Ah, teenagers. They, along with college kids, basically define what’s cool in American society. I recently spoke to one about what life was like before social media crept into everything and he seemed to be pretty curious about it.
Oh, and then he dropped a truth bomb on me: there’s a new trend in town.
Said teenager told me that the “cool kids” no longer are the ones who are constantly posting stuff on social media. Quite the opposite: they’re the ones who are going out, doing things, attending events, and actually living life.
For ages, being online was the go-to solution for everything. Don’t have friends? Go online. Can’t find a date? Go online, maybe get an AI lover, and have a nice day. Don’t have plans? Go online.
Social media made it oh, so easy to just slip into the world of being terminally online — even if you don’t want to be that way. It’s almost expected of us, to a point.
It’s clear that going online isn’t bringing us together. Online communities are notoriously toxic, to the point that they radicalized tons of young men against women.
The funny thing is that we’ve known that social media is bad for our mental health. Studies even confirm it. Yet it felt like the status quo for so long that we just all rolled with it.
The new “cool” is being able to say you go out with friends.
The teen who I spoke to said two things that shocked me: bullying apparently is over and the cool thing to do is go out. As in, people are actually investing effort in hanging out face-to-face because they started to realize how bad being terminally online can be.
The fact that this kid said that having moms that give them a little breathing space is a status symbol was also quite telling, too. It seems like kids these days actually want to exist as humans rather than a bunch of online meme posts — imagine that!
Believe it or not, this is the new sign of the “have’s versus have-not’s.”
Right now, we’re seeing two sides of the same generation. The differences between both sides are striking — and a sign of what’s been going on in the country since their birth.
One side is hyper-independent, surprisingly mature, socially apt, and capable of surviving on their own. This is often because they had to make do, due to parents who encouraged them to grow up or as a result of having both parents out due to work.
The other side is increasingly socially awkward, parent-reliant, and often under-educated by no fault of their own. I’ve noticed this mostly with children who are either emotionally neglected, raised in religious extremist sects, or born to a pair of helicopter parents.
There’s a little irony here. The kids who seem to be doing best are often not the ones from upper-middle-class backgrounds. After all, those tend to be the families that end up acting hyper-protective of their kids. The risk aversion is real.
At the end of the day, the have’s and have-not’s are defined by two things: money and whatever’s rare.
The have’s often have both money and whatever is status-worthy at the time. Right now, the biggest status symbol you can have is a life outside of meatspace. And you know what? I’m okay with that.
Social media’s gripped so many of us.