Shadowing Practice: Gen Z's Morality Crisis - Learn English Speaking with Video

A third of Gen Z thinks being extremely rich, having billions of dollars, is morally wrong.

That's roughly three times higher than the percentage of boomers who feel the same way.

This really shouldn't surprise anyone.

Independent media and news sources almost always report on billionaires when they are exploiting people, the environment, or both.

Which really isn't hard to do, but why is it that Gen Z, more than any other generation, thinks being a billionaire is morally wrong?

Why do the younger generations seem to be obsessed with debating morality and appearing morally righteous.

Are they really just a bunch of virtue signaling pricks or is something deeper going on?

Two centuries ago the average person's moral compass was acquired through radically different means.

In western cultures, God and scripture were the primary influences of moral guidance, reinforced by social institutions that were much more religious and doctrinal than they are today.

There were fewer opportunities to encounter and openly express unorthodox morals, and bad actors were condemned and urged to repent their sins.

As 2 Timothy puts it, scripture was meant for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

Except for the occasional iconoclast or philosopher, most conversations didn't revolve around challenging religious morals, they were taught as universal truths.

But today, those religious values hold much less precedence.

Developments in science, secularization, and growing religious nonconformity weakened the authority of religious dogma,

giving greater legitimacy to questioning moral principles once treated as axioms.

This created a whole host of novel moral ideas.

Could morality exist without God?

Was bringing a child into the world inherently good?

Did humans have moral obligations towards animals?

Should sexual behavior be judged by religious doctrine or simply by consent and harm?

In other words, morals added a heavier weight to subjectivity and debate, emphasizing personal experience and philosophy rather than any single doctrine.

Of course the morals we abide by have always had a subjective element to them.

A large reason something feels wrong is due to how we saw others respond to any given act, aka our experience.

I'd also have to imagine we all carry a slightly different set of inherent morals which subtly shape our ethical decisions,

but historically, less weight was placed on these aspects than on religious doctrine.

We could have a long debate about nature versus nurture, whether some aspects of our morality are inherent within all of us, or if all morals are relative,

but that's not the topic of this video.

I'd rather focus on the implications of this indisputable fact.

The information we consume and the culture we live in affects our conscience.

And when we add that onto the fact

that religion is easier to question then Gen Z's reasons for quarreling over morality become clear.

To make this clearer, we can look at a fairly new moral principle amassing millions of followers online, antinatalism.

Antinatalism is a philosophical position that procreation is morally wrong and that humans should not have children.

A moral position like this would probably be unheard of to our parents.

To them, having children was a duty, an undeniable biological drive.

But in the digital age, where information is abundant and easily accessible, controversial moral positions travel fast.

Convincing antinatalist arguments can gain loads of views simply because it is such a contentious topic.

Algorithms reward sustained attention and engagement, and what could be more engaging than a piece of content about whether we should have babies or not?

One of the most famous arguments, the asymmetry argument, was popularized by the philosopher David Benatar.

The asymmetry argument contests that the absence of pain is good even if no one is there to enjoy it, whereas the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is a deprived subject.

Therefore, avoiding pain by not existing is always preferable.

Put another way, it's good if someone never experiences pain, but it isn't bad if they never exist to miss out on pleasure.

This argument is logically valid, but to many people, the premises aren't sound.

Those who disagree with antinatalism might argue that pain isn't always an undesirable thing, and in fact, struggle and suffering are often necessary for living a fulfilling life.

If we always avoided pain at all costs and we only chased pleasure like a hedonist, I doubt many of us would find enjoyment in everyday life.

So to have pleasure and pain as the basis of arguments regarding the morality of procreation is kind of foolish.

But an antinatalist might respond to that with, even if pain brings fulfillment, does the amount of unwanted pain someone will inevitably experience by being human justify that?

And should we bring a person into this world without their consent, knowing they will suffer?

You could have a compelling rebuttal for this line of thinking, but there's always going to be another person out there who supports antinatalism and can voice their opinion,

whether that be in the comments section of a piece of content or with a brand new piece of content itself.

