Tweet by @julesterpak | Are.na

Related to mental health, young people are exhausted by the internet’s constant connectivity and comparison. Whereas Millennials grew up performing online—curated Insta grids, LinkedIn job announcements (“Some exciting personal news!”), the rise of the personal brand—Gen Zs eschew performance for authenticity. It’s the shift from Kylie Jenner (aspi... See more

I think that part of people's problem is they're not in enough gangs. There's this great tension in life where you desperately want to belong to something else and you want to stand apart at the same time. You want to be special, but you want to be accepted, too.

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted t... See more