Bulwark Takes - Are Young People Trying to Escape the Internet?

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Conor Kilgore and Rachel Janfaza discuss why Noah Kahan has become a defining voice for Gen Z—and what his music reveals about a generation shaped by COVID, social media overload, and constant comparison. They get into the mental health themes, the push to log off and reconnect with real life, and why so many young people feel nostalgic for a world they never actually lived in.Exclusive $25-off Carver Mat athttps://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES. Promo Code BULWARKTAKES

Hey guys, it's Connor Kilgore here at the Bullwork. I am usually a behind the scenes person, but today Sarah Longwell let me out of the dungeon where she keeps me doing focus groups and, you know, helping sort through which kinds of focus groups we're going to lob at our community every week. And I'm joined by Rachel Jen Faza, who is one of the other zoomer qual people here at the bulwark. And today we're going to talk about something that is near and dear to both of our hearts and that is also dominating the iTunes charts today.

So the number one album on iTunes, the day we're recording this, is an album called The Great Divide by Noah Khan. Noah Khan is a barely Gen Z folk singer from Stratford, Vermont. I guess I'll let Rachel start and just tell us a little bit about who this guy is, why he means so much to all of us. And he's also sort of a cultural artifact of Gen Z, which I think people can learn a lot about. Precisely. There are plenty of things we can glean from this, but I'm very, glad that Connor, you're out in the daylight talking about Noah Khan with me. I feel like this was

how we bonded early on in our friendship. It totally was. Well, I'm from Southern New Hampshire and Rachel. You're from the Boston area. And so Noah Khan is, I think, for many New Englanders and younger New Englanders, what Bruce Springsteen is for the state of New Jersey and more working class people from New Jersey. Another way to think about it is like Gen Z, Stomp Klapp music, like Mumford and Sons, that kind of thing. I found out about him, and I think it was like 2017. I remember actually my friend, who was a student at Dartmouth at the time in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is right near Stratford, Vermont, had, and I believe Noa Khan had lived between the two,

had, like, heard about him and sent me and was like, I think you're going to love this. He really, really took off during the pandemic and thanks in large part to TikTok. And that's one of the reasons why he's such a Gen Z. emblem or icon. There's a new Netflix documentary that came out about his life this week, which we're going to talk a lot about, and it coincided with the release of this album. He talks a lot in the doc, in his music, and also through a nonprofit that he started, about mental health and about loneliness and about really figuring out who you are amid all of the noise of the world around us today, which is really what we do in these focus groups.

He has a unique story that everyone's story is unique, but his resonates with young people because he was really trying to figure out who he was during the time of the pandemic. He started putting out the music on TikTok, and that's how a lot of stars these days are born. But I think when it comes to him in particular during that pandemic time, when everyone was isolated to their bedrooms and kind of trying to grapple with adulthood while living in your childhood bedroom and realizing that you're no longer the little kid that you once were and what does that mean? and how do you relate to your family? That's all a part of Noacon's story. And I think that's part of what resonates so much with young people who are obsessed with him like us.

Yeah. And like you say, he had been around for a few years before the pandemic. Back when nobody knew who he was, but his breakout hit album is called Stick Season. It came out in 2022. And I think that a lot of the lyrics there and some of the subject matter are very, you can tell the album was written during COVID. You know, one of the famous lyrics is, my doc told me to travel, but there's COVID on the planes. This is just like a song of our generation because we look back and we're like, oh, yeah, remember when we had to wear masks on planes, what we couldn't travel because there was COVID

when we had to like take these road trips with our friends instead of flying. Like these moments that we're going to look back on, like, it's a, it's a ballad of the times, as a lot of songs are when they're written. But this is precisely a very Gen Z experience. One of my favorite tweets of his because we farmed a few tweets of his to give our viewers a sense of his personal style, tweeted right before the start of the pandemic, I've been preemptively self-quarantining for four years. Corona is no match for depression. Let's talk about his personal style a little bit.

A lot of his personal style, I would say, is just very Zumer-specific. There is a lot of self-deprecation, a lot of self-disclosure in a way that you might not see from older generations. I feel like his style, in part, is very playful and kitchy and funny in all the ways, but it's also very self-deprecating and ironic. And he, it's kind of dark sometimes. And I think also before this album came out, he was posting a lot about everyone needs to expect to have a sad girl summer when this comes out and be depressed because he's writing from a place of his own emotions. And clearly he has had a lot on his mind recently.

