Every cost suppliers have offloaded compounds downward. The youngest carry the most.
When a corporation transfers a cost (a carbon emission, a data extraction, a contingent liability, a debt) onto its customers, the cost does not disappear. It accumulates. And it lands hardest on the people who did not buy anything yet. Pick a generation. See what they pay.
You are the first generation in modern memory expected to be financially worse off than your parents. The system you are entering charges more for everything that used to be standard, while paying you less for the work that funds it.
Average student loan balance for Gen Z borrowers. After inflation adjustment, 13% higher than Millennials carried at the same age.
Median monthly mortgage payment as a share of household income has never been higher. Homeownership among under-35 lags every prior generation at the same age.
Of people aged 16 to 25 are worried about climate change. Nearly half say it affects their daily lives. The warming is real. The contracts to slow it were signed before they could vote.
Average daily time on social media. The largest commercial extraction of attention in human history. The platforms that monetized it are richer than entire countries.
Of young people in the Blue Shield of California NextGen Mental Health Survey report regular mental health challenges. Up from 87% just two years earlier.
You are the largest single buyer cohort entering its peak spending years. The suppliers that have been extracting cost from you for two decades cannot afford to lose you. Aggregated, this generation has more bargaining power than any reform mechanism ever proposed.
The platforms designed for your attention know more about you than your parents do. Your mental health, sleep, and self-image have been measurably degraded by services that you do not pay for in money. You pay for them in something else.
Of teenagers aged 13 to 17 use a social media platform. One third report using social media "almost constantly." The brain is still forming. The algorithms are not.
The risk of experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety for teens spending more than three hours daily on social media. The US Surgeon General has issued a formal warning.
Of teens 13 to 17 say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. This is the product working as designed.
Of adolescents use screens until midnight or later, during the developmental window when their brains most need sleep.
Of teens say worrying about climate change negatively affects their mental health. They will live through every consequence of every emission accumulated to date.
The platforms that monetize you cannot operate without your time. The advertisers that fund the platforms cannot operate without your future purchases. You are the customer twice over, treated as a resource. The terms can be rewritten.
A child under 13 cannot vote, cannot sign a contract, cannot opt out of the digital, environmental, or economic systems built before they were born. And yet they bear the largest accumulated cost of any decision made in the last fifty years.
Of today's five-year-olds will face unprecedented exposure to heatwaves over their lifetimes under the more pessimistic warming scenarios. The comparable share for a Boomer was 16%.
Microplastics have now been detected in human placentas, breast milk, and the blood of every population tested. Children born today are pre-polluted. The long-term effects are not yet known.
The average decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970. A child today inherits a natural world fundamentally less alive than the one their grandparents grew up in.
Photos shared by parents. Apps installed by schools. Algorithms trained on their behaviour. The average child has thousands of data points captured before they can read.
Of adolescents globally show problematic social media use, up from 7% just four years ago. The age of first exposure is dropping, and the effects are now reaching children.
A child cannot sign a contract. But a parent can sign one on their behalf. The single most powerful act of procurement a parent can perform is to set the terms with every supplier their child interacts with, before the supplier sets them first.
A baby born this week will live to roughly 2100. Every emission, every debt, every data extraction, every plastic particle, every contract signed without their input is part of the world they will pay for. The bill is already being written.
The minimum global warming a child born today is on track to live through. Most of the emissions causing it have already happened, before this child took a breath.
Microplastics cross the placenta. Children born today carry detectable plastic particles before they have inhaled their first breath of open air.
The median net worth of households under 35 across most developed economies, adjusted for housing costs, has fallen behind every prior generation at the same age.
Pregnancy apps, hospital systems, and social media have already constructed a profile of this child. They will be born into a digital identity they did not create and cannot delete.
Of adults globally believe today's children will grow up worse off financially than their parents. Three in four parents already expect this child to inherit a worse economy than the one that produced them.
Every decision adults are making now will be paid for by a person currently asleep, weighing seven pounds, with no say. Parents have one tool. The right to sign the terms with every supplier this child will encounter, before the suppliers write their own.
The pattern is the same across every generation on this page. A supplier produced a benefit, kept the profit, and offloaded the cost to a person who could not yet refuse it. The child does not know they are paying. The teen has no procurement tool. The young adult inherits the bill. Every generation since the 1970s has paid more for less.
Supplierism activates in two places. First, individuals who set terms with the suppliers they already buy from. Second, parents who set terms with the suppliers that touch their children, beginning with privacy, and beginning on day one.
This is the missing infrastructure of citizenship. The publication explains how it gets built.
Generate the procurement terms that hold suppliers accountable for the world being handed to children growing up now. The selections that follow are pre-set for a household focused on children's safety and climate. Adjust freely.
Try the demo