Gen Z & the Revolution| American echoes, Egyptian wails

I am late to the Gen Z & the Revolution party because participation is a luxury, hard to afford. Like most of my generation in Masr—not “Egypt” as a brand, but Egypt as lived reality—I spend my days chasing a livelihood.

This is the post-revolution era. It may resemble what came before, but its terms are new, especially in their severity. Reflection has become a luxury, one that requires extra struggle atop daily exhaustion.

It is difficult to secure your bread in the very field the government touts as its flagship achievement: architecture. Entry-level salaries hover around the minimum wage, while working hours exceed 10 a day—excluding the sleepless stretches before deadlines.

If you work on government projects, such as the New Administrative Capital, all of this still applies—along with the mediocrity of the final product into which you pour your days. Projects of enormous scale are rushed in the name of speed. Recent graduates shoulder the burden. Effort goes unrecognized. Revisions are arbitrary, often born of ignorance. And you are expected to listen and obey.

If you are a migrant from outside the nation’s capital, as I am, you face high rents for poor housing with minimal services. If your finances are tighter, you find apartments carved into narrow rooms, dormitories with up to six beds or spaces partitioned with wooden boards like livestock pens—“No rest for the weary.”

What is to be done?

I agree that the mass labeled Gen Z is not cohesive. But why? Is it because the gap between young people in Indonesia, the United States and Egypt is vast in structure, economy and opportunity? Or because I see myself as open to others, yet refuse to exile the conservative Salafi youth—the so-called “closed” type—from my generation?

Perhaps neither. Perhaps it is because I begin adulthood certain I will spend it paying for survival—for myself and my family. Even modest stability, even forming a family, feels remote. Meanwhile, others my age, residents of manicured “Egypt,” harvest opportunities without seeking them. The distance between us is stark.

I could recount my childhood memories of the revolution, few as they are. But I am consumed by its consequences, because they define my daily life. Chief among them is the death of its romance. January has been reduced to a punchline in cafés and late-night gatherings. Oct. 7 made that painfully clear.

Were the repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood not bloody? Was the bombing of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital not seismic? Yet for the powerless, tragedy becomes an anecdote recalled before ordering a second coffee.

With romance died belief in public action. Some ask, “Action toward what?” Many of us look to the January 2011 generation, hoping to inherit experience. Instead, each seeks their reflection: the socialist turns to the socialist, the Islamist to the Islamist, the indifferent to the indifferent. They recycle the same lessons and share the same paralysis—despair and its narcotics, individualism and its limits, slow quasi-collective work sustained by only faint hope in us.

We are more cautious. We did not inherit Egypt’s political catechisms, nor do we argue over Nasser and Sadat. Or perhaps we are simply fragmented—absorbing an American-style identity logic. Each of us swims in a single identity: Egyptian, Muslim, Christian, agnostic, queer, woman—forgetting that the Egyptian contains multitudes.

We may also have absorbed another American trait: the reflex to hate. If you oppose personal freedoms, I reject you. If you defend them, I reject you. Yet we all live in the same shack of repression, sparring like roosters and celebrating hollow victories. Hatred is a luxury we cannot afford when everyone’s life is precarious.

“The January Revolution was slogans without substance,” some of my peers argue. But we refuse to move without substance. Substance requires education, culture, dignified living standards and narrower class divides. It requires ending suspicion of the other and the daily race against hunger. We cannot deliver all this—and yet we insist on waiting for it.

This phase is marked by identity conflict reduced to surface markers: Kemetists seeking ancient lineage; Islamists longing for caliphs; women redefining men as beasts in search of liberation; men rummaging through tradition for dignity; Christians appealing for rescue somewhere between the military boot and papal robes. All debate online. None move. Still we repeat: no more empty slogans.

Fear of sacrifice

To speak of January is to confront today’s disorientation—no longer merely the outcome of domestic decisions, but part of a global turbulence. With every tremor at the US Federal Reserve, the groan grows louder in Egypt.

I fault the revolutionary generation for elevating slogans over structure—for failing to build organization into a political program, and that into an economic and urban vision people could trust. I fault them, too, for monopolizing the revolutionary moment and condescending to those who did not join when “the dream, once, touched them.”

The revolution also devoured many of its own. They wore T-shirts declaring themselves “martyrs on demand.” Those immense sacrifices have yielded a present defined by fear—fear of sacrificing even a fragment of personal life, let alone life itself.

Today’s prevailing instinct is individual escape. Some seek it in drugs. Others in personal fulfillment, elusive in Egypt. Some chase American-style consumption—though here it rarely merits the name. Others imagine salvation through migration to a white world closing its doors, in a global order where goods move freely and people do not.

If I assign blame, I must also blame the overwhelming majority who entrusted the country to heroic, savior generals, making collective action harder still. I blame the fear of the “other,” the disdain for minorities and the persistent urge to retreat backward.

Yet our generation knows perspective matters. Judging from outside—or only from within my own convictions—erases context. Understanding does not cancel judgment, but it tempers it. It may open a small space for dialogue, and from dialogue, perhaps action.

Or so I hope.