And that's explored through the documentary too, but also through the lyrics of these songs, which it just came out today. So we're only just familiar- Can I jump in on that, Rachel? Yeah. We were going back and forth about this album, like, this morning as you were, you know, coming down to D.C., are you going to have a sad girl summer because of this album? No, I mean, so I kind of like the upbeat ones that are on this album and also of all his songs

in general. But I will say, so I used to have this thing when I was on planes where I would literally only listen to a playlist of Noah Con and Jack Johnson. Like, it's like just the two of them. And it was like my plane music because that was kind of a time for me to be like, I get very anxious on planes. So I would be a little more like, not sad, but like a little more quiet music. And I think that's the type of vibe that it's also great driving music. And he talks about that too. And like the music is about New England. Obviously, we're both from there. So a lot of times we might be driving through New England. And,

And I think that the songs are, some of them are sad, but some of them also have a bit more of an upbeat. And those are the ones that I think I might spend them more time listening to. But what about you? As you say, it's also great driving music. I like every time I drive back to New Hampshire, I'm from a small town there that is a lot like Stratford, Vermont, where Noah is from. And he has a song called The View Between Villages that is about going back to his hometown as an adult, which I love. A lot of his music, I think, is very angsty and talks about his mental health struggles, which, you know, he has said publicly he has struggled mightily with. Everyone has some sort of mental dialogue that they're going through.

And therefore, this resonates with anyone who's having that dialogue as, you know, it could be you're really, really going through something or it could be something that's maybe more of like a minor inconvenience that feels, you know, like a lot of gravity in the moment. But there's a lot of resonance there no matter where on. the spectrum, your situation lies. I think also one thing, Connor, that I'm really curious to hear from your perspective about is, so you're obviously from New Hampshire. And in the documentary, there's a lot of emphasis on Vermont as like how it can be for people who live there during the depths of winter at a time when like, there's not much daylight. It's not very pleasant. and sort of like the loneliness that can come with that, especially when, you know, there's not as many people around as maybe for me who lives in New York City.

When you're watching the dock, how did that sit with you? And did that, did it remind you of parts of your growing up? It totally did. The entire documentary reminded me of my childhood, both the like winter in northern New England, small town, scenery. You know, he's also a child of divorce. about that at great length. I am as well. And so that like that comes with all kinds of baggage that I think resonated strongly with me. So one of the scenes in the doc is of him during his Fenway

concert. He has a joke where he says, if your parents are divorced, like say yeah. And like a lot of people in the audience are cheering. And he's like, oh, that's kind of messed up. His specific callout was if your parents are divorced, it's not your fault. It's your dad's fault. and his dad was at that show. Yeah, and they're going to his dad's face. Bollertakes is sponsored by ORA Frames. Look, Mother's Day is coming up, and this is the last holiday

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Name number one by wirecutter, you can save on the gifts, moms love, by visiting auraframes.com. For limited time, listeners can get $25 off their best-selling Carver mat frame with code Bullwork Takes. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code, bulwark takes. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout in terms and conditions, do apply. Some of the public self-disclosure that he does, I'm like, well, you're going to have to explain this to your folks at Christmas. Cool. Good for you. I don't know if I would go this far. Yeah. One of the other big themes of this documentary that talked about something, which he really, at least to my knowledge, hasn't talked about much before, is he talks about having body dysmorphia,

which is under-discussed in general, but especially coming from a young, young man. And we talk a lot about body image amongst young girls. And there's been a lot of studies on how young women experience body dysmorphia, eating disorders, comparison culture, a lot of which censor social media and why this is so hyper exacerbated for our generation. But I think having him as now a spokesperson for this is really important because, of course, so many other young men are dealing with this. They just don't talk about it in that way. Yeah, I do think there needs to be a better spokesman for like male body dysmorphia than, you know, there's a lot of this in-cell culture. Obviously, clavicular has gained a lot of fame

and looks maxing. We, we did a focus group a couple months ago and asked if anybody had heard of clavicular and one young gentleman was very tongue-in-cheek jokingly was like, oh, yeah, I've been bone smashing. recently. This came up in a listening session I did recently too. So actually it was really interesting. It was these young women were talking about Ozempic culture and looking at

a war show season and just social media and seeing how thin a lot of people have become. And this young man was like, well, it's not just happening for young women. This looks maxing ideology. Because if you look at someone like clavicular, like he's doing all of these crazy things. whether it's, you know, taking a hammer to his jaw or other sort of peptides and drugs and et cetera.

