Inertia with a Capital I

December 2023

Psychology

Part 3 of a series on self-identity and technology.

Two videos went viral on TikTok within the same week. The first showed a Gen Z woman talking about the stress of managing work, life admin, and basic self-care. The second showed a different Gen Z woman explaining her frustration about student debt and limited job prospects despite doing everything she was told to do.

The comment sections were predictable. Older users blamed character flaws — entitlement, laziness, inability to cope. Younger users blamed systemic failures — precarious work, unaffordable housing, deliberately misleading advice from previous generations. Both camps were certain they were right. Neither camp noticed the pattern.

What's actually happening in both comment sections is the Fundamental Attribution Error. When we explain our own failures, we reach for situational factors — the economy, the housing market, my boss, my circumstances. When we explain other people's failures, we reach for dispositional factors — their character, their choices, their attitude. We excuse ourselves through context and condemn others through personality.

The generational version of this is particularly well-structured. Older people can explain Gen Z's struggles as products of their generation's character (entitled, screen-addicted, unwilling to start at the bottom) while explaining their own struggles as products of structural conditions (economic cycles, historical bad luck, external forces). Gen Z can explain Boomer success as products of their generation's historical circumstances (cheap housing, union jobs, social mobility) while explaining their own struggles as products of structural conditions (the same housing, same jobs, same mobility — now unavailable).

Both groups are doing the same thing: distributing credit for success to individuals and distributing blame for failure to systems, while keeping the systems they benefited from invisible.

This is what makes it politically useful. By focusing blame on the characters of younger people, older people avoid acknowledging their role in creating the conditions younger people are now navigating. They pushed people toward college when they knew college was becoming expensive. They voted for housing policies that restricted supply. They dismantled employment protections that had taken decades to build.

These aren't accusations — they're observations about collective outcomes that no individual consciously chose. The point isn't blame. The point is that the attribution error protects the systems that produced the outcomes. By making it about character, we make it impossible to examine the structure.

And this is why the inertia is so profound. Not just the economic inertia — the housing market that doesn't clear, the employment conditions that don't improve — but the epistemic inertia. The difficulty of asking "what produced this?" rather than "who is at fault for this?" is enormous, because asking the structural question threatens the story everyone has been telling about how they got where they are.

You can hold the attribution error in mind without resolving it. The conditions are real and the responses to them are real. But so is the error. And seeing it is at least a start.