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The United States is experiencing a silent, creeping crisis in the world where making a friend is a thumb-swipe distant and fiber-optic cable appears to be no solution. Recent statistics given by U.S. Surgeon General show that about 50 percent of U. S. adults indicate that they feel loneliness, a physical/spiritual social alienation that is as hazardous to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. To the irony, the greatest numbers of this isolation are never reported in old age in rural isolation areas, but among the most digitally attached: Generation Z.
Gen Z (1997-2012), the first generation of real digital natives, was born in this time period. They have not experienced the world without high-speed internet, cellphones, and the capability to stream their lives to the entire world in real-time. Nevertheless, even though they are the most connected generation in the history of humanity, their reports indicate a greater number of cases of depression, anxiety, and social isolation compared to Boomers, Gen X, or even Millennials. It is not merely a teenage angst or a stage of growing pains, but rather it is a deep cultural change in the ways by which humans connect with each other, and it portends a failure of the social structure within which our species has been surviving thousands of years.
Being lonely is not necessarily sitting alone in a dark room as it is the case with a 20-year-old today. This is frequently a lonely loneliness of being in an environment of overcrowded digital clatter, notifications, and inexhaustible content, and being emotionally desperate to experience just one moment of pure, unfiltered human in our presence.
One has to differentiate between being lonely and alone. Social isolation refers to loss of communication with people. However, the subjective expression that your social ties fail to satisfy your emotional needs is loneliness. To Gen Z, the volume of interaction is higher than it has ever been, but the utility of that interaction is lower than it has ever been. You can have half a thousand people read your post and still believe that, should you vanish to-morrow, nobody was going to be aware of the fact.
Parallel play in early childhood development occurs when the children play together but not with each other. This is the prevailing social form of Gen Z, sitting in the same physical space, but digitally disconnected. Walk into any college dorm, or coffee shop and you will find a group of friends physically together, but digitally divided. This brings about a Social Disconnect wherein the physical body exists but emotional and intellectual self is in a different place, pursuing algorithms instead of communicating to the other end of the table.
Human brain developed to analyze social signals by performing eye contacts, sniffing pheromones, touching hands, and hearing tones. The digital communication deprives them of these and leaves text and pixels. Gen Z is also subjected to large doses of so-called social content, and such communication is not accompanied by neurochemical satisfaction, such as oxytocin release in physical presence. They are literally consuming "social junk food: it is time-saving and gives a short-term dopamine fix, yet it causes the soul to be undernourished.
The internet has transformed the psychological terrain of Gen Z into a world where it creates a number of distinct vulnerabilities that older generations did not need to traverse as they were growing up.
Being a digital child has meant that most of the developmental stages such as solving a problem in person, reading between the lines or even proposing an outing is all done behind the screen. This has resulted in an occurrence called social atrophy. In a screen-mediated communication, there is the luxury to edit what you are saying, to apply filters like emojis to conceal your actual emotions, or just to ghost when the communication becomes awkward.
The environment in which Gen Z is placed in real life makes any social interaction highly anxiety-provoking due to the absence of a delete or edit button. Since they have not trained their chaotic, unscripted skill of live conversation, they tend to just neglect it, and go back to the comfort of their gadgets.
There is continually an upward comparison enforced by social media. In the earlier generations, you used to compare yourself with other kids at your classes or at your block. Nowadays, a teenager living in a small town can compare his or her life, figure, and social positions with the top moments of the world leaders and celebrities that are perfected and photoshopped.
This establishes a self-performing way of life. When the objective of an outing is making the perfect photo to show the world that you are having fun, the process of having fun will be second. Such performance is tiring and somewhat isolating in that it does not allow one to reveal his or her real self, with all its imperfections, to others.
It is an essential adolescent activity to form an identity. Nevertheless, Gen Z has to deal with it with an online identity that does not always align with their inner world. The identity grounded on the changeable measures of likes, views, and shares turns into a shaky, alienated object when the self-worthiness of these objects is attached to these indicators. You do not exist in the sense you are, but in the sense that you are seen. This brings a sense of strong loneliness since the person who likes you, it is not you, but rather the character you have created.
The role of the past generation is something that cannot be neglected. Gen Z was brought up by parents who were also going through the smartphone era. Most of the Gen Z children have spent their time competing with their parents phones. When the primary caregivers of a child are digitally distracted the child may fail to form secure emotional bonds and ultimately, develops a lifetime feeling of longing which they later attempt to fill with their own screens.
It's not just "the phones." The form of the contemporary society has been reorganized to the extent that it disintegrates the manner in which the Gen Z constructs community.