I bring up this argument to illustrate why Gen Z are obsessed with morals

and why a moral philosophy like this could gain so much traction today.

The internet and the democratization of information have allowed us to find irrefutable evidence for our unique set of morals.

Any moral subject can accrue a substantial following, providing a prodigious amount of debate material.

When we have the ability to broadcast these opinions to potentially millions of people and signal a better way to live, many of us will capitalize on that opportunity.

And I am one of these people.

I have made hundreds of self-help related videos about how one should think and act.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, and I'll explain why a little bit later,

but an unavoidable consequence is that many creators are quick to impose their moral biases on their audience without consciously realizing it.

These creators typically attract people who have gone through similar experiences

because we naturally gravitate towards content that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and morals, which creates an echo chamber of anecdotes reinforcing their moral position.

In other words, there's an endless amount of internet culture bubbles producing an endless amount of internet debates.

It's enthralling to watch two people participate in verbal battles, and when we find a video of a strong debater within our moral spectrum who can destroy other people's arguments,

it gives us a little ego boost.

One of the biggest enablers of moral ego boosts on the

internet right now is Jubilee's one person versus 20 people debate series.

If you aren't familiar with this, Jubilee invites one person with certain moral principles and has them debate 20 to 25 people with opposing principles.

The result is exactly what you would expect.

The arguments become very heated very quickly, involving yelling, personal attacks, and unanimous support for the opposer from the 19 other opposers surrounding them.

I have watched many clips and full segments of many of these debates

and among the hundreds of people that have been on this show, I think about one of them has been genuinely open to changing their mind.

99% of people are only there to prove why their beliefs

or morals are objectively right and aren't really listening to the rebuttals the host is giving them.

And you know what's fascinating?

No matter what moral or political position the host takes, the top comments are always glazing them talking about how they absolutely destroyed everyone that stepped up to the seat.

In the Michael Knowles video, everyone's talking about how stupid all the guests were and how they just wanted to prove they're right.

And on the Mark Manson anti-Manosphere versus 20 Manospheres video, everyone is talking about how dumb and naive all the guests are.

I think Jubilee knows what they're doing here.

They invite a host well versed in debate or someone maybe a little more mature and emotionally regulated,

and then they invite 20 youngish people who have probably been waiting for their opportunity to scold this famous host with vitriol.

And they do this because they know it's going to create a lot of clickbait and engagement and controversy, not because anyone's going to actually listen or have their minds changed.

One thing I do want to say in Jubilee's defense though is

that they actually invited me on to be a mediator for a new series, I think it's called Middle Ground, where they provide the moral argument Jubilee does,

and then an equal amount of guests with opposing opinions sit on either side and debate them, which I think is a good format.

It's definitely better than the 1 versus 20 people.

I did not accept the invite, and kudos to them for creating something like that, but that's just not what most people are watching.

Most people are, like I said, just looking for that person who is really good at debating the moral principles that agree with their own, and the 1 vs 20 people format enables that.

However, I am required to say that this isn't always the case.

Some people search for philosophical debates with the intention of learning and perhaps changing their mind when presented with better information,

which I know is a crazy concept.

But regardless, our digital platforms have thrown our moral beliefs into a blender

and poured them into a plethora of varying culture cups.

So perhaps it is less of an obsession with morality that Gen Z has, as it is a natural consequence of having so many different moral opinions.

This goes back to what I said at the beginning.

We hear about why some acts are morally right

or wrong more than ever because we've never had as many chances to contend with each other's morals.

But this still doesn't explain what shapes Gen Z's moral compass specifically.

Why is it that Gen Z thinks having boatloads of money is so immoral, and why is abortion more morally justified to them than previous generations?

The answers to these are a bit more complex, and they're related to much of what I talked about in a video on my second channel, which I'll link in the description.

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The simplest answer is

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that it feels like the system we live in incentivizes you to be morally compromised

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and abandon any moral righteousness in order to thrive while everyone else suffers.

