On the Cusp of Caring: A Gen Z-er’s Guide to a Better Relationship with Aspiration, Desire, and Dreaming, in Lieu of a Childhood of the Internet, Trump, Covid, and a World Burning Beneath our Feet
I’m no stranger to the internet. Born in 2002, I have both memories of playing sudoku on my parents’ box computer, and the first time I ever interacted with a touch screen (it was to play Fruit Ninja on my childhood best friend’s iPad). As I reflect on some 10 years of having social media, I think back to how it has shaped my sense of self, my relationship with the world around me, and my psyche.
Many cornerstone aspects of my identity have been constructed and deconstructed due to information, media, and literature only made available to me due to the internet. As someone born into a highly religious family and extremely homogeneous community, I often wonder who I would be if I didn’t have access to the internet. I think back to the right-of-passage Google searches that I frantically deleted from the family computer of “am I gay quiz” and “girls kissing” when I was no more than 11, after discovering the word “lesbian” on my Instagram Explore page. I think about the articles, read around the age of 14 detailing the LDS church’s history, its relationship to people of color, and Joseph Smith’s relation to underage girls, which began the deconstruction of my childhood faith. I also think of the countless nights spent watching films such as “Lady Bird” and “Good Will Hunting” that shaped my point of view so fully; secretly purchased to rent, watched with headphones in my bedroom at age 16, knowing that if my parents knew I was watching rated R films, my phone would be confiscated until I was in college.
I’d like to believe that these personal milestones and pivotal discoveries that shaped my identity would have been reached eventually with or without the internet, maybe in later years of young adulthood, and being exposed to other cultures apart from the “Molly Mormons” I call kin. I’d like to believe that my queerness, my faith transition, my political beliefs, and my artistry would have been found, and eventually fostered to the fullness that they are embraced now, still I would be naive to think that I would be where I am today, at 21, in the fullness of being out, exploring other faith practices, and creating the art that I am creating without the catalyst of the internet.
While reflecting on my full experience with the internet, although expansive and liberating in many ways, I can’t help but think of all of the times, countless at that, when I have been exposed to truly terrible things from the computer I carry around in my pocket. I remember the first time I was sent a photo of a grown man’s genitals. I was 13, and I thought the person I was adding on Snapchat was a kid I knew from my 7th-grade English class. The photo was blurry and strange. My stomach turned after I processed what it was that I was looking at, and as I quickly turned my phone off, my first thought was to pray. I was worried I was going to go to Hell.
On a more global level, the first time I learned about many pressing issues of our time was from social media. Abortion, the Climate Crisis, Police Brutality, the Pillars of White Supremacy, and an even broader stance I can recall being exposed to the word “Feminism” for the first time via my Instagram Explore page.
Even on a professional level. The reason I signed with my first talent agency at the age of 14 was because of an open casting I saw online, the program I attended at the American Conservatory Theater was found through a Google search of short-term conservatory programs out of my home state of Utah, and the majority of my professional jobs have been booked because of the networking I do on social media.
I owe much of who I am today to the fact that I had access to the internet from such a young age, and for better or for worse, it is why I am who I am in countless ways.
But as I reflect on the last ten years of my life, spanning from prepubescent me to the working professional and artist that I am now, I can’t help but sit with the eerie knowing, that no person - not on a psychological, neurological, nor physiological level, was ever supposed to be able to digest, process, and act upon this amount of information and noise, and yet it's often the first thing we interact with in the morning, and the last thing we interact with at night.
The level of desensitization to violence, the intentional manipulation of thought brought about via personal data breaches, and the complete lack of media literacy that seems rampant among every generation these days is not only dangerous but on an individual level, completely debilitating.
I think back to middle school, the first time I heard the word “Pussy” was from the mouth of our former president, a clip from YouTube played during lunch from the phone of a boy sitting four seats next to me, he laughed at the implication that one should be grabbed. Later that year, when I myself was sexually assaulted, those words burned between my ears. I thought of my family members, the supposed “trusted adults” in my life, whom I knew voted that man into office.
