Gen-Z’s Age of Yearning

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

In the 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley depicts a character called John the Savage, who yearns for happiness, looking for it in a society living off of fabricated shallow feelings - quite literally, as people achieve happiness through consumption of the drug, Soma. John the Savage longs instead for a raw, unfiltered life, wishing even for the negative parts of existing. In recent years, the thematics of Brave New World draw themselves closer to our own society and culture as we yearn for the same things as the characters in Brave New World.

“Yearning” has recently become popular among young people, it's a word used to describe an intense feeling of longing for something, as a form of urging. As a late Gen-Z, at 22 years old, I have noticed the ascendance of yearning as a generational reality, as we long for something without really knowing what. This has materialized in a post-pandemic world and I have felt it inside myself. In one of the dimensions of our desires, our generation yearns for real feelings, for authentic connections and experiences. It seems like we lost touch to whatever force builds that within ourselves, and from that vacuum comes our yearning.

The 3-year social gap left by the isolating virus of Covid-19 reshaped the social tissue of our lives as adults. Once I was out of the quarantine social isolation and back into life, I began struggling to experience things like before. Things wouldn't hit the same, I couldn’t truly feel, experiences were shorter and clouded by a new behavior: an unspoken presence that stood between people and their emotions. After a few post-pandemic years of depression, I came out of it and began noticing these feelings in my peers. I noticed that my yearning to feel that way was also a generational mark. Maybe it was a product of the current age, the result of technology replacing experiences, the convenience of staying in, living through everything from your couch. 

But then, what even is that feeling that we are missing so badly? That bodily feeling when you're traveling in a beach town with your friends, you just had dinner, and you sit down with them outside, as your cheeks burn from the long day of sun and your body hurts from playing. You start talking to them about everything, and you decide to play a game, and the UNO is actually really fun, the conversation gets funnier, and your stomach hurts from laughing, and you go to bed so tired you immediately sleep. You know, that feeling that's left in you when you go to bed? That fulfilling sentiment of nothing but existing?

One might argue: that feeling is the depth that comes from our patience to feel. It's an organic process that dialogues with our human nature and heart, when we allow ourselves to be bored and perceive every moment of an experience. The Japanese term for it is Ma (間). We are trading this condition for the cheapness of immediate feelings, the emotional short videos you cry to or TikTok drama that’s only interesting for a moment, but you forget about 5 minutes later.

The modern world has caught us in a trap: the choice of commodity. We are always making our lives easier, doing homework in ChatGPT, ordering takeout, as if these easy things were the fictional dosage that let us bear the disfiguration of modern times. Whether it’s a Gen-Z problem or a product of modern times, our generation struggles from this affliction and experiences a lack of liveliness in our own particular way. We managed to live a childhood that's screen free - and at the same time, during the rise of technology - and although we would run home to play video games, they were slow enough to load that we would have time to talk to the friend we invited over. Although we did have Instagram and Snapchat, our cameras were not clear enough for images to merge with real life, and our internet service kind of sucked. 

So the pandemic came as we grew up, as our frontal lobe developed, and we were stuck at home looking at screens all the time, figuring out new technologies and algorithms. It was so fast-paced and gratifying, right? In those two-or-so years, we watched so much: endless live-streams, we watched others playing games, crafting and dancing as we laid in bed watching it from morning to late-night. The world of the internet left us feeling like images on our screens were real experiences, as natural to the human core as going to the beach with your friends, but it's not even close.

@nayanmanihazra on twitter

The other day, I saw a tweet criticizing our generation for this lack of motion (or emotion). And it’s true; Gen-Z is not drinking, not having sex, not going to clubs, not organizing, not reading, not having relationships, not causing any trouble. One in four Gen-Z adults confess to never having sex, and more than half of American young men are not having relationships at all. Amongst Gen-Zers, only 38% of the entire generation regularly drinks, comparable to older generations. While you may personally know some Gen-Zers who do these things, the vast majority of them just experience these ideas online.

Sociologists and philosophers have long theorized that technology is at the center of this state that left us yearning for true feelings. Jean Baudrillard one of the most popular thinkers to fully conceptualize this idea: he coined the concept of 'Simulacra’ (yes, like The Matrix), the state where simulated reality replaces the material world, and can become so compelling it actually erases reality, as a copy without an original. Today, we see AI creating a new world, where we see celebrities saying and doing things, with no fact-checking ability to know what’s real. Whether the Pope really was wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket is secondary to us, what matters is that we laughed and retweeted it, then moved on with the doom-scrolling.

And the virtual world? It's kind of a dangerous place. Despite the illusion of freedom on social media, platforms dictate what you see, think, and talk about. To experience life in the digital world is to surrender your life to an unknown matter. We are not connected through the wind, the smell of flowers in the air, or the sound of life in a city. We are connected through a crafted virtual mesh of binary numbers and codes. In this simulation we experience, the authentic is not authentic, and our behavior mimics the online environment as we copy our surroundings but without the depth of real life. We love punk culture, but not its subversiveness. We want the intellectualism of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, but won’t read like them. We spend our days thinking about how we can portray our lives through Instagram posts, but not about enjoying the experiences themselves.

That agony and yearning have become parallel to virtual connection for Gen-Z. How can human emotion manifest, as raw, flawed, and uncontrolled as it is, if the world we chose to experience it in does not allow these flawed and raw realities to exist? This is why we struggle to feel. We ignore our biological condition as human beings, venturing through life as if we are evolved animals. As if that, in any way, would untie us from our need to feel things, to smell the trees and to touch the other's skin. We have not evolved from our existence as social animals, this nature continues to be crucial to our own self. To outsource our existence to a virtual reality is not fulfilling us, as is obvious by the rise of so much incomprehensible hate, from unadjusted teens and an anxious, disconnected generation. 

Take a look into some of your own actions and try to understand if that's a true feeling or a virtual copy of it. Look at its depth and shape. Are the same 200k minutes of your Spotify Wrapped as deep as that one live concert you went to last year? 

Jean-Paul Sartre

Today, I saw an elderly woman on the bus, who had the most beautiful hair I have ever seen. She had golden curls mixed with natural gray. I was mesmerized, looking at her and seeing such an effortlessly extraordinary person. All I wanted was to tell her I loved her hair and that she was beautiful, and maybe that would've made her day, too. But I didn't want to go through the awkward discomfort of making conversation with a stranger. Maybe it would have been awkward, but more likely, she would be flattered and we would both have gone on with our lives. 

And as I age, I see that powerlessness infiltrating into my life and holding me hostage, as I watch my proto-life unfolding shallowly. I wonder when I'll be able to actually live it deeply and electrically, not as a copy, but with the blazing feeling of being alive. So maybe I should plan a trip to the beach with my friends, but this time leaving the phone home. And you should as well. Find your own way to feel that feeling we’re all yearning for.