Eleni Kalorkoti for Vox

Good morning! I’m Rachel Cohen, a policy correspondent at Vox. 

I do a lot of work covering issues like abortion rights, housing, and homelessness. But I also spend time thinking about deeper cultural shifts affecting millennials' connections to community and each other. I spent much of 2023, for example,  writing about all the negative, bleak media and pop cultural narratives about motherhood, and the toll they have taken on women of my generation.

Today at Vox, I’m taking a closer look at a phenomenon that I’d started to notice after a reader reached out to ask what I thought they could do about homelessness. They were unsure what they could really do, as just one person, to enact meaningful change in the world.

It isn’t just them. A recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll surveying Americans ages 18-29 found that young people are far more fearful than hopeful about the future: They worry about the moral direction of the country, don’t think their vote will make a real difference, and don’t volunteer for community service.  

Other research suggests that Gen Z and millennials volunteer at lower rates than adults born in earlier generations, despite overwhelming data that volunteering and donating boosts self-esteem, physical health, and lifespan. 

It could actually make people happier. 

So I wondered: What has made so many of us turn away from donating to charity, or volunteering with nonprofits — taking individual actions to better the world? 

And were these attitudes contributing to the American loneliness crisis? 

To answer these questions, I started reading widely and interviewing experts on social activism and philanthropy.  I ultimately traced this collective turn from individual action back to major shifts in the political and economic landscape of the 2010s.

Here’s some of what I learned: 

 It was the era of Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, and we all grew more fluent in critiques of billionaires and plutocracy. Activism around the climate crisis in particular emphasized the limits of personal behavioral change, and new arguments gained prominence that volunteering and charity were, at best, unproductive; at worst, they were harmful distractions from the change we really need. 

Nicolas Maeterlinck/AFP via Getty

Critiques against nonprofits also sharpened. Activists and intellectuals argued more forcefully that nonprofits were often complacent and even disincentivized to solve real problems, since doing so could threaten their own funding streams. The Effective Altruist movement argued that most charities were wasteful and ineffective, so giving money to such organizations began to seem futile.

There was also this sense that real, serious social change would come only from mass protest and collective pressure on governments and corporations. We saw such protests in the 2010s against poverty, police brutality, and rising global temperatures. 

This growing emphasis on collective action felt clarifying, righteous, and long overdue. It motivated us to demand more from those in power. But in retrospect, it also helped fuel despair and cynicism, as it promised a better world only if near-impossible political and policy changes were made, and fast.

I think what really struck me was that despite all the attention on collective action, many millennials and Gen Z young people actually grew more isolated and pessimistic about social change.

Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

To be clear, young Americans’ turn away from volunteerism isn’t entirely about our own apathy or anxiety. One expert I spoke with noted that young people today are doing far more than previous generations to make ends meet, including holding multiple jobs. For us, “there are fewer discretionary hours available in a day,” he told me. 

Since finishing the reporting, I’ve been rethinking my own views on individual action. I now see  volunteering and philanthropy as more than just acts of service for, or donations to, nonprofits. It can actually be much broader — and include giving time and money to your family, your neighborhood, your country, or anyone around the world.

Philanthropy could be funding malaria nets for strangers, or it could be watching your friend’s daughter or caring for an aging parent, even sending remittances to relatives abroad.

“When neighbors on a block shoot a message to your group text asking if someone can keep an eye on your kid, or bring over a meal, these things aren’t considered volunteering,” one expert told me. “But do you get paid for it? Do you get a sense of benefit by helping?”

I believe we do.  

Read my full essay here, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can email me at rachel.cohen@vox.com. 

Getty Images

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from editorial director Julia Rubin. We'll see you tomorrow!

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