The talk of Gen Z has been narrowed down to snaps, DMs or short messages. Although this enables a person to be in constant contact, it is not very deep as compared to traditional friendship. Physical hanging out has a kind of friction, you need to travel, you may have lapses of silence, you must make compromises about what to do. This friction is eliminated with the digital life and relationships are disposable. When one of your friends annoys or is boring, then you need not reply any more. Friendships will be transactional and superficial without the stickiness of physical space that is shared.
The sociologists usually refer to the "Third Place" which is not the home (the first place) and work/school (the second place) social environment. These include parks, shopping centers, cafes or community Resource centres. To Gen Z, these physical third places are either fading away or becoming too expensive. Instead, we have the Digital Third Places (Discord servers, gaming lobbies), which, although useful, do not offer the same community grounding of a person in the community that physical space gives.
Coupled with the dating applications and infinite social organizations, a paradox of choice exists. With everyone at your reach, it is difficult to commit to anyone. You can swipe and get someone new instead of investing in a challenging friendship or a complex romantic companion? This attitude of the infinite scroll towards human beings makes it impossible to establish the deep and long roots that can be used to deter loneliness.
It is impossible not to mention that Gen Z was deprived of some of the most important developmental years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The rituals of passage, high school graduations, college orientations, first job, all the places where social skills are developed, took place on Zoom. To most people, the social muscle just never grew or just got weaker in those early life years and they feel like they are catching up and out of practice in the post-pandemic world.
Loneliness has a biological reality. Our bodies are in a state of social threat when we are deprived of a social connection. Evolutionarily, a human being was a solitary human being and even now our brains respond to being alone as though we are being stalked by a predator.
The loneliness being chronic augments the release of the pressure hormone cortisol. It also keeps the body in a constant fight or flight mode when the cortisol levels are excessively high over a prolonged period. This is not only harmful to physical health (regarding the risk of heart disease and stroke), but it also complicates the process of contacting other people. Being stressed and defensive and you have more chances to see a social cue as a hostile signal, a self-perpetuating cycle of isolation.
Most Gen Zachers fix their loneliness by developing parasocial relationships- one-sided relationships with influencers, streamers or celebrities. The relationship is a vacuum, whereas you feel that you know these people since you watch their daily vlogs. They are not aware of your existence and they are not able to be there with you when you are in crisis. Counting on parasocial relationships is just as thirsty as salty water; it seems as though it were supposed to take out the thirst, but instead you are even drier.
Gen Z is the first to be sitting in the front row to witness all the world tragedies happening in real-time. It is an ambient trauma that gives the feeling that the world is a very threatening and depressing place. It makes the desire to get out of the house and create a life or a community incredibly low when the world is perceived to be ending, and people begin living a hermit lifestyle of doom-scrolling and isolation.
Loneliness is not a curable system, however. By abandoning content in favor of connection we can remake our social lives.
It has been found that even minimal and weak-tie interactions cause a significant mood improvement. Talking to a librarian, chatting with a neighbor regarding his/her dog, or making a joke with a cashier makes your brain think that you belong to a human ecosystem.
Joining a hobby club, an intramural sports team, a religious group, or a volunteer group provides you a "shared mission." People bond the fastest when they are looking at something together instead of at each other.
To be able to be truly intimate, one must be willing to risk disliking or misunderstanding someone. We should stop being on the highlight reel. Texting is a form of communication that should be replaced by calling a friend. Be real
in a struggle and not a meme. It is about the cracks in our persona that enables other people to get in touch with us.
The answer to the problem of loneliness does not lie in the deletion of social media, but rather in deliberate use of it. Being an in-person meeting, use apps as a logistics tool and then set aside the device. Attempt to grey-scale your phone or place app restrictions on your phone to disrupt the dopamine cycle that has been keeping you scrolling rather than living.
Since loneliness is a somatic condition of stress, the physical solutions are useful. Cortisols can be reduced with yoga, meditation, and regular exercise, which helps to go out of the defensive mode and the social mode.
Loneliness by Gen Z is not a failure. It is not in that they are weak or lazy. It is a cultural state of affairs, the rational consequence of a society that has made digital efficacy more important than human incontinence. We have created an optimized world that is full of reach and starving in depth.
In case you are a Gen Z who feels lost, you actually do not have to add to the content you already consume in order to occupy the empty space. A feeling that was created by a screen cannot be scrolled out of. You need community. You need friends who don't use filters to see you, who turn up when likes have ended and a reminder that it is only through human solidarity that you are a human being.
It is time to pull our heads out of the screen and face each other. The refresh button is not on your telephone, but in the real world.
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