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FAFO, yet again [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-01
I wrote a story a while ago about how I didn’t like the FAFO terminology that’s being used a lot nowadays. I preferred the Biblical version from Hosea 8:7:
They sow the wind
and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head;
it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain,
foreigners would swallow it up.
Normally this is shortened only to the sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind lines, but the entire verse makes is abundantly clear that doing this is a bad thing.
This morning I was driving to my ex- and now part-time job and catching up on the podcasts I’ve fallen behind on. (Now that I’m sorta-retired, my commute time is much shorter per week, and a recent trip to Iceland put many of my regular podcasts on pause. I’m currently 17:50 behind.) This morning I listened to the “How Gen-Z Views the World” episode of the Foreign Policy Live podcast, which was released on June 6. And in this podcast, I found another reason to dislike the term FAFO.
I’m not a member of Gen-Z, almost all of my friends both in the real world and online are not members of Gen-Z, and even my daughters appear to be too old to be members of Gen-Z. So in some ways, listening to this podcast was like listening to a cultural anthropologist talking about a culture that’s far removed from Western society.
According to Kyla Scanlon, to Gen-Z, FAFO is not a cautionary statement, it is a philosophy of life. Apparently, Gen-Z is interprets the phrase as an embrace of nihilism. “The world is going to hell, so why should I get a job? The world is going to hell, so what’s the purpose of education?” Etc. And according to Scanlon, Gen-Z is a factor throughout the developed world, where the messaging that they’ve embraced is that the world for them will be worse than it is for their parents. There are specific terms for these members of Gen-Z in Japan and South Korea.
So while to us old people, the messaging of FAFO is meant as a cautionary tale, to members of Gen-Z (to whom we are trying to communicate), the meaning is very different. As such, the message we’re trying to send may not be the message that is being received.
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