Her voice is weary yet chilling, telling us she is not complicit in a world edging toward destruction. She’s still in her teens, an inheritor of generations leaving her the burdens of global warming, economic inequality and a ravenous social media that thrills her even as it exploits and strips away the tender gifts of her youth.

Zendaya as Rue Bennett in the HBO drama “Euphoria” is a prescription-drug-addicted high schooler wandering through the wreckage of sexting, statutory rape, body shaming, mass shootings and lives playing out on smartphones, where avatars and parallel realities prompt one of her friends to muse: “I don’t think I have an attention span for real life anymore.”

“Euphoria” is a stark dive into Gen Z, those born into a post-9/11 planet of rising tides, starving polar bears, TikTok videos, selfies, invasive algorithms and the specter of the YouTube star. They are the latest iteration in an America whose sense of itself is often marked by generational divides between baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials and teens like Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who admonished Congress and U.N. world leaders for not doing a better job at preserving the planet.

It has been a year of skirmishes between young and old. From Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jolting C-SPAN with her progressive politics to the resurfacing (yes, really) of the “Brady Bunch” stars to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary. We hang in that surreal balance. Rifts between generations are part of the natural order, but these days the differences echo with existential questions over climate change and how artificial intelligence and other technologies will reshape the way we live. Even the sisters in the Disney blockbuster “Frozen 2” must contend with environmental damage wrought by their elders.

Will Miami disappear this century under rising waters? Will the robots we create subsume us? Will we endure endless superhero reboots? Disappear into our virtual reality headsets? Will Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk mine every sacred piece of our identity? Such questions for younger generations are not rhetorical. Frankenstein is here; the “Black Mirror” is eerily ascendant.

Anxiety over the future is seeping into a cultural landscape altered in recent years by the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. The Trump presidency, with its impeachment troubles, anti-immigration fury and multiplying lies, has divided the country, distorting our reality and cheapening the creeds that made us a nation. One can understand why the Gen Z characters in “Euphoria” pedal through suburban neighborhoods numbed and perplexed.

“Even I don’t fully get it,” Zendaya told The Times this year. “But I understand a good percent of it. Rue says in the first episode something like, ‘We just showed up here without a map or compass.’ And it’s true, because we don’t know what the … we’re doing. Nobody actually knows what they’re doing. Imagine growing up in social media and being a child. It’s not easy. It’s confusing. And it’s uncomfortable. It’s a lot of things.”

The air between generations has been arrowed with condescension and dismissive tweets for a while. But GIFs and memes this year poking fun and outrage at baby boomers tapped into a deeper anxiety. The “OK boomer” social media tag was a jab at a post-World War II generation that millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Zers (roughly 1997-2012) regard as entitled, affluent and blind to the consequences of decades of technological advances and environmental degradation even as dystopian films and literature have flourished.

Much of the criticism against boomers was in satire and jest. Social media amplified and democratized “OK boomer” in a time when the calling out and muting of enemies in a growing “cancel culture” allows younger generations to peel back the masks and reveal the prevailing sins of those in power. It is mass reckoning carried out by TikTok and Twitter.

Such an atmosphere is informing politics, college campuses and the entertainment industry. Director Martin Scorsese unleashed Marvel-fan wrath when he said that superhero movies resembled more an amusement-park ride than serious cinema. His comments pointed not only to a generational gap between Scorsese and “Suicide Squad” cosplayers but to how computer graphics and special effects are re-imagining movies for audiences who minute by minute live in their screens.

Cinema is rapidly changing, much like it did in the 1970s when independent filmmakers, including a young Scorsese, upended Hollywood with realism. Today, technology has given us cosmic fantasy. It has also splintered how and where we watch films and TV. Entertainment common ground between generations is shrinking as each seeks shows, podcasts and video streams that speak directly to them and less to the wider world. This raises questions about shared narratives and the future of art, expression and identity. The trend will accelerate with the streaming wars between Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus and other platforms.

It is a progression changed by, but as old as, time. Baby boomers cut their teeth on vinyl records and “Easy Rider”; Gen Xers had “Friends” and “Reality Bites”; millennials watched “The OC” and “The Social Network”; and Gen Z is only too familiar with news of school shootings appearing on their social media feeds and turning themselves into avatars and doppelgangers for 15-second TikTok videos.

One of the most potent signs of youth taking over is Billie Eilish, the 18-year-old subversive who has jolted pop music with her debut electro-pulse album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” The work makes Eilish, who at times looks like an end-of-days denizen, the youngest artist to be simultaneously nominated in the major Grammy categories of song, record, album and best new artist.

Of course, each generation thinks it discovered what has already been charted by the one preceding it. Socially conscious Gen Zers may be marching against gun violence and climate change, but boomers and their elders born before 1946, including Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King Jr., protested for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. A fine line runs between self-righteousness and forgetting. Or worse, not being aware of what those younger and older than us have been through.