Nothing feels real anymore. No one feels real anymore. And though I used to roll my eyes at the Gen X-ers warning us about the dangers of the internet while voice-typing on their phones, I have begun to realize that there is real truth to their words.
Our generation is forgetting how to be human beings, and the generation after us isn’t learning how in the first place. These ramblings are the product of a walk-and-talk around France with my best friend that evolved into a ten-mile trek where we ranted about the cult of nonchalance, situationship culture and the rise of perfectly curated “casual” Instagram.
Many of us came of age in a world where everything we did was memorialized for all of eternity. People underestimate the psychological impact of having a digital footprint at such a young age, as it certainly dictates the way that we behave as adults. When confronted with the possibility that every action will become part of our permanent online record, the natural response is to self-censor, to model our behavior on its potential consequences. We had no room to make mistakes or try something new, because doing so would risk ridicule.
Though it is a cliché, it is true that you cannot grow without committing errors along the way, leaving many of our peers, and the majority of Generation Alpha, trapped in a kind of permanent adolescence, a state of hyper self-awareness and subsequent conformity. I worry especially about kids born even ten years after me: kids who never got to be weird, to be loud know-it-alls with one too many pairs of patterned knee socks (yes, I’m talking about my middle school self here). Nothing is more terrifying to me than the girls I see walking around the mall, the girls who cannot be older than 12 in their full faces of makeup and their PINK training bras. Part of this early maturation can be linked to the rise in early puberty, but it also has plenty to do with socialization and the kind of content younger teens have access to.
What so many adults forget is that adolescence is often a painful period. Yes, there are moments of beauty and experimentation, but it is a time when one feels immense pressure to define oneself, often according to societal standards or others’ expectations.
What technology, especially social media, does is magnify the experience of self-censorship and performance tenfold. It allows us to be our own voyeurs, to think more about the perceptions of others than our own desires and values. In fact, it dictates what those desires and values should look like.
While this has always, to some extent, been the effect of media, be it movies or artwork, social media makes self-evaluation and comparison compulsory and inescapable. Algorithms shape themselves to our interests, then tell us how to be the people we ‘want’ to be. While movies are presented as fictional realities, there is no such sense of fabrication in an influencer’s day-in-the-life video, leaving us to wonder why our lives are so vapid and ugly in comparison.
A reel captioned “creek girl summer: i’m trying to get dirty.” A post instructing people to add ‘whimsy’ to their lives by adopting hobbies such as collecting trinkets, sending snail mail and making ‘whimsy mindset shifts’ like ‘less screen time’ and ‘childhood nostalgia,’ whatever that means. The process of self-identification and discovery has gone beyond mere outfit choices and favorite bands: aesthetics are now entire ways of being.
We have not only chosen to model our hobbies and mindsets on internet trends. We have gone even further, modeling our behavior and personalities on the hypothetical other’s opinions. Self-censoring offline is a way to control people’s online perceptions of us, especially as the line delineating the two becomes increasingly blurry.
Social media and meme culture, so much of which is based on making fun of people for simply existing, taught us that we have to be the first ones to laugh at ourselves, lest someone else beat us to the punch. It feels like everything we do is a ‘bit,’ and we learn that, while everything we do must be precisely calculated, we have to appear not to take ourselves too seriously.
This is not to say that meme culture is bad, I love to laugh at the misfortunes of others as much as anyone, but it has extrapolated a paranoia that was perhaps once familiar only to marginalized groups. It is no longer merely people of color, women or queer people who are the butt of every joke; we have reached an equality of mockery that makes everyone think twice before they act or speak. It is the result of our culture’s obsession with effortless cool in the era of emotional minimalism, and it forces us to shrink our personalities into a palatable nothingness.
This brings me to my second point, which is the fact that, aside from my fellow book-readers, few young people could spell the word ‘nonchalance’ until recently. The cult of nonchalance is the perfect culmination of our alienation from one another and the real world, that is, the world beyond the screens. Vulnerability is no longer a sign of trust or maturity; it is an embarrassing admission that there is a dissonance between our image and our self. Effort is cringe. To try something and to fail is to lose your dignity. We are terrified of being too much, too involved, too soon.
This fear dictates our actions, even when it means we cannot foster genuine connections with other people. We no longer seek relationships because, while so-called situationships rarely end well, they feel less scary than being honest about your desires and emotions and less restraining than committing to caring about another person. People want all of the rewards with none of the risk, because we no longer value experiences for their own sake. As my friend pointed out, not every relationship needs to be easy or instant or convenient or ‘right.’ Sometimes they can just be right for this version of you at this time, or they can be a learning experience.
Cultural critic and writer Magdalene Taylor asserts that the situationship is “a sign of our mass immaturity, our inability to feel things honestly and wholeheartedly.” She urges us to leave the self-deception behind. “Call it anything else — a romance, an affair, a relationship, a marriage, a fling, a crush, a torturous entanglement. But God, at least say it with your chest.”