So I think I think that it's a disservice to only focus on young women when we talk about these issues. And the other piece, too, is I think we spend so much time talking about the manosphere and toxic masculinity. And we don't have very many examples of like positive male icons for young men. And here we could have one of them. I sure hope so. One thing I want to get your take on, Rachel, we, I think you mentioned right before we came on here that his date of birth is January 1st, 1997, which is literally the first day that you can be born and be considered Gen Z based on all the social scientists who track this kind of thing. You said he's sort of squarely what you would call Gen Z 1.0. So how do you think his work might trickle?

down to like the Gen Z 2.0 cohort, you know, these people that you talk about who are sort of the dividing line is whether you graduated high school before the pandemic or after the pandemic. No matter how old you were during the pandemic, I think that everyone dealt with the fact that they spent time alone and that they were sort of isolated from others who they would have previously spent time with. And I think that precisely for Gen Z2.0, that happened at a time when they were going through adolescence when they are trying to figure out who they are. And normally, you would do that by socializing with other people around you. And that wasn't the case for many young adults at the time in Gen C2.0. I've talked a lot about how I think this is part

of the gender gap. I think this is part of why young men shift to the right in 2024, because there's an anti-authority sentiment that it sparked. And a reality that the adults in the room didn't really know what they were talking about and everyone was just kind of winging it. And I think Noah Khan actually gets at that in a lot of his commentary in being so sort of glib and self-deprecating. His songs are about coming of age, truly, and going through heartbreak and relationships with your parents and seeing parents get divorced and experiencing, feeling distant from where you grew up, where you no longer live, but still wanting to call that your home and not knowing if you can anymore. These are all things that young people were

going through at that time that made it so hard. And I think we're really only starting to peel back layers of the onion of how COVID impacted our generation. And I'm sure there will be plenty of other art that grapples with that for the next many years to come. Yeah, I just want to drive home if there are and if this is something when um when like sarah gets on these takes and talks about gen z sometimes people can be like well is this actually new and like you guys think that you invented being sad and you invented like getting ghosted when you're dating whatever but um i think a lot of his um lyrics and i talked about covid on the planes earlier but talks about zoloft taking my medication and pouring my trauma out which is

what you know you might pejoratively call therapy speak but i think is you know is very of um of our pandemic era one other thing i know rachel you wanted to touch on is how um a lot of his stuff is about getting back to nature and quote unquote logging off which i will say a lot of the the draw of his music for me personally not just the new england of it all but um is how much it felt like the the most away from it all rural parts of where I grew up and I'm someone who spent the pandemic in like an urban environment. My brain just needed a cleanse after that. That was a big draw of it for me too. But talk a little bit about how the sort of log off nature of his music. Yeah. So there's a few pieces of this. One I think is really just rooting

yourself in the real world, which we're seeing a massive revival of amongst young people. I hear this all the time in my research and my conversations with young people, but it's also very clear on social media, is that there's a real distaste for sort of the social media ecosystem that was really prevalent for Gen C1.0. Gen C2.0 kind of wants nothing to do with that. I think it's also a lot of where AI anxiety is stemming from. But there's a resurgence. of these in-person events, whether it's like run clubs or hike clubs. And I think also, you know, the mental health conversation that we've been having as a country for the past many years, it obviously is is intimately related to our collective phone usage addiction habits.