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In a system that prioritizes shareholder value, squeezing every last drop of money out of a product with little to no regulations on the integrity of

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that product or its uncanny ability to make people addicted, suicidal, or apathetic, you're naturally going to have a lot of bad actors in

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positions of power who do not at all care about the moral consequences of what they make.

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There isn't really any punishment for exploiting anything or manipulating people with shady marketing or grifting,

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and the people fortunate enough to already hold most of the assets are making obscene amounts of money while everybody else suffers.

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And the majority of the people who were too young to participate in the accumulation of those assets is Gen Z.

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If the system we lived in rewarded more people who produced and endorsed the highest levels of life satisfaction, the lowest levels of suicide rates,

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environmental conservation, and a broader middle class, then I'm sure that less of Gen Z would think being a billionaire is immoral.

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But you could also argue

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that one doesn't get to be a billionaire through any other means than extreme exploitation and wealth inequality, so billionaires wouldn't even exist in that sort of system.

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This is another one of the reasons why morals are in such grand contention right now.

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A lot of Gen Z feel like they either have to participate in a broken system to thrive, or abandon their morals completely and succumb to sin, which I've made a whole video about.

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And those opposing life paths are always leading to tons of moral debates in modern society.

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Of course, there are more than just those two options.

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People can live a wealthy, incredible life by genuinely helping other people enjoy their lives more and making the world a more peaceful place for everyone,

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but that feels like the exception, not the rule.

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Now you might be saying, alright Cole, I get it, but don't you feel like some of Gen Z are just

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virtue signalers who want to appear morally superior as a front to make up for their shitty life?

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And to that I would say, maybe sometimes, but more often than not, no. A prevailing idea in our culture,

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especially when older generations are talking about Gen Z, is the psychological phenomenon of Ressantimon.

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Popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, Ressantimon describes how feelings of powerlessness,

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envy, and frustration can be transformed into moral condemnation.

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Rather than admitting that we desire what someone else possesses, we convince ourselves that possessing it is morally corrupt in the first place.

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Amassing wealth means you are greedy, being extremely ambitious means you are too selfish, power becomes an inherently corruptive form of oppression,

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and our inability to attain these things can be reframed as evidence of our own virtue.

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If we apply this to Gen Z, the argument would be that at least some of our moral outrage towards billionaires,

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landlords, corporations, or other successful people isn't motivated purely by concern for injustice.

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Instead, critics would argue that economic frustration makes morally condemning billionaires psychologically satisfying.

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Put more simply, if you believe that you'll never become wealthy, it's much easier to believe that becoming wealthy was immoral all along.

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Personally, I find a myriad of problems with this line of thinking.

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While I don't doubt that there's a very small portion of Gen Z who feels powerless

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and thinks of any form of power and wealth as morally wrong because they lack the ambition and drive to acquire it,

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I would argue that the majority of Gen Z only sees the very extremes of these things as morally wrong.

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It is not unreasonable, and it is not some form of self-sabotaging psychological manipulation, to think that the people in power shouldn't be diddling kids,

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destroying the environment for AI slop nobody wants, and hoarding exorbitant amounts of wealth that could be used to create a more equitable society.

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Also, I know plenty of people in positions of power with a lot of assets

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and wealth who find the system they've benefited from to be

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as immoral as the people who haven't been fortunate enough to thrive in this system.

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So clearly resentment born from powerlessness can't explain all of this moral criticism.

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And even in the cases where it can, it tells us very little about whether those convictions are right or wrong.

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And this is where I think the accusation of Ressantimon misses something important about Gen Z.

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Our generation has unprecedented access to information about how wealth and power are accumulated, who benefits from them, and who bears their costs.

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The morality of these systems, therefore, is much harder to ignore.

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What previous generations might have experienced as an abstract economic arrangement can now be dissected, criticized, and debated by millions of people online.

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But this increased awareness comes with its own problems.

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When every inequality can be traced to a system, every purchase to an exploitative supply chain, and every action to some broader social consequence,

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it becomes increasingly difficult to make choices without assigning them moral weight.

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The internet then gives us an endless arena to debate these decisions while algorithms disproportionately reward the most provocative moral judgments.