It seems we have forgotten that it is everyone’s first time being alive. Unlike the generations before us, we were never allowed the space to be messy, to be wrong, to figure things out. We grew up in a world where one misstep can get you ‘canceled’ or labeled ‘cringe,’ and this has turned our lives into constant, exhausting performances.
Although one could argue that this has always technically been the case, it has now leaked into our concept of self; it is up to us to curate our own image. To a certain extent, women have always understood this. As Margaret Atwood wrote in “The Robber Bride,” “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” The internet has turned us all, no longer just women, into our own voyeurs. Do we exist if we are not being perceived by others? Social media would tell us otherwise. For proof that even men have been infected with the virus of meta-perception, look no further than the dangerous trend of looksmaxxing. Endless anti-aging products and body dysmorphia are no longer solely the realm of women, though they continue to impact us disproportionately.
Because the internet has become a toxic cesspool of comparison and dangerous self-improvement, there is a growing sense among my friends and peers that we need to escape the cycle; Gen Z is returning to physical media, with teenagers buying CDs, disposable cameras and even rejecting the newest iPhone in favor of flip phones.
Although driven by a dissatisfaction with our overly online culture, this desire to return to a romanticized “before” has itself become an aesthetic. We cannot escape the system without filling the void that made it so captivating in the first place. This pivot can be read as capitalism doing what it does best: influencing and adapting to consumer behavior in order to sell us things we do not need. For instance, outlet malls and mass-produced clothes are no longer popular among a generation educated on the realities of fast fashion’s environmental and labor legacy.
As Shein hauls wane in popularity, we see ourselves inundated with content about how to thrift the best clothes. Although my mom grew up ashamed of shopping secondhand, it is now trendy to do so, even among a subset of very wealthy yet supposedly environmentally conscious young people — for example, the CC student body. It is utterly terrifying that even an anti-online movement poses no real threat to social media’s popularity, because it can be subsumed into yet another trend cycle with its own aesthetics and must-have items.
This is why I am suspicious of the new trendiness of being offline, of rejecting clean-girl flawlessness and male incels. In the wake of the analog resurgence, a new genre of ‘girl’ has emerged, and she embodies all of the values and personas that are popular right now. If being a ‘clean girl’ with a meticulous online presence and lifestyle (assuming the two can even be separated) is cringe, the solution is to be the ‘messy girl,’ the ‘rotten girl,’ the one who is unbothered by the opinions of others yet somehow still lives a life that is perfectly curated.
As Rayne Fisher-Quann writes, “the state of being effortless, aloof, nonchalant, largely offline, and unaffected by micro-trends is often what makes her such a fetishized figure. She appears to be living her life rather than looking for attention, but an unmistakable part of the appeal, of course, is that she always appears to get it anyway.” She is the culmination of all of our fantasies and experiences, all of the things we imagine perfection to be. “The It Girl, as she exists in the consumer consciousness, is a fantasy of authenticity.”
Trends of the Times declares it imperative to achieve the just-rolled-out-of-bed look, as if it entails an ascension to a higher level of consciousness. We should aspire to be messy girls because it is more than just a fashion statement: it is an indictment of our values, of our happiness. “[Messy girls] live in the moment. They wear what they have. They have all they need.” Doesn’t that sound lovely, to live in the moment, to have what you need?
Of course, there are things you need to buy before you can be one of them. One fashion commentator recommends ripped jeans that are ‘interesting’ instead of ‘pretty.’ Another TikTok with the caption “caring is cool & chic” recommends that viewers pick up niche hobbies, write physical grocery lists and make small talk with cashiers. Every part of your day, including the way that you interact with those around you, must be spent curating the flawlessly un-curated cool-girl look. Even being a good friend is a part of the ‘cool girl’ aesthetic; this influencer says that, in addition to going out with face masks still on (for maximum I-woke-up-like-this-ness), “showing up for your friends is such a cool thing to do,” as is “rewearing clothes.” We are so unbelievably online, so used to seeing ourselves through the lens of a camera, that existing is itself now a form of performance.
“Elle Decor” shares that, “Hot on the heels of the ‘intentional clutter’ boom, the ‘messy girl’ trend is the very online answer to ‘organized chaos,’ with a feminine bent.” Instead of rejecting hyper-curated ideas of femininity under capitalism, it merely reframes them. It opens a new market of products, all while masquerading as the alternative to our current consumer culture. From a design perspective, though, your possessions are still your personality — you are defined by what you consume. “Which brings us to another point: Messy isn’t cheap. It is, in and of itself, a position of privilege that comes with attendant social markers — who is it that can afford to be messy, and who is it that will accept them for it?”
What makes social media more dangerous than its predecessors is exactly this blurring of reality and fiction. Gen Z, and those who come after us, are “a generation that’s starving for connection, but trained to perform instead of relate. When everything becomes aesthetic, nothing feels real.”