My generation is broken...
2023-06-18
When I take a look around my circle of friends or peers in my age in general, I can't help but come to the conclusion that my generation is fundamentally broken. And I'm not talking about these factually wrong ideas of us Gen Zs not wanting to work or being politically apathetic. I'm talking about an almost omnipresent psychological crack caused by today's society. Let me explain...
My generation certainly is the best connected and informed, physically healthiest (sports and nutrition) and most inclusive (LGBTQIA+) one in history. We are also one of the generations that likes to set their own definition of a "good life" (like trying to travel as much as possible and enjoy live, earning only what you need and reducing work time to 30 h or a 4 day week for a better work-live balance) and doesn't fear fighting against social standards (40 h middle-class office job as THE goal) in order to make it a reality. Especially in wealthy countries like Germany, we also live in "the land of plenty", most of us never had to experience any major shortages of essential goods, we can fulfil most of our materialistic wishes and until recently didn't even have to think about the risk of war (Russia ruining this run of piece of course). With all of this, we should be the happiest generation ever too, right?
Well, as it turns out we also are one of the generations or possibly THE generation that's the loneliest and most effected by mental illnesses ranging from (occupational) burnouts over self-distructive behaviour to existential crisis. Don't believe me? Take a look at official reports from the WHO or your local health ministry and you are going to see a skyrocketing number of cases. And you know what? It's not even our fault! This is an result of the ever decreasing number of real life social interactions and supposedly dystopian future presented to us by the media, all of which is heavily accelerated or even made possible by the internet . You heard right, I as an extremely tech-savvy person make the worldwide miracle of interconnected computers responsible for all of this.
Of course, the internet isn't inherently bad (just like any other technology) and opened the door to many priorly unthinkable achievements like productive asynchronous communication between millions. But I also truly believe that exactly this concept of sending a digital message to someone or a whole community and waiting (or craving) for a response was the first step towards the ever increasing distance between individuals. Nowadays with these numerous sophisticated social media platforms using self-learning algorithms to maximize screen time by all costs, we not only notice an inevitable decrease in productivity (Can't work while watching TikTok, huh?), but also the hardware limitations of your monkey brians.
You see, we humans we're able to shape the world to our likings (I won't answer the question whether or not that's a good thing, but you probably already know the answes), because we are an incredible social species and try to mirror others' behaviour in order to learn new skills and fit into a group. This ability of so-called Social Learning only enabled our rise to the top of species since not every invidiual had to figure out how to make fire him- or herself, but could copy this skill from someone else and use his limited lifetime to develop new ones. But on almost any social media platform we are confronted not only with unrealistic beauty, fitness, success or whatever ideals, but so many of them that we can't possibly manage to mirror them all. This leads to unavoidable failure (because our inner-monkey will try anyway) and can cause major psychological harm in the long run when many of these events pile up, especially if you have a genetic tendency for mental illnesses.
THIS is why my generations is currently effected the most as we basically grew up with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Snapchat and whatever they all call themselves, but this problem will only become bigger as time progresses and more and more generations grow up this way. Personally, I believe VR and AR (as shown in countless movies such as the excellent Ready Player One) to be the ultimate danger, because the technologies in combination with a true metaverse open up the possibilty for a whole life time without real world interactions. At that point, the only solution I see to keep the society working is to pump the population full of mood boosters via their food and drinks.
I know that this one has been a bit of a depressing article, so I want to close with a positive note. We aren't in that dystopia yet, there are countless people out there waiting for you to call them for an outdoor activity and YOU are still in control of your digital devices, not the other way around. If you feel the need to limit their impact on your life, take a look at my article " Smartphones are today's opium of the masses " as a starting point. As always, feel free to share you thoughts in the comments down below...