Noticing Gen Z and the Tweens of Gen Alpha, Part 5 - Bravester

They are not like previous generations.

This generation is different. Says someone who has been there with teens since the 1980s. I as a youth pastor have worked with teens in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and now the 2020s. (Read about these different decades here.) So I say confidently that this Gen Z and the new tweens of Gen Alpha are very different. This Information Age and the smart devices have changed adolescence. This is a good and bad thing. Join me in this series at the odd wonder of what is going on. Your heart will break and you will find inspiration. I believe in teens.

This one has a focus on social media. And a lot of words that I didn’t write. This is more from Freya India, whom I’ve quoted often in this series, talking about how social media has sucked the bravery right out of Gen Z.

Today’s tweens have more of other people’s memories than memories they have created on their own. And they are know-it-alls believing everything they have seen on YouTube or TikTok is real and real life wisdom–without learning any of this information on their own. And they love to share this know-it-all wisdom with adults to educate us as if it is true.

My first urge is to correct them or say there is no way that they know that information to be true. I’m learning to just listen. Tweens want to be heard, even if they don’t have their own memories to be shared. This very thought grieves me so.

Freya India wrote this truthful insight, What Happened to FOMO. I encourage you to click through and read all of it. And ache for the memories not being made.

Social media doesn’t make Gen Z afraid to miss out; it makes us want to miss out. We want to avoid the risk, the rejection, the awkwardness, the effort and energy that the real world demands. Our major problem isn’t fear of missing out. It’s fear of taking part. –Freya India

Why is this?

“As pre-teens, many of us spent hours each day on social media platforms. Platforms designed to make us self-conscious: about how we look, how we present, what parts of ourselves we want to display. We inspected every inch of our face with filters and editing apps. We scrutinised how we stand and speak in every Instagram picture and Snapchat Story. We examined every word of our tweets and status updates. With instant feedback on every part of ourselves, we learnt to perform and manage it all perfectly. We learnt to love our little worlds of control. Here we can rehearse every flirty DM before we send it. We can check every email with ChatGPT. We can get the angles and lighting perfect before we show our faces to the world. In contrast, when it comes to real life, with its awkward conversations, its messy relationships, it’s live. It’s real. It’s terrifying. We would rather miss out.” –Freya India

Sign. How did this happen.

As Jonathan Haidt said, “We note that the first generation to move its social life onto social media platforms immediately became the loneliest generation on record.” https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth-mental

Here’s another redefinition of FOMO: “For Gen Z, FOMO isn’t a harm of social media; it’s a motivation to use it. It’s what traps young people on TikTok and Instagram. They fear being left out of social media itself.” (Freya India)

The social media billionnaires have won and stolen our children. While we adult influencers watched.

I am encouraged that this trend is changing. Parents are seeing this cost in their children and making stricter choices for their children. Schools are banning phones in classrooms, and sometimes buildings. Churches are becoming a places where you are told to leave your phones behind. I believe in three years we will re-read this article and be shocked at what we’ve done to our young people.

I’ll leave you with this uncomfortable thought:

“When have we ever had a generation so comfortable with online attention yet so deeply uncomfortable with real-life interaction? When have young people been so crippled by social anxiety yet comfortable telling millions of strangers online about it? Young people who can post selfies for the world to see but can’t bear making eye contact? Who find it entirely normal to broadcast their faces and feelings and private lives online, but feel their hearts pound when someone says hi to them on the street? Who say they feel