It took me a while to write this article for multiple reasons:
1. I didn’t want to offend technophile Gen Z’ers (that includes me).
2. I didn’t feel qualified to speak about previous generations that I wasn’t a part of.
3. I honestly wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about this topic.
I’ll start out with this: it’s in our nature to want to be better than others. It’s not right or honorable, but it’s normal. We’ve all seen those “remember when” and “you know you’re old when” posts by Millennials and Gen X’ers (and even Gen Z’ers sometimes) who are fully willing to berate a kid in the comments who doesn’t know an obscure reference to a Walkman or something. And don’t forget the time Jimmy Kimmel called out Billie Eilish for not knowing who Van Halen was (it made the news!).
Okay, the point is, some people don’t like the new generation. After all, we’re just the optimistic dreamers who got caught up in the efflux of groundbreaking technology and can usually be found with our eyes glued to a screen instead of curing cancer. But has Gen-Z really changed that much from previous generations?
Well, we now have a supercomputer that stores pretty much our entire lives into little apps. It’s small enough to fit in our back pocket, but it’s one of the biggest differences between then and now. I don’t think there’s ever been something like it that became everyone’s literal world.
It’s something that we always need to have with us, or the adrenaline starts flooding in. “Where’s my phone?” we ask, looking around the room and eventually asking someone to call it, even though it’s 10:00 at night and there isn’t really any need for us to have it except to check our missed calls and texts. I’ve not only experienced this myself, but I’ve seen it happen to other people: a little 8-ounce metal thing causing the not-so-little world to stop for a moment.
Gen Z’ers are also used to knowing everything—i.e., getting notifications about a tragic event just hours after it happened. Does this make things worse for our generation, too? Is having things easier always better? Does having depressing news constantly within reach make us more agitated and fearful, or is it a good thing that we aren’t kept in the dark?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, and I’m sure you don’t either. But I think it’s important to recognize that although our generation is different and worse in some ways, there are a lot of ways that we’re the same. Past generations were able to find ways to waste time before the internet/social media, like reading, watching TV and listening to the radio. In the same way that we use our phones as an excuse to be recluses, people did the same thing with their books and Walkmans (Walkmen?). The only difference is that we now have a socially acceptable excuse to be withdrawn into our own little portable world.
So, yeah, our generation sucks. But so did the generations before us. While some people reminisce about VHS tapes and mullets, I think about how difficult it was for my parents to have an interracial wedding. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of horrible things about my generation. There’s a lot of chaos right now (and especially last year, which we will not speak of).
I also recognize the issue of technology making a lot of horrible and unmentionable things easy to access with a few clicks of a button, while previous generations probably would’ve had to go through some major underground loopholes.
But my final takeaway is this: whether you’re more confused about cassette tapes or TikTok (in my case, it’s both), we are all humans tainted by sin, and our technology hasn’t made sin worse—it’s just brought it out of hiding. How we handle that is a responsibility given to everyone.
Photo by Laila Al-Hagal
