When boomers were growing up, community wasn’t something you had to seek out; the way life worked built it in. You married young, you went to church on Sundays, your neighbors showed up when someone fell ill, and if you fell apart, there were people around who noticed. That world is gone. Millennials and Gen Z inherited what was left after the social scaffolding was stripped away, and nothing equivalent took its place. What filled the gap was screens, algorithms, gig work, student debt, and a food supply laced with synthetic chemicals that didn’t exist when their grandparents were children. And it is killing them. Not as a metaphor, but in horrific, measurable deaths that are climbing faster than anyone predicted.
It’s not happening in a single dramatic wave but through a slow accumulation of despair, isolation, and biological disruption that no one alive has faced at this scale. Researchers now use the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge in fatalities from drug overdoses, alcohol, and suicide that has hit young adults harder than any other age group over the last two decades.
But despair alone doesn’t account for what’s happening to their bodies, because what’s in the food, the water, the packaging, and now the bloodstream is doing its own damage. Millennials and Gen Z absorbed endocrine-disrupting chemicals from conception onward. The first generations to carry that kind of saturation through every stage of development, and the health consequences are only beginning to surface.
This isn’t one crisis; it’s a psychological collapse and biological contamination converging on the same people at the same time, people who were told they’d be fine if they just worked hard enough.
The World That Held Boomers Together
Boomers grew up inside a social order that most of them didn’t think twice about. Marriage came early because the median age for a first wedding in the 1960s was 20 for women and 22 for men. So most people had a domestic anchor before they turned 25. Church attendance was just as embedded, with more than half of them showing up to services regularly during their formative years. And because these habits overlapped rather than existing in isolation. They created an environment where people saw each other often enough that someone’s absence became a signal on its own.
None of this was perfect. Boomer-era institutions were exclusionary, conformist, and built around a narrow template that punished anyone who didn’t fit it. Society expected women to organize their lives around marriage, whether they wanted to or not. Racial segregation still ran through churches and neighborhoods, and the pressure to conform left plenty of people suffering behind closed doors.
But even something flawed does its job when it forces regular contact between people. It creates a sense of obligation to something outside yourself, and that obligation works as a kind of informal surveillance. The safety net wasn’t formal or well-designed. but it was there. And for most boomers, that meant hitting rock bottom didn’t mean hitting it alone.
What Replaced It Was Nothing
All of that fell away for everyone who came after. A 2022 report from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that only 29% of millennials attended religious services regularly while growing up. Compared to 52% of seniors, and nearly a third never went to church with their family at all.
Marriage moved in the same direction. Shifting from something most people did in their early 20s to something that happens in the late 20s or early 30s. If it happens at all. A third of Gen Z and 35% of millennials now identify as religiously unaffiliated. Compared to 19% of boomers and 15% of the Silent Generation, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, and the trajectory hasn’t reversed.
The same AEI research found that 35% of millennials and 39% of Gen Z reported feeling lonely as children. Compared to just 17% of boomers. And when researchers accounted for marriage, religious participation, and geographic rootedness, the loneliness gap between age groups nearly vanished.
Millennials who have those things aren’t meaningfully lonelier than boomers who have them. It was never about temperament or some flaw built into younger people. The connective tissue that used to hold communities together dissolved, and nothing took its place.
When Loneliness Becomes a Cause of Death
Isolation stops being a feeling and starts becoming a cause of death at a certain point. And for millennials and Gen Z, that line crossed years ago. A 2019 report from Trust for America’s Health and the Well Being Trust found that between 1999 and 2017, drug-related deaths among 18 to 34-year-olds jumped by 400%. Opioid overdose death rates in that age group climbed by more than 500%. Deaths involving synthetic opioids rose by 6,000%, and between 2007 and 2017, alcohol-related deaths among millennials rose 69%, drug-induced deaths rose 108%, and suicide deaths rose 35%.
The report tied all of it to financial pressure that never let up. Student loan debt now consumes nearly half of young borrowers’ income, housing costs have outpaced wages for two decades, and many millennials launched their careers during the Great Recession and never fully recovered. The communities that once absorbed some of that strain have largely disappeared.
Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gave this a name. In 2015, Case and the Nobel laureate Deaton coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe what they were seeing. Americans are dying not from age or illness but from lives that have stopped working.
Younger adults are carrying financial and emotional weight that their parents never did. Without the communal ties that once helped people hold together under pressure. In 2017 alone, roughly 36,000 millennials died from causes classified under that term. And that number doesn’t account for the people still alive but living with depression, substance use, and anxiety, which often worsens when there’s nobody around to notice.
A Food Supply That’s Rewriting Their Biology
The psychological collapse is only half of what’s happening because the other half is chemical, and it started before most millennials were born. The body runs on hormones. They tell it how to grow, when to develop, how to regulate everything from metabolism to reproduction, and the system that produces them is exquisitely sensitive to interference. Endocrine disruptors are synthetic chemicals that hijack the signaling. Either by mimicking hormones the body recognizes or by blocking the real ones from doing their job.
Bisphenol A, a compound used to harden plastics, lined the baby bottles millennials drank from. Phthalates, which make plastics soft and flexible, saturated their food packaging. PFAS coated their cookware, their school lunch trays, and their drinking water. A 2024 report from the Endocrine Society and the International Pollutants Elimination Network found that high exposure during fetal development and childhood can leave lasting damage to reproductive health, metabolic function, and cancer risk.
