Gen Z hits the track (and the tracking apps), a new Lord of the Flies adaptation hits home, and pop songstresses say they are manifesting their dream lives.
Resource of the Week: Faith and Life Survey
What’s shaping your faith in an increasingly complicated world? The Colson Center is conducting a Faith and Life Survey and has invited our readers to participate. All participants have the opportunity to win a $100 Amazon gift card in exchange for their responses. Your answers will shape our understanding of how to support parents of teens in the mission of sharing our faith.
And now for our three conversations..
1. Gen Z is Running Wild
What it is: “Runfluencers” are social media influencers who make videos about running—and some say they’re turning what used to be fun into another online competition.
Why everyone is running: Gen Zers made up over a third of 5K runners, 10K runners, half-marathoners, and full marathoners, according to a 2025 report from Strava, a social media app for runners. The report says that “Doomscrolling Is Out, Movement Is In,” but running has turned into another thing that is performed on social media. Running content has become its own category, with videos like GRWM for a run, run with me, and run club vlogs. While the trend is likely influenced by videos like “what one month of running every day did to my body,” the main draws for young people seem to be community and mental health. Local run clubs are popping up in major cities, helping young people make friends and find romantic partners, with one publication even describing run clubs as “the new bar.”
Continue the conversation: Would you ever run a marathon?
2. Jack’s Back
What it is: A TV adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies has arrived on Netflix, written by Jack Thorne, who also wrote last year’s surprise hit Adolescence.
Why it feels especially poignant right now: The Lord of the Flies show pulls no punches. These boy actors/characters, whose ages range from young teens to literal toddlers, feel vulnerable and isolated, and it is a visceral and often disturbing experience to watch their infamous descent into anarchy, evil, and chaos. Still, as Imogen West-Knights points out, this adaptation of Lord of the Flies is most focused on how easily young men are influenced by their peers, authority figures, and, most importantly, their fathers. Piggy, Ralph, and Jack are all looking for belonging and meaning—as are the young men in our own lives. Who will teach them what it means to be a man? Will it be some misguided influencer who smashes his face for a better jawline, or someone who loves them, cares for them, and points them to the most complete picture of masculinity: Jesus?
Continue the conversation: What can we learn from a story like Lord of the Flies in our current day and age?
3. Manifest Destiny
What it is: Within the last couple of weeks, pop stars Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo both joined Cosmopolitan for online interviews that involved creating “vision boards.”
What that means: Vision boards are generally used to help someone manifest their dream life circumstances, which in turn involves affirming that one already has them. The board itself is typically a collage of images that the creator finds inspirational, used to represent the sort of life they hope to live. The idea is that by focusing on these things, you can bring them into being. As we discussed in our short video on manifesting, there is a dark side to assuming everything that comes into our lives is something we had the power to determine. But there’s something else going on in these interviews that can actually open up a discussion about the Biblical idea of contentment.
Let’s translate this one further…
It seems like Cosmopolitan is basically trying to use new-age buzzwords as clickbait. The Billie Eilish “vision board” is essentially just a conversation about how her life has gone recently (including a promotion of her new James Cameron-directed concert documentary), with clip art added to the side of the screen to simulate answers getting pinned to a board. In the Rodrigo interview, while she does physically pin a variety of images to a board, her video is also mostly a rehash of some of her favorite recent memories.
Manifesting is often construed as a way to attract more money, a better romantic relationship, or to open some other hypothetical happiness portal. But in these interviews, what Eilish and Rodrigo put on their so-called vision boards is not some new, exotic future; it’s their own recent past, and an appreciation of life’s simple joys. (As one example, when Eilish is asked, “Do you prefer staying in or going out?” she responds by saying, “My ideal Saturday night, for real, is laying in the sun in the day, and then organizing a drawer. I’m not even kidding.”)
In other words, what it seems like these women are modeling with their so-called “vision boards” is actually a sense of contentment. 1 Timothy 6:5-6 contrasts what we might call the typical goal of manifesting with the ability to appreciate what we already have in life, particularly when that life is one formed by a relationship with God. The passage critiques those “who think that godliness is a means to financial gain,” and promotes instead the idea that “godliness with contentment is great gain.”
Many teens look up to stars like Rodrigo and Eilish, which means that their worldviews are influential. And while this is far from a wholesale endorsement of everything Eilish and Rodrigo say and do, in this particular instance, we think they might be onto something.
For more context and nuance, check out our Roundtable podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In the meantime, here are three questions to help you continue the conversation with your teens:
- Have you heard of “vision boards”? What do you think the point of them typically is?
- Who is one celebrity or influencer that you feel genuinely influenced by?
- What do you think it takes to grow in contentment?
Parenting together,
Evan Barber and the Axis Team
In Other News…
- Teen boys and young men are turning to injectable peptide stacks in order to achieve physical transformations and faster muscle recovery, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), in a trend being fueled by looksmaxxing culture.
- The latest Gen Z trend is the comeback of the hacky sack. Teens are starting clubs at schools, making TikToks about their newest hobby, and the footbags are already selling out in stores.
- Winning out over MrBeast, LeBron James, and Taylor Swift, the celebrity young people want to emulate most is Zendaya, who came in second to “none of the above”.
- With age verification requirements on the rise, some kids are fooling age-checking technology with a fake mustache.
- The game Subnautica 2, which is the sequel to Subnautica, a quiet hit about crafting, exploring, and avoiding giant leviathans in an underwater world, releases this week in early access.
PS: Know someone who could use our conversation starters with their teens? Share the CT with a friend!