Gen Z Can Reclaim Meaning in a Chaotic Society

In a globally bestseller book, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, Héctor García (a Spanish-born software engineer who lived in Japan for over two decades) and Francesc Miralles (a Spanish author-journalist and specialist in psychology) explore a profound philosophy centred on finding your raison d'être – the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. It is a beautiful, harmonious framework for a balanced existence. Yet, standing inside a Bangladeshi university classroom, lecturing to a room of visibly exhausted faces with hopelessness, discussing Ikigai feels almost cruel, if not entirely dystopian. For a generation trapped in the crushing gears of a post-humanist, hyper-capitalist reality, searching for a blissful life or a meaningful purpose is not just ambitious; it feels like a dark joke. How would you find your “reason for being” when the very ground beneath your feet is constantly shifting, and the state machinery seems engineered to drain your humanity?

Just two years ago, Bangladeshi Gen Z stood at a historic crossroads. There was a tangible hope in the air following the 2024 mass uprising. Young people, in particular, expected substantial changes in a historically toxic political culture and demanded qualitative reforms across the state machinery. If you critically look at the period of interim transition to the present political landscape under the newly elected government, you can feel a suffocating silence. Walk through any university campus or sit down at a local restaurant or café, and you will find a social rupture around. And the sentiment is identical: disappointment, helplessness, and a profound sense of betrayal. Look closely at almost all sectors, and you will fail to notice anything positive about the way things are going. Despite major political overhauls and new promises, the core political culture remains rotten, bitterly conflicting, and fundamentally detached from the citizens it claims to represent.

This is no longer just a political crisis; it has mutated into an existential one. When chatting with students randomly inside the classroom or out in the corridors, a heartbreakingly consistent theme emerges: many of them want to leave the country. But if you press them on the specifics, most of them don’t even know exactly why or where they are running to. It seems to be an instinctual, animalistic flight response. They are deeply concerned about social security, worried about their future, and entirely justified in their fear.

The political failure has turned into a severe economic trap. The structural decay of the state has allowed a hyper-capitalist, crony economy to flourish unchecked. With the inflation shifting to 8 or 9 per cent, the ground reality for households has become a painful squeeze. The job market has contracted; structural unemployment has transformed into a chronic epidemic, with hundreds of thousands more workers constantly at risk of losing their livelihoods. The education system, focused on rote memorisation/certification rather than critical thought, offers less hope or very limited practical tools for survival. Living life itself has become the ultimate challenge. In an environment where basic survival is a daily battle, trying to find a meaning in life could feel like a luxury reserved only for the elite or the privileged.

But here lies the trap where the failures of the state and the greed of the market converge. In our desperation to escape political instability, we are blindly sprinting into an even more dangerous paradigm: a post-humanist consumer culture. We live in an era where technology, market metrics, and capitalist efficiency dictate our worth. When the state fails to ensure social security, the market driven by capitalist consumerism controls the human psyche with a false promise of salvation. It tells our youth that their value is entirely tied to their productivity, their corporate resume, their LinkedIn network, and their purchasing power.

This is how we are losing our human identity by degrees. We are rapidly transitioning from citizens into mere consumers. Even we have simultaneously become products of power in a hyper-capitalist society. Your frustrations are actively monetised. Your attention is harvested by algorithms designed to keep you angry, detached, and insecure. When you lose trust in political leaders and completely lose confidence in the government, the market fills that void by telling you to buy more, achieve more, and optimise yourself like a piece of software. You are taught to treat your own mind and body as a startup that needs to be constantly upgraded. This is a hallmark of the post-human era – where the human element is drifting away, and we become data points serving a broken economic machine. Besides, loneliness among the youths has been epidemic across the globe.

To find true happiness and reclaim life, Bangladeshi Gen Z should urgently pivot toward a radical, timeless philosophical view: “Less is More.”

This is not a call for passive surrender or lazy resignation. Rather, “Less is More” is an effective, countercultural act of rebellion against both the political theatre and the capitalist meat grinder (profit over humanity). It means choosing to decouple your self-worth from the chaotic, corrupt external systems that always seek to exploit you. If the state machinery cannot offer you stability, and the job market refuses to give you dignity, you must stop allowing them to define your internal peace. You need to reject the hyper-competitive narrative that forces you to consider your peers as rivals in a scarce survival market.

True wealth and purpose are found when we minimise our dependency on artificial consumer needs and maximise our investment in human connections, community engagement or solidarity, and intellectual autonomy. When you stop measuring your life by the metrics of a crony capitalist society that views you as an expendable product, you instantly reclaim your power. You transition from a helpless victim of a broken system into an architect of your own internal reality or strength.

We need to clearly understand a harsh global truth: the scarcity of jobs and economic precarity are not unique to our borders; this has been a global phenomenon. Fleeing the country is an illusion of escape that often leads to the same hyper-capitalist grinder on foreign shores. The true path forward lies right here. Post-uprising Bangladesh stands at a delicate crossroads where we can no longer afford the luxury of endless political clashes or destructive conflicts. The ultimate rebellion for Gen Z is not to abandon the ship but to anchor down and take ownership of the blueprint.

Your purpose in life is to become the architects of the nation you fought for. By channelling your frustration into visible constructive action or effort, you hold the power to build a better Bangladesh – an independent state anchored by a resilient, self-sufficient economy, rooted in a just, equitable society, and fortified by guaranteed public safety for all citizens. Do not let a broken, corrupt system convince you that you are helpless. The power to redefine our future does not belong to the rotten political culture or the ruthless market. It belongs to the generation that can dare demand substantial positive changes in the state machinery. Stay resilient, refuse to be reduced to mere products, and let your shared purpose be the catalyst that will certainly help transform Bangladesh from a land of survival into a home of shared prosperity.
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The writer is an Associate Professor of the Department of English at Stamford University Bangladesh.

He can be contacted at [email protected]