What makes this an age-specific problem is timing. Hormones control organ formation during the fetal stage and early childhood. So disruption during those windows can permanently alter how the body develops. Millennials and Gen Z grew up as the first generations absorbing these chemicals from conception through their entire childhoods. That exposure is now showing up in their bodies.
Girls are reaching puberty earlier than anyone has ever recorded. Sperm counts have dropped by more than 50% since the 1970s, according to a meta-analysis by Levine and colleagues. And rates of infertility, obesity, diabetes, and hormone-sensitive cancers are climbing in younger age groups at rates that diet and exercise alone can’t explain.
Plastic in the Bloodstream
The chemicals aren’t the only problem. The plastic itself is showing up inside people. Microplastics, tiny fragments smaller than a fifth of an inch, have been found in virtually every organ and fluid in the human body. Studies published between 2021 and 2024 detected them in blood, semen, breast milk, and placental tissue. A Stanford Medicine investigation found Teflon particles lodged deep inside children’s tonsil tissue, not sitting on the surface but wedged within the organ itself.
The clearest evidence of what this means came from a 2024 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Marfella and colleagues examined patients who underwent surgery to remove plaque from their carotid arteries. Of the 257 patients who completed follow-up, 58% had polyethylene lodged in their arterial plaque. Over a mean follow-up period of nearly 34 months, patients with microplastics in P plaque had a 4.5 times higher risk of heart attack, stroke, or death. Compared to those whose plaque contained no plastic. That’s not a modest increase.
Scientists estimate that adults ingest roughly one credit card’s worth of plastic every week through food, water, and air. And because plastic doesn’t biodegrade, it accumulates. Every year a person is alive is another year of intake with no meaningful pathway for elimination. People born after 1980 have been absorbing this material since before birth. And the accumulation will only increase as they age. This is a category of contamination that simply did not exist in the boomer body.
The New Ways They’re Dying
Fentanyl is the clearest example. The synthetic opioid barely registered in the illicit drug supply before 2013. Now drives the majority of overdose deaths among young adults.
It is so potent that a lethal dose fits on the tip of a pencil, and it has contaminated the supply so thoroughly that people who never intended to take an opioid are dying from it.
Then there’s social media. The rise in depression among teens and young adults during the 2010s was so sharp that researchers like Jean Twenge have linked it directly to the increase in youth suicide during that period. Constant exposure to curated lives, online harassment, and algorithmic content designed to exploit emotional vulnerability created a psychological environment with no precedent. And its effects concentrate almost entirely on people who grew up inside it.
Vaping-related lung injuries are something else altogether. Companies marketed e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to smoking, and an entire cohort adopted them before anyone understood the long-term effects on lung tissue.
Alcoholic liver disease is now showing up in people in their 20s and 30s. Decades earlier than doctors used to see it. Organ failure in patients who aren’t even middle-aged.
Millennials and Gen Z didn’t inherit these risks. The world they were born into manufactured them, and nothing like them existed a generation ago.
What They’re Passing to Their Children
Millennials and Gen Z are now having children of their own, and the burden they carry doesn’t stop with them. The Endocrine Society’s 2024 report confirmed that the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals can pass forward through epigenetic modification. Which means the chemical exposure millennials and Gen Z absorbed during their own development has already rewritten the biology of their children, and potentially their grandchildren, before those children have any direct exposure of their own.
But the inheritance isn’t only epigenetic. A 2022 pilot study published in Science of the Total Environment detected microplastics in placental tissue, breast milk, and infant feces across all 18 mother-infant pairs examined. Confirming that the contamination passes directly from mother to child starting in the womb and continuing through breastfeeding.
Children of parents struggling with substance use, untreated depression, or chronic financial stress face compounded risk across every measure of well-being. The same missing support that pushed their parents toward despair is what those children will grow up in, too. No funded community networks, no affordable healthcare, no stable labor market.
Policy interventions that could change this trajectory exist, but none have materialized in any meaningful way. The 2024 PlastChem Report found that no government worldwide regulates more than 3,600 chemicals of concern in plastics. Federal investment in mental health remains a fraction of what researchers have called for, and policymakers continue to treat the housing and wage crises that define daily life for these families as problems that will sort themselves out.
These aren’t people waiting for consequences to arrive. The consequences are already being passed forward, and nothing is being done fast enough to stop them.
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What the Deaths Will Look Like
Boomers had a world that caught them when they fell. It was imperfect, often exclusionary, and sometimes suffocating, but it was there, and it kept people from falling all the way through. Millennials and Gen Z inherited a world optimized for convenience and profit. Not for keeping people alive or connected or sane. And the gap between those two realities will show up in how they die.
Most of the deaths won’t be visible because they will be horrific and slow. Metabolic failures from chemicals that accumulated over decades. Organ damage from plastics that the body couldn’t expel. Suicides that followed years of quiet isolation.
It will look like a 34-year-old having a heart attack, a 28-year-old whose liver gives out, and a teenager who doesn’t come home. It will happen to millions of people who did everything they were told to do. They stayed in school, earned the degree, tracked their steps, talked about their mental health, and still couldn’t outrun the world they were handed.
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