She stared into the window. The night was dark enough that she could clearly see the reflection of the furniture, but the angle at which she sat thankfully hid her own shaking form from her sight.
“G-d, tell me, what’s the point – what’s the point of living in a cruel world?” It sounded pathetic, dumb, even to her own ears, it sounded too much like begging she swore so much to be above.
The fear stayed. “It’s too much. Everything’s too much,” she inhaled, voice shaking. “If happiness is about being aware of our influence, our significance – why do we live in a world where more controls us than we can control? Why do we live in a world so set on hiearchy, on luck? Is there any point in significance, if all we have is just the illusion of it?”
Her exhausted brain imagined what they would say, how they’d react, without her wanting it.
You’re too arrogant, too narcissistic-,
The world wasn’t saved by whining-
Too ambicious, hypocritical, sensitive. Typical-
The fear returned, stabbed through her chest like an iron rod, making her fight for her breath before she could force out the words. “No, no, no, I don’t want to die. I never said that. I’d rather run from my problems than end them permanently.”
“Just tell me, whoever you are… What’s the point of living?”
“What’s the point, when all we do is just exist?”
There was no answer.
– unrelated excerpt from the thoughts that appeared, stuck and lingered.
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)
Some people’s politics are literally just “people deserve to suffer”
I think a big part of why gen z culture is like this is because we’re almost too aware of our own insignificance. We are bombarded each day with news depicting how the world is ending, history repeating itself, injustice everywhere, morality gone and no real way to save or solve anything. We grew up on dystopian books, apocalyptic worlds, rebellion, death and fallen empires and then we see it play out in reality. It’s depressing, it’s shoking, it’s infuriating, and most importantly – we can’t do anything about it.
Like, I recently watched Interstellar, and while my mother complained about not understanding the sub-plots, I was sitting there, trying to process the fact that the world is dying in real life. Perhaps not the same way, but it is. (With global warming, we’re halfway to the critical temperature. Perhaps, our children will know that conifers existed only from books and from stories. Think about that for a second.)
But we have no miracle “flying to another inhabitable planet” solution here. We aren’t even close. Even if we had, nobody would be using it because the world is ruled by the rich and ignorant, and losing money in saving people is the last thing people like that want.
So we, here, children who should be first and foremost caring about grades and first crushes and learning are instead stuck in this hellstate of helplessness.
And that makes us angry. Furious. Depressed. Exhausted.
All of that.
We are like this because of one simple fact: We don’t want to die in a world we couldn’t save.
all the websites im looking at to get help with my seasonal depression are like “r u feeling a wittle blue 😦 kinda down in the dumps :(( gotta lil rain cloud over ur head :(((((” no bitch im exhausted and miserable and want to die all the time should i drink more orange juice or what
artherra 