviours that contradicted their segmentation, entire audience cohorts that seemed to have slipped out of the frameworks that were supposed to describe them.

We embarked on the study to understand what we were looking at. 150+ young people aged 16 to 30, spread across 19 countries, from a deliberately broad range of socio-economic backgrounds, genders, and experiences. The methodology was intentionally varied (interviews, ethnography, focus groups, written tasks) because we suspected that what we were looking at was too multifaceted to be captured by a single approach. We covered everything from social media behaviour to spending habits, attitudes toward work and income, ethical concerns, and the relationship between values and purchasing decisions.

What emerged was something I hadn't anticipated. These seemingly disparate behaviours weren't separate phenomena. They were interconnected expressions of a single, coherent shift. The social and financial pressures of the pandemic had intensified tensions that were already deep-seated for this generation, and what we were observing was their collective response; not just adapting to those pressures but, in many cases, turning them into opportunities. They were building something new. An economy that operated on fundamentally different principles from the one they'd inherited.

The framework that organised our findings identified three major structural shifts. Each one, taken individually, was significant. Taken together, they described a generation that had quietly rebuilt the relationship between commerce, culture, and community from the ground up.

From Top-Down to Peer-to-Peer

The first shift was about power, and specifically about who holds it in the creator economy.

To understand what had changed, you need to understand what came before. The social media platforms that shaped Millennial experience (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) were, at their core, networks of consumers. The gap between creator and consumer was narrow; the difference between scrolling Twitter and writing a tweet, between seeing a Facebook post and commenting on it. These platforms emphasised the social in social media. They created networks where individuals could amass large followings but had few avenues for direct monetisation. As a result, brand deals drove the bulk of creator income, and since brands prioritised scale and reach, money concentrated in the hands of the very largest voices.

Next Gen had a fundamentally different relationship with these platforms. For context: 25% of TikTok's entire user base were born after Facebook opened to non-college users. The OG platforms weren't their spaces. Boomer parents with different values and a significant toxicity problem had made them exclusionary. Of the legacy platforms, only YouTube maintained a genuine pull; which told us something important about how young people thought about these spaces. If Millennials prioritised social, Next Gen prioritised media. These weren't networks of consumers. They were networks of creators.

TikTok had changed the economics of this in ways that were hard to overstate. By dramatically lowering the barrier to its creator fund (a cumulative 100,000 views in the last 30 days; a staggeringly small number by TikTok standards and far lower than YouTube's threshold), the platform had shattered the perceived barriers that prevented young people from seriously considering content creation as a source of income. A whole generation of creators who started channels during lockdown for fun suddenly found themselves earning money. "Currently make little to nothing off of TikTok," Denise, nineteen, told us, "but it has helped my boyfriend and me to pay for bills and groceries, which is already very surprising for me. I never thought that I could be one of those people who do this."

But here was the tension. TikTok's creator fund gave out far less money than YouTube's ad-revenue model ($238 million versus roughly $15 billion annually). Worse, it didn't scale as the platform grew; the value of a view decreased as more creators were added to the fund. What we were left with was an entire generation of content creators who took their work seriously but couldn't monetise it at scale through conventional means.

The response to this constraint was where it got genuinely interesting. Rather than chasing scale (more followers, more views, more reach), Next Gen had developed what I came to think of as the Minimum Viable Product model. Small was good. Micro-influencers reigned. "I have a really small community but it makes me money," Maelle, twenty-four, explained. "Not many people are making the kind of content that I make and that really helps."

The logic was elegant. By pursuing hyper-niche topics rather than trending content, creators could become big fish in small ponds with genuine longevity, rather than minnows in a sea of trends that might not be trending tomorrow. And because these small communities were deeply engaged, they were willing to pay directly for content through platforms like Patreon, Twitch subscriptions, and direct purchases; bypassing the brand-deal model entirely.

This was a structural inversion. The Millennial creator economy was top-down: large audiences, brand-funded, advertising-dependent. The Next Gen creator economy was peer-to-peer: small audiences, community-funded, direct-to-consumer. The power had shifted from the platforms and the brands to the creators and their communities. And it was expanding beyond content; creators with small followings were pivoting into selling physical goods, services, and expertise directly to their audiences, leveraging the low cost of online retail to build micro-businesses that would have been impossible a decade earlier.

From Commentators to Change Makers

The second shift was about the relationship between belief and action.

Millennials and Next Gen both saw social media as having enormous potential to change the world. But where Millennials had tried to comment their way to change (declarative statements, shared articles, hashtag activism), Next Gen was blurring the line between digital activism and real-world action. The distinction was philosophical before it was practical: this generation didn't just want to express opinions about the world. They wanted to materially alter it.

Nowhere was this more visible than in the collision between the anti-work movement and hustle culture; two phenomena that appeared diametrically opposed but turned out to be expressions of the same underlying impulse.

Anti-work, rooted in anarchist and socialist economic critique, had grown from a radical fringe idea into a mainstream conversation centred on the r/antiwork subreddit. Its focus had softened and broadened from pure ideology into a wider dialogue about working conditions, labour organising, and personal narratives about quitting hostile workplaces. At the same time, hustle culture continued to exert enormous influence; the pressure to always be working harder, faster, stronger, to monetise every skill and passion.

The apparent contradiction dissolved once you listened to the key voices driving hustle culture. Next Gen weren't hearing from hustle culture employees working for other people. They were hearing from entrepreneurs working for themselves. The takeaway was the rejection of traditional employment; working hard for yourself was commendable; working hard for someone else was wage slavery. In this sense, hustle culture and anti-work had far more in common than they appeared to. Both were rejections of the conventional employer-employee relationship. Both were assertions of autonomy. Both were responses to a world where the social safety net felt unreliable and young people felt they'd been left to fend for themselves.

