When they were 9 years old, they were provided with knowledge of the world! No one informed them of its use.
There is a generation of us all that has never experienced anonymity, and that is just it. They were algorithmically profiled before they were old enough to vote, one before they were ever spoken to, and another before they were old enough to read. The young people of the Generation Z (those born between 1997-12) however, were not ‘brought up’ in the digital age. They came to be born straight into its mouth and hatched the chewing habit.
It is what we term “a crisis of identity. But almost all that is too clean, too orderly a way of talking about what is going on. The predicament that Generation Z finds themselves in is almost a philosophical emergency—the vertigo of living in a world in which you are two people: you are on the ground you have a body, a birthday, a mom saying “what happened to you today? A philosophical emergency: A vertigo when you live in two worlds, one physical, having a birthday, a bedroom, a mother asking, ‘What happened to you today? Unfortunate is not that young people are opting one over another. The tragedy is that this line has been erased: few of them were given a map!
A See in Glass to turn the mind’s gaze inwards.
Generational Identity has been battled from time immemorial! Boomers lived under an ‘existential fog’ of the Cold War and that fog shrouded their purpose. Gen X, a generation that was raised in a culture that warned us not to take anything for granted. The orientation is taken away, and millennials are the first generation of adults where their identities and personality have been mined, thereby questioning the whole concept of social media.
The algorithm, for generation Z, presented them with something different in kind, however.
So, it is not a social media tool, it is a social media environment! As the air itself. The algorithm does not simply reflect you back on or duplicate you, it makes you what you are. It is able to enjoy some self-expression; takes the voice away from others. It does this by amplifying the anger, turning pain into art, turning what is most intimate into a most intimate experience – grieving, falling in love, being pinned back and forth, being confused and frightened, being happy – into something like-handed out. A 16-year-old girl gets upset and puts a tear-filled video on YouTube, it gets 400,000 views and she learns what? That there is merit in her pain – when it is publicly exercised. The ‘$’ is money. The self is the result of . . . .
This is not metaphorical, it is real. True Psychology, lack of which people are brought up with.
Who am I when nobody is looking?
A question comes to mind that I want to record but Gen-Z can’t possibly answer: Can they?
The smartphone should never fail to have the alphabet available, I suppose. The audience seldom walks away. Social consciousness, it’s true, has become electronics — and studies have found that young people are avid users of their phones, checking them out more than 150 times a day, even when it’s not used in the same way as in the past when addiction takes meant checking out — it’s simply their social awareness. The phone would not be where it was if it were not down, if it were not there, really it would not be. For people who have been imagined for the most part by that social world, which seems horrifying.
“Social imaginary” (Charles Taylor) is the network that connects the sense of self and the frameworks that we are offered to interpret who we are, what is important. An imaginary of society is handed on from one generation to another. But they have been given a world that has not been handed down by previous generations, a world that is instant, a world that is global, a world that is numbers, a world that is forever noted.
Your Great Granny could transform when she relocated to another city. At seventeen, the awkward phase ended and so did the cringey opinion – though the bad haircut was not until a while later. There is no dissolving with Generation Z. The internet remembers. Old tweets surface. Unwanted children’s photos are shared. The same “self” that is the problem that you want to leave behind is the one continually haunting you and putting a TIMESTAMP,
If it is all your becoming archived, “what about when you are a new?”
Leveraging Political Strategy for Personal Gains
Another part of this crisis is peculiarly “modern” — literally “politics of the self.”
Generation Z has been inundated with the myriads of terms used to describe them. What was once hidden (and perhaps tightly policed) in the realm of gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence and mental health is now a distance thing. From many aspects, this is true freedom. To some extent, which is the language with which the young people refer to themselves – and each other – to get a handle on this, to find a way to describe it. That matters enormously. This has literally saved lives.
Yet there is an underside to it of which we are not sufficiently honest. When identity is used as a filter to understand the world and when this identity is a performative one which is academically recognized and shared in a public ‘digital’ space, the burden becomes overwhelming in working through a set of identities that have to be readable, shareable, and stable. The inchoate self, the inquisitive self, the one that doubts and contradicts — the younger self — is hard to show in a Twitter bio, even in a style, on a TikTok. Public should be added with labels but can also prematurely harden the liquid prior to the setting of the concrete.