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So while Gen Z may not be uniquely resentful, we may be uniquely equipped to moralize nearly every aspect of life.

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We inherited a world with fewer universally accepted moral authorities,

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while simultaneously gaining access to more competing moral philosophies than any generation before us.

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The internet gives us endless information to construct our own moral framework, but also endless opportunities to find evidence that someone else's is wrong.

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I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing.

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As someone who enjoys the freedom to pursue their own passions and desires, I like that I can absorb a more logical moral stance with the abundance of research at my fingertips.

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I don't mind a bit of moral variation within a society.

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Questioning the morality of the system we participate in can expose genuine injustice

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and help us reconsider beliefs that previous generations accepted without much scrutiny, but there is a point where moral awareness becomes moral obsession.

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And if the internet has shown us anything, it's that having uncapped research potential can lead to some pretty abhorrent moral justifications.

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Thank you you very much for watching this video.

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I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below.

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I'm sure it will reinforce everything I just said in this video.

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The comment section is always like that.

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And if you want to watch another video about modern morals, you can watch this video about why Gen Z abandoned morals for money.

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And now I'm heading out.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Gen Z's Morality Crisis”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: moral, Gen, morally, debate, argument. This video has 166 sentences and 2874 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:45. The speaker talks fast, about 182 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 75% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
morally adverb	/ˈmɔɹəli/	In terms of morals or ethics.
morality noun	/məˈɹælɪti/	Recognition of the distinction between good and evil or between right and wrong; respect for and obedience to the rules of right conduct; the mental…
billionaire noun	/ˌbɪl.jəˈnɛɚ/	Somebody whose wealth is at least one billion (10⁹) currency units (usually understood to exclude holders of hyperinflated currencies).
endless adjective	/ˈɛndlɪs/	Having no end.
antinatalism noun		A philosophical view that deems procreation as immoral.
immoral adjective	/ɪˈmɔɹəl/	Breaching principles of natural law, rectitude, or justice, and so inconsistent with the demands of virtue, purity, or "good morals"; not right, not moral…
doctrine noun	/ˈdɑk.tɹɪn/	A belief or tenet, especially about philosophical or theological matters.
consequence noun	/ˈkɑn.sɪ.kwəns/	An effect; something that follows a cause as a result.
inherently adverb	/ɪnˈhɛɹəntli/	In an inherent way; naturally, innately.
thrive verb	/θɹajv/	To grow or increase stature; to grow vigorously or luxuriantly; to enjoy a state of excellent health and well-being; to flourish.
virtue noun	/ˈvɝt͡ʃu/	The idea of all that is good or excellent (in every sense of those terms) in a human being, collectively instantiated by a varying number of human traits known…
oppose verb	/əˈpoʊz/	To attempt to stop the progression of; to resist or antagonize by physical means, or by arguments, etc.; to contend against.
abandon verb	/əˈbæn.dən/	To give up or relinquish control of, to surrender or to give oneself over, or to yield to one's emotions.
amass verb	/əˈmæs/	To collect into a mass or heap.
antinatalist noun		A supporter of antinatalism.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
bring up verb	To mention.
go back to verb	To stem from; to originate in.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
head out verb	To leave, depart; to go on ahead.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if you believe that you'll never
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have allowed · have made · have gone
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be obsessed · was acquired · were condemned
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Those who disagree · people who have · person who is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 37 contractions and reduced forms, such as isn't, don't, aren't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: thrive /θɹajv/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, ethical /ˈɛθɪkəl/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: obsession /əbˈsɛʃən/, frustration /fɹʌsˈtɹeɪ.ʃən/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, emotionally /ɪˈməʊʃənəli/, obligation /ˌɑ.blɪˈɡeɪ.ʃn̩/
Long words — get the stress right: morality /məˈɹælɪti/, inherently /ɪnˈhɛɹəntli/, asymmetry /eɪˈsɪmɪtɹi/, philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/, inequality /ˌɪn.ɪˈkwɑ.lɪ.ti/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like morally, morality, billionaire.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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