Gen Z Has Never Been More Connected. Or More Fucking Lonely.
A while ago, I found myself talking to a girl from my college who attends a bunch of classes with me. She’s beautiful, kind, funny, popular, extremely intelligent and gets amazing grades, but for some unknown reason, we’d never really talked much before then.
On that day, however, she looked so down that, moved by genuine concern, I asked her what was causing her such visible discomfort. She said she couldn’t keep up with her group of friends anymore because she felt less and less understood.
I thought, “That’s strange! We follow each other on Instagram, and I always see her out having so much fun with them. They look like the closest people on Earth. I envy her a lot (in a loving way).”
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, especially when I consider the fact that the more I talk to my peers, the more I realise that, for us Gen Zers, navigating relationships is becoming increasingly difficult.
The world has changed, technology has evolved, and we’ve been swept up in a society where the gap between the analogue and digital worlds is widening, where everything moves too fast for us to keep up, and where external standards of comparison easily seep into our homes.
We spend our days scrolling through social media, seeing people’s seemingly perfect lives, without realising that, little by little, this perfection has become first a tool for racking up likes, then a social standard we feel we must conform to.
Think about it: if you open Instagram, you’ll see millions of users travelling to the same cities with huge groups of friends, visiting fancy spots, partying all night long or going out to dinner with their partners at elegant restaurants that make for the perfect date.
And if we open TikTok, I can confidently state that it’s even worse: millions of people proclaim themselves love gurus, claiming that if your boyfriend isn’t constantly giving you flowers, he doesn’t love you.
Then you scroll through a few videos, and sure enough, you see the influencer with perfect hair and fresh makeup opening her front door to find a bouquet of one hundred roses with a note from her man (whose identity must remain strictly private. He mustn’t be tagged under any circumstances).
The same guy who will drive her to the most romantic spot in town, where her gorgeous, fashionable, super-duper-hyper-mega-loyal friends are already waiting to have the greatest, most unforgettable dinner of the year (it’s just the same place where another fifty influencers have already been, with the same romantic boyfriends and the same one-of-a-kind friends).
Damn, it’s so tiring. It makes you actually start wondering why you aren’t getting all those roses, too. Or why your nights out with friends are so oddly boring; or, even worse, why you can’t find the right friends to do all those cool things with.
Basically, the more we scroll, the deeper we delve into a tunnel of instructions mixed with models we feel forced to recreate and, inevitably, show off.
It's sad, isn't it? Wasting so much time comparing ourselves to the rest of the world, wondering how our lives could look as perfect as, if not better than, everyone else's?
This way, not only does it become very easy to drift apart from those healthy relationships with people who love us because they don't seem to meet a certain standard, but we also risk settling for someone who doesn't truly see us, just so we can have beautiful content to share.
We spend our days chatting with an endless number of people, perhaps more than ever before, considering how easy it is to connect nowadays, while complaining that we want friends and someone who loves us. But we worry more about what we can do and show in their company rather than what they can give us.
It’s chaos, a huge, nerve-wracking chaos that makes us forget about the one and only question we should ask ourselves when it comes to the people we want to share a piece of our lives with: Shouldn't we stop worrying about how our relationships look and focus instead on how they make us feel?
Photo © Odessa A’zion and Drew Starkey Photographed by Myles Hendrik.
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