I’ve made some friends with Millennials recently. I’ve personally forgiven them for the coffee shop epidemic and inflation (not for Facebook, just yet). But there is something I need to address.
One thing I’ve noticed from being around real people is how different they are from the ones you meet on the internet. It is human nature to care about what other people think of you, for enhanced survival (I think). But the existence of the internet and people who are chronically online completely erase all that.
In the face on Gen Z, those emotionally unavailable, bisexual polyamorous gender-questioning, technology addicted basket cases, it seems as though hundreds of years of the study of human development and psychology will get discarded, because it is all so bizarre it is completely incomprehensible.
^This 13-year-old girl is a multi-millionaire now, BTW. OnlyFans, lots of fans…
The existence of Snapchat in particular gives rise to a new kind of dating, one with no label, but all the comforts of being physically desired, without any of the physical intimacy or emotional connections, which come with baggage, undesirable bodily fluids (yuck!) feelings.
Since before I could remember I’ve juggled between a few consistent boys on Snapchat, who change like the seasons. When people ask me if I’ve ever been in a relationship, I freeze, because I don’t know how to answer that question. This concept never occurred to me, partially because I’ve always been in one, or two, or a few, rinsing out my heart with bleach each time one ends until it is spotless and I am free of the pain of being alive and existing because I feel absolutely nothing.
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve never posted a man on my social media feed, unless he was a gay one. (I have a loving panel of homosexual men who will support me in all my endeavors, even illegal or illicit.)
The reason I don’t post any men to my feed is that it would mess up the vibe I’ve carefully curated, the aura of my aesthetic and personally embarrass me. It’s also important to note that I have a loving relationship with anonymous_4657, and countless more, all of whom have parasocial relationships with me.
Will I ever meet anonymous_4657? No, of course not. And this is the beauty.
(Once I found out who one Anon was, he worked at my high school as the girl’s basketball coach. Yikes!)
One of the first jobs I ever had was as a webcam girl, which I started the day I turned eighteen. I thought it would be a fun and interesting way to earn extra income. But what began as a part-time job quickly escalated into a lifelong case study into the ever-changing human condition.
The extreme prevalence of e-girls and OnlyFans models in this day and age are because women are in general very frightening to some men to approach, so the existence of e-girls comforts them in knowing their biological needs are satisfied without having to be emotionally vulnerable.
With that being said, I’m probably a little broken. It might be because of the internet, life circumstances, or God’s fatal design flaw in my creation. Truthfully, there’s probably something deeply wrong with me, but I just don’t think I care anymore. This is where Millennials and Gen Z diverge a little bit.
While Millennials like to sit around in a circle with one another and do a wellness retreat with some inner child healing, Gen Z is more likely to be sitting around in a basement somewhere smoking weed out of five-gallon soda bottles and Home Depot buckets, listening to Alice in Chains, asking each other how exactly they’d do it.
This is because Gen Z’s inner child is holding a gun. Gen Z isn’t trying to get better. Gen Z is actively getting worse, and documenting it on TikTok like it’s nothing. This is because Gen Z was born into the end.
(It is fair to note that Gen Z have a lot of things in common with their predecessors, Gen X’ers, who brought rock and roll to the mainstream and thought the world was going to end in 1999)
The real beauty here, however, is the desire for human connection, coupled with the need to escape the present reality.
I like to treat the varying psychological conditions I’ve been diagnosed with like the answers to Buzzfeed quizzes, getting a different result each time. Arguably, my Zodiac placement, Capricorn Sun, Moon and Mercury, is a better explanation for why I am the way that I am.
(Jeff Bezos is a Capricorn. This explains everything.)
Now we’re getting to the root of the issue. What happens when the iPad children grow up and have to live in the real world, and all the things that becoming an adult comes with like going to college, getting professional jobs, or marrying?
The answer is simple: They don’t. Time passes, but Gen Z does not.
Maybe it’s the processed food, vaccines, unfiltered access to technology from a young age, or it has something to do with the formaldehyde in vape pens…
Regardless of the causation of this group neurosis, we are here to stay. I can comfortably say that I have faith humanity can be restored.
Seemingly, Gen Z cannot function, but they function in their own way. Through a language many understand, but few can comprehend.
Memes.
Hieroglyphs were an ancient form of communication between the ancient Egyptians. Memes and emojis have replaced that. It is a form of communication that transcends language and brings the world together, in a time of desperate need for unity.
Also, memes are actually much deeper than you’d think. They are used to convey those emotions that don’t always have words attached to them. Art is a good example of this.
And life tends to imitate art.
I always think that Facebook is for old people who don’t read. But the real beauty of the internet is you can pick and choose where you want to go, like Hogwarts houses you’re assigned to, and I have a permanent residency on Tumblr, where young girls would go in 2014 to glamourize varying degrees of psychosis for other ones.
Facebookers have stolen the culture of meme page accounts and took our beautiful language to make them racist or impure. But the original intent of memes, an art form, was quite simple: to spread joy in times of madness or uncertainty.
memes from 1920
Also, why is it that every 9/11, the state mandates us to have to be sad when we can share memes about it instead?
There was a shooting at my high school, sure, trauma, but what better way to cope with this, then by listening to “Pumped Up Kicks” slowed and reverbed on repeat, tweeting about “90’s core”, accompanied by a weed vape pen with questionable ingredients?
Is there any alternative, to survive the weight of the world than to turn to something that makes you laugh in the worst way possible?
Gen Z has figured out that humor is survival.
Is it Gen Z’s fault they so messed up? No, I don’t think so. I think everyone is a product of their environment (until they change it, but still, lasting effects linger). But maybe it was intentional in the creation of Gen Z in the laboratory, to be so… Yanno…
“Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
There is a quiet wisdom about this philosophy, a wisdom that generations prior cannot possibly conceive of. To embrace the absurd, is to bypass the natural suffering that goes along with life, by saying “too real” or “me” next to a picture of a dead body, before just moving on to the next unimaginable man-made horror life has in store.
Albert Camus called this absurdity, that moment when the human desire for meaning crashes into the silence of the universe. He said we are hardwired to search for reason, for purpose, for narrative. But the universe? Doesn’t care. It offers no answers, just entropy and violence and some weird guy yelling on TikTok about soy consumption.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes about a man condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to roll back down every time he reaches the top. That’s life. That’s the whole thing. But here’s the twist: Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus as happy. Because the moment he accepts the absurd; the futility, the repetition, the cosmic joke… he becomes free.
That’s what Gen Z has done. Except instead of a boulder, it’s a phone screen. Instead of pushing it up a hill, they’re doom-scrolling through endless disasters, climate collapse, school shootings, government lies, and whatever the hell is going on with AI girlfriends. The scroll never ends. But rather than break under the weight of it, they laugh. They repost. They make it a meme. They find absurdity and match it with more absurdity.
This isn’t nihilism. This is the indomitable human spirit.
Gen Z doesn’t need a revolution. They need the freedom their parents never allowed themselves to feel based on the limiting beliefs passed on for centuries prior. (But mostly, they need people to stop mistaking irony for apathy.)
They live every day in the face of despair, not because they think it’ll get better. But because they know that anonymous_4567 misses them, dearly, and there is no other girl in the world like them…
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