Fast forward a few strange years, of bizarre tweets and an attempted coup, the COVID-19 outbreak in full swing, I was attempting to pass my senior year of high school, and try, and ultimately fail to start my college journey.
The ages of 17-19 were nothing but false starts, mingled with the remnants and hollow implications of what should have been one of the most important eras of my life, in regards to personal and professional development. We were left with this hollow space of what could have been, but never was, a hunger for connection, and an equally aching pit of loneliness, of longing, for what our lives should have been, and a deep uncertainty of the world around us, that for many, myself included, turned into a deep mistrust in not only the remnants of the world we occupy but also a deep mistrust within ourselves. This time of exploration, which should have been laying the ground for self-actualization in the broader world away from our youth, was stripped away, and in that empty space, I watched, as we all clung to the one source of connection that was safe, familiar, and imitated true connection; the internet. And we ate it up. We sat, for years, and watched the individualized puppets on the walls of the cave that is personal algorithm, and we slowly slipped into a sedated, submissive state of anger and apathy with no reference point of the bizarre nature of this form of connection.
The one thing that I believe set my generation apart from the millennials, who had their college years and a bit of real life to hold as a vantage point of what adulthood was “supposed” to be, and the Gen Alpha kids who were gaining consciousness in and through the pandemic, is that Gen Zers have no framework as to what it is like experientially to exist as adults in a pre-pandemic world.
We were birthed into the “real world” in and through an era of complete distortion of all normalcy, and primed with a childhood of overconsumption of information and an extremist cultural divide and political climate, we face an external landscape that is grim, and an internal landscape that has been desensitized to that fact. And anyone who wants to argue that our generation is sensitive, naive, or reactive, has never taken the time to sit with the world in which they are leaving us, and the circumstances from which we came.
What I have noticed among my peers, among young folk across the nation, is a decreasing drive to dream, to desire, to aspire, and an increasing appetite for individualism, consumerism, and stagnation of thought beyond feed, with a natural result of chronic loneliness and disconnect, without a real understanding that that is what we are feeling, to begin with.
And really, who’s to blame us? Looking back at our given circumstances, we have every reason to lull, to buy, to sleep our young adult years away because for a pivotal moment in time, bodies gathered in space and time were unsafe, unwanted, and for some time, illegal. On a physical level we were isolated, and on a mental and emotional level, being ok with the substitution of social media, individualism, and consumption, was easier than the collective grief that had nowhere to go. Shutting down our care for our own lives, and our own future has been a coping method for the collective for years.
This chronic loneliness, this chronic disconnect, is not only harmful to individuals and personal development but humanity at large. In this article that Vox posted, conversing about Hannah Ardent’s point of view of the connection between loneliness, mass anger, and resentment, Sean Illing summarizes her view well when he said, “In her book on totalitarianism, Arendt talks about the emergence of “the masses,” which is distinct from what we might think of as classes or interest groups because those are groups that are by definition fighting for some common interest. She’s talking about the rise of an “unorganized mass” of “mostly furious individuals” with nothing in common except for their contempt for the present order. She calls this “negative solidarity” and it’s the raw material of totalitarianism, because it’s a world without connection and friendship, where the only basis of collective action is some kind of awful combination of anger and desperation.”
But this burning, this unbreakable human spirit, this desire to connect, to dream, to grow together is still aflame, is still there, waiting for us to engage with it, to feel through the grief, to invest in our own narrative once again. So how do we shift this? How do we turn the tides on our own acquired apathy? What is our anecdote?
One quote that is brought to mind is from Thomas McConkie’s At-One-Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity. A not strictly Mormon account of Thomas’ relationship to the mind, heart, and body connection, and its role in human divinity. “A mature heart practice is not about always trying to feel good, it's about being willing to feel more.”
We have enough information. We have more than enough context, we have thick skin, and we have grit, we even have the want to want, but what we lack, what I would like to argue here, is the need for embodied transformative collective experiences. Through our bodies, through our sweat, to learn from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.
