Gen Z is, in most ways, no different than the generations who came before us. Cigarette lighters in our cars were replaced with phone chargers, but we still follow the incentives given to us and do what is required of us to survive. The problem is, to survive requires almost nothing.
We don’t have to hunt or gather food, nor do we have to drive to a grocery store or restaurant. We Doordash and work from home. We use dating apps and social media to cultivate relationships from our couch. As long as one can afford rent, one never needs to leave. But to afford rent, one must work two meaningless jobs, plus a passion-project-turned-side-hustle because any time not monetized is time wasted. What I’m saying is, we’re incentivized to numb ourselves. We created a world where we were no longer needed.
So we sedate ourselves with technology and processed foods and gorge ourselves on the narrative that we could be otherwise. We were told we could be anything when we grew up and Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok fed us more options than we could ever imagine in an endless scroll. Gen Z was given too much freedom.