Generation Z also had more words at their disposal for claiming identities than any previous generation in history—and not enough time and room to discover who they are underneath the gaze of others or witness of the public, either. It certainly is not as if that contradiction is trivial. It is right in the center, as it were, of the crisis, I would say.
As the Weather fills me with anxiety.
No data is unclear. Generation Z is a much more anxious and depressed generation than those who came before them, is lonelier, and is much more likely to be suicidal. In the past decade (2009-2019), ER visits for self-destructive behaviors three times higher in adolescent females compared to any other age group, and at the same time, a teenage girl’s social life has taken a sharp turn in favor of the smart phone and Instagram. It is not a coincidence.
But this is what I want to take issue with: This notion of the “fragile generation” or the “coddled generation” or the “overtightened screw.” The tale is easily told, and it is a lie. If loosely read as flaws, frailty, or frail, it will go on reinforcing that notion of fragility, but it is actually a rather in-depth understanding of a very disordered world. Not breaking down in normal conditions, these youth are. They are reacting to something that is abnormal — and quite rationally.
This is a Generation Z problem of, “Who am I now?” they are not doing anything wrong! A wound in which the body tissues are injured. It is what happens when you add, the most formatively developmental phase of human life, your ego which is still building up from scratch, adolescence, and add to it the most overly stimulating, overly social, overly comparative, and so addicting environment you could find. What of the inevitable, what were we to do?
The path back to oneself.
I am not nostalgic. I do not believe the solution should be to break the devices and go back to an idyllic view of rural simplicity. The digital world is one and only word. That is not something that is going to change. This, of course, should come as no surprise to Gen Z, who have never experienced anything different and would likely be astonished by anyone who suggests otherwise, let alone those who doubt their capacity and resiliency, or dismiss them as less innovative than their critics deem them.
If you are resilient and do not know where to go it is like ‘endurance’ only. What this generation is crying for and is starting to mutter and ask for in their barely coherent and brilliant ways is a culture that lets them be unfinished.
Allowance to be without interpersonal knowledge. Allowance to be a person of contradiction. The liberty to be wearing a mask that we can carry around with us, wear on, take off, or put on, having a teen identity and, at eighteen, being confused or, at nineteen, no. No wonder that many young people are escaping to individual pursuits, antiquated hobbies, diaries and therapy, religious groups, the hills and anywhere they can get to – anywhere they can avoid the feeling that they are quantified, acted upon and acted-up upon.
Like all generations they seek themselves in their way.
A letter to the Algorithm’s Children
The thing I can just say this: You are not the online you, Generation Z. You did it for yourself, you compressed, you translated, you filtered, you optimized and it is all for a medium you were not intended for. This is you – the one who does not have anything to say in an idle conversation, the one who changes her mind, the one who feels something she has no words for, the boring, one on a Tuesday afternoon. That is the one that is worth building!
There is an identity crisis in the world. Also, however, a crisis is a turning point. There’s hope — fitful, fragile, beautiful — that Generation Z is paradigm-shifting. Shifting from doing to being. From Known to unknown. Say goodbye to all that “How do I look?” and hello to the old, hard, important “Who am I?”?
There is no algorithm for this question! It could be a caption, it could be made for engagement, or it could simply be a trending sound. Literally, it requires a time of silence and guts to sit with the uncertainty until something that is true arises in this countercultural era.
Generation Z did not pick the world into which they were born. But they also are increasingly making choices on how to live through it—and it is teaching me things and hopefully other folks’ things about what it means to be human in a world that increasingly tries to numb me to numbness.
I do not give up on crises like that. It is a generation I watch as if my sperm cells are in it.
It is not a self. It is not a profile. It is not a niche, it is not an aesthetic, it is not even a take! It is the one under it all the time, etc., the one that existed before the first log-in and will exist after the last.