I think back to the first time I went to a lesbian bar, no more than six months ago. I had been out for some time and was happily dating my then-partner of almost two years. I didn’t think that this experience would be so emotional for me. In theory, I was at peace with my sexuality, I loved who I was and I loved who I loved.
But being in that room, of dykes, mascs, femmes, and queer folk alike, I felt the calcified shame that was lurking in my shadow wash through my body, and then like a palm on frosted earth, it melted away with ease. As I danced, as I sang, as I spent the night in a space where I could witness others being themselves, embodying themselves shamelessly, I tapped into a safe, relaxed, and comfortable version of myself, a version I thought I could only feel alone, or with a select few individuals who had been vetted for sharing similar values. And safety found in loneliness is not true safety, it is just an act of avoiding harm. True safety is within community, within the active acclimation to one's own vulnerability, and being held through that. That night I tapped into a soft knowing of a fuller version of myself. A version of myself that was not just trying to feel good, but trying to feel more.
We deserve to ground these values we gained through internet dialogue, into active, informed, and productive action. Not just in protests, or demonstrations, or collective rage, but in feeding our neighbors, mutual aid, ferocious joy, and what some call socialism and others call being neighborly. We are a distinctly left-leaning generation, with visions and dreams of change, but there is no revolution found in the roots of individualism, and as Hannah Arendt warned, loneliness is the richest soil for fascism to grow.
We need to learn what it feels like, to have important and necessary conversations face-to-face. We need to indulge in the dance of life, not just observe it and then protect ourselves with armored “opinion”. Each day we have a chance to face and challenge our own realities, to rehearse for revolution as Augusto Boal argues. How on earth are we going to insight change without the skills of engaging in dialogue, community building, and caring- as in the verb of displaying kindness and concern for others? Not just saying it, or checking off the box of internal belief systems, but in an active practice.
We lost years of rooms of bodies and breath, of messy first kisses and conversations where eyes meet. We have lost our capacity to remain sensitive to the senses, to develop our taste away from the secluded box of visual/audio content that raised us. We have access to more information than any generation before us, and yet we know so little about the bodies that carry us through this life. Our true nature will never be found in empty rooms with just our “selves” bouncing off the walls. We need to feel through community, we need to collect, we need to organize. We need to find the profound in our own primality. And that takes practice, and sustained, uninterrupted attention, unwavering presence.
There is something out there, something I cannot teach you of, something that I cannot even begin to name, that is formed in the active engagement with faith in your own life, your own story, your own desire beyond feed. In community, in neighborhood, and in active collective caring.
The internet is great for information and documentation, but there is something sacred and singular to be found in facing faces and speaking with voice. In touch, and mess, and moments lived in time that will only ever be seen again behind our eyelids, or read about from journals, or shared around campfires. Life is meant to be lived, not just theorized about, and experiential learning is what makes us human. Please do not let yourself, your thoughts, your beliefs, your values, to be solely based on words from a screen. The idea of something is not the something. Your life is found in the finding, there is something to be seen in the search.
Please do not let these years lost take away our collective youth, please do not let the weekly tragedy keep you locked in your room. The greatest rebellion and revolution for our generation is to see the world burning and dance anyway. And I would like to argue that the dance is the water we need to make the brittle clay of fear and shame soft again, so we can rebuild our reality on the fertile foundation of belonging. I promise the leap into faith will be worth it.
The leap into shedding light on the things we feel so alone in, paving the way for moments of “me too” “I see you” and “tell me more”, the leap into vulnerability, is the quickest way to dissipate shame. The slow and steady steps we can take to come back together as a people, to recognize that we have more in common than we could possibly imagine and that our bodies have much to teach us about that.
We can and we must, through simply witnessing each other, and sharing our own experiences, walk each other home from the false house of shame, of fear, of cerebral “certainty” and a lack of embodied context, to our birthright of empathy, community, and care. As you read this, I challenge you to reach out, to touch your life, to engage with the fall into the unknown, because I promise what’s waiting for you on the other side of that wall is a whole world of others just like you, waiting to be embraced. And please, if nothing else, don’t just take my word for it.