This orientation toward action rather than commentary had sharp implications for how brands engaged this audience. The research surfaced a deep and sophisticated cynicism toward cause marketing; what the participants consistently identified as woke-washing. "I definitely think brands should take a viewpoint on social issues," Jai, twenty-one, told us. "However, I do think it's very hard for campaigns to seem sincere because a lot of the time it does just seem like it's a bit of a money grab."

The cynicism wasn't performative. It was informed. Andrew, nineteen, was blunt: "I mistrust most brands; my mum works in PR so I know what companies will do to make us feel that they're working a certain way." The generation that had grown up watching brands pivot to rainbow logos every June and post black squares in solidarity had developed a finely calibrated filter for distinguishing genuine commitment from marketing self-indulgence.

And the demonetisation problem made it worse. The same platforms on which brands were performing allyship were systematically demonetising the creators from marginalised communities that those brands claimed to support. Black creators, LGBTQ+ creators, creators discussing social justice; all reported disproportionate algorithmic suppression. "The amount of creators that I know of, Black women or queer women, who make exactly the same content as me, get banned by the algorithm," Andrea, twenty-two, told us. "There are so many things that get flagged that shouldn't be." The hypocrisy was visible and it was corrosive.

The implication for brands was uncomfortable but clear: spending on solidarity (supporting small creators directly, investing in marginalised voices, embodying values in business practices rather than marketing campaigns) mattered infinitely more than speaking about solidarity. Next Gen weren't looking for brands that said the right things. They were looking for brands that did them.

From Linear to Circular

The third shift was about the lifecycle of objects and the nature of value itself.

The conscious consumerism of Millennials (buy less, buy better, buy ethical) had evolved into something more structurally ambitious in the Next Gen Economy. Driven by a combination of financial pressure and genuine ethical conviction, this generation had built a circular economy; not as an aspiration or a marketing concept, but as a lived practice.

Resale was at the centre of it. Over the three years preceding our research, reselling and thrifting had grown 21 times faster than the retail apparel market. Next Gen were driving this, with 45% growth in second-hand buying in two years. The stigma that had historically attached to thrifting had evaporated entirely; buying second-hand was now associated with authenticity, uniqueness, and taste rather than economic necessity. "It sounds like I have a huge array of luxury clothing that costs a fortune," Lewis, twenty-three, told us. "I don't. I am a huge proponent of upcycling and second-hand clothing. There's a cashmere Etro coat for £90 on Vestiaire Collective that has my name on it; and I will rock it like it is brand new."

But this wasn't purely idealistic. Profit was a major driver. The resale market offered a chance not just to recoup costs but to generate income. Platforms like Depop had captured the artfulness of thrifting and upcycling, while StockX had captured the speculative dimension; buying what would be desirable tomorrow, not just what was desirable today. Drop culture had turbocharged this, with limited-batch releases from brands like Supreme creating massive secondary-market demand.

There was genuine tension here, and the participants didn't shy away from it. Morgan, twenty-two, was emphatic: "I NEVER buy from resellers. I hate them! It ruins the fun of the trainer hype and the passion for trainer collections." The exclusionary dynamics of resale (working-class kids priced out of sneakers by speculators) were visible and felt. The ethical complexity was driving Next Gen away from mainstream drop culture and into niches; the same movement toward the long tail that we'd seen in content creation.

The pattern was consistent across all three shifts. Scale concentrates power and creates exclusion. Niches distribute power and create community. Whether we were looking at content creation, activism, or commerce, the structural logic was the same: Next Gen were building systems that were smaller, more distributed, more communal, and more directly connected than the ones they'd inherited.

And at the speculative frontier, emerging technology was extending this logic further. NFTs (at that point still in their hype phase, before the bubble's deflation) and retail investing (the GameStop short squeeze being the most dramatic example) demonstrated something important about this generation's comfort with financial experimentation and their willingness to weaponise market mechanisms for both profit and protest. The GameStop episode in particular; in which amateur traders on r/wallstreetbets conspired to drive up a stock price specifically to inflict losses on hedge funds; was digital direct action of a kind that had no precedent. For many participants, getting rich wasn't the point. Demonstrating collective power was.

The Organising Principle

Underneath all three shifts sat a single insight that I kept returning to throughout the research. Previous generations processed the world through binary frameworks: this or that, work or play, commerce or community, consumption or creation. Next Gen operates through a fundamentally different logic: this and that. The boundaries that older generations treated as fixed (between earning and creating, between buying and selling, between activism and entertainment, between community and commerce) had dissolved; not as a philosophical position but as a practical reality.

This is what made the Next Gen Economy genuinely new rather than merely different. It wasn't that young people had different preferences within existing structures. It was that they were building different structures entirely. The creator who monetises a hyper-niche community through direct patronage while selling upcycled goods on Depop while participating in labour organising on Reddit isn't operating in three separate domains. They're operating in one integrated economy where commerce, culture, community, and conviction are inseparable.

For brands, the implications were profound and, for many, uncomfortable. You cannot participate in the Next Gen Economy by marketing to it. You can only participate by being part of it; by genuinely co-creating with audiences, by embodying values in practice rather than performing them in campaigns, by adding to micro-communities rather than extracting from them, and by understanding that the generation you're trying to reach has already built an economic system that doesn't need you. The brands that thrive in this economy will be the ones that earn their place within it. The ones that don't will keep optimising their media spend and wondering where the audience went.

This research was conducted through ZAK's Selfhood platform in 2022, encompassing 150+ participants aged 16-30 across 19 countries.