eramidsummer:

Gen Z manifesto

Here is to all the people aged 14ish up to 22ish. 

We’re not millennials, but most of us aren’t kids anymore. 

We actually weren’t born with smartphones in hand – we spent our early childhood bit similarily to millennial.  You are thinking about the kids born from 2006-ish that have been exposed to tablets, smartphones and Internet daily. (for example, I grew up rarely watching cartoons and my mother sometimes allowed me to play online for half an hour. That was it.)

So yes, we had the Internet and we love it now, but it wasn’t that essential in our lives up until the late years of primary school & middle-school. 

We are savvy in tech & internet stuff and we adjust to new things immediately. It was a huge part of our teenage years and it is VERY important in our lives and we don’t think that the internet is a waste of time and danger because we understand it. We remember how to live without it.

We don’t see social media, technology and the Internet as socially crippling in general because we know that properly used, they are good. We don’t see spending time together with phones in our hand as any different as sitting in together with a newspaper, book or crossword. Meeting and spending time on the smartphone together(plus discussing over it) don’t have to be any less bonding than discussing a book or a movie in our opinion.

We know what a video cassette is. And CD.  Same with flip-phones. Pendrives. Non-virtual DVD-rental. Desktop computers. 

We used it, actually. Those items were part of our childhood.

We know that we’re ‘privileged’ in terms of medicine standard of life and technology, but we feel pressured. 

We’re-entering adulthood in times when the whole world, whether in terms of politics, technology or work market, is changing as rapidly as it had never been changing before. 

We feel like we had to change the world. We are expected to be responsible adults, focused on the future and aiming high while in high-school. We feel that we have to be better and better and normal teenage goofing around isn’t an option for us. We are being told that wanting to survive and wanting to have a simple, average life isn’t enough when sometimes, it is. 

We feel that we have to change the whole wide world when in reality changing just our life and our close environment would be enough, but society didn’t really tell us that. 

We are treated like adults and kids at the same time, not as teenagers we are (and yes, in my mind people in their early 20s should be allowed to be treated like teenagers). 

We don’t hate older or younger generations. 

Our coping system is usually sarcasm, cynicism, memes and Tumblr. 

That doesn’t mean we all wanna die. That doesn’t mean we don’t have ideals. That doesn’t mean we’re pessimists. 

We are realists. We know that hope is important but sometimes our dark humour is the only thing that keeps us going. 

We are aware of our mental health and our mental illnesses and we want the older generations – actually, all generations, not to treat this matter as a taboo. 

As the Silent Generation and Gen X, we suffer from a new version of Weltschmerz (source here). 

(of course, those are general characteristics and they don’t apply to all of us or at least not all of them -in case that is not obvious for some people)