And there's really something to be said for the relationship between, you know, taking some time away from all of that and, feeling better and or not even feeling better but grappling with what you're going through and having time to process and I think that resonates especially with with young people who are just so hyper tuned in it feels like an unrelenting constant barrage of notifications likes comments invitations to join X platform um whatever in real time all the time and you know I know you mentioned Connor how people always say like, well, is it really that different for Gen Z? And I am totally, well, you know, let's have that argument any day of the week. A hundred percent, life is different for Gen Z because

of social media. There is literally no other way to put it. Like, I get everyone has social media and we all are dealing with the ramifications of it. But to grow up with it, with the level of FOMO, with the level of, do I look like these other people who are, posting these beautiful pictures of themselves. And what if I don't with the comparison culture when it comes to education and jobs? And, oh, this person was able to buy a home and I am not able to or this person is able to start a family and I'm not able to. It's all of these traditional milestones that we talk about Gen Z peeling away from. We're also watching other people live those milestones through the screens of our phones. And that's really hard on a lot of people

who might want to be experiencing those things but can't for whatever reason. So it is different for Genzy, 100%. And this is true, I think, across generations, people sort of bemoan what social media has done to all of our brains, what it's done to politics. And yet these companies just keep getting bigger and bigger. And like the, so the state of preference and the revealed preference, I think, are a little bit in tension, right? He's clearly very online. I mean, like, he rose to fame because of TikTok. He talks about posting a TikTok, taking an edible, going to sleep and waking up, and he was famous.

And he was posting clips of his songs, basically, as they were in production before they had been released. And he also is, you know, Connor, we were looking at his tweets before we got on here. And, like, he's been posting a lot. He's a very online person. But I think he also takes breaks in a way that also this comes up in my conversations with young people all the time where like there's a real trend of deleting social media for like a few weeks or a few days or even a few hours and getting a taste of what it's like to not have it.

But then everyone always comes back to it because of course they do because this is the world we live in and we're never going to put the genie back in the bottle. And I'm not advocating for that. But I think it's just like the dynamic of sort of being one half in the real world, one half online. And then also having these different personas in those two dual reality. and the what that does for one's mental state and how complicated that can be feeling like you have two sides of you. It's kind of like a Hannah Montana thing. Like, you know, you're a real

person and then you're the person you are online. And I think that's all wrapped up in this too. And part of why it is so resonant for our generation. The other piece of this sort of resurrection of in real life experiences and everyone deciding to put their full. phones away for a bit is that young people are super nostalgic for a time period that we never lived through. And actually just today, there is an NBC News Decision Desc poll that shows that 62% of 18 to 29-year-olds say that they think their life will be worse than prior generations. And they're also in that same poll, nearly half of Gen Z adults say they want to live in the past. So I've been talking for a long time about why Gen Z is nostalgic for a time period that they never personally lived through.

But part of it, most of it, is all of these topics that we've been discussing already for these past many minutes, which are as comparison culture, unrealistic beauty standards and body image, FOMO, algorithms driving the gender gap, live streamed toxicity, violence, hate, anxiety that comes from social media, but also AI. I know what Kahn talks about nostalgia in a little bit of a different way, but I think it's really related. And I actually personally think about this a lot, which is, you know, and every generation definitely experiences this. So this isn't unique to Jensen. But like as you grow up and you become an adult, especially if you're from a big family, like I'm the oldest of four, you miss the time that you had with your siblings.

And you miss the time when we didn't have phones, when we would sit around and just sort of like laugh and play with each other, play outside or whatever. Like these are all, you know, these are just normal things that you do as a kid. But also, that's not what childhood really looks like anymore. You know, Gen Alpha is growing up in a completely different context than we did. iPad kids, right? iPad kids, AI kids, like Gen Alpha will be the first AI native generation. It just looks different.

And I think we're all grappling with what that means. I think that what Noa Khan gets out in the documentary is, that he really hopes that he was able to or that he is able to express how much his family members mean to him and how much he might regret certain pieces of certain relationships or he might celebrate certain pieces of certain relationships. And I think he talks about having a lot of concerns that he's not able to express that in the way that he wants to. I think that's something that we all deal with, no matter how old we are. For sure. So Rachel, thanks for letting me out of the dungeon. You and Sarah both let me out of my dungeon. This was super fun to chat about. And Noa Khan, if you're out there, we tried to get you on to the bulwark for an interview. And if you're out there and you like this and want to talk about this some more, hit us up. Your people know where to find us.

We would love to talk to you. All right, guys. Thanks. And, you know, go subscribe to the bulwark on YouTube. We'll see you around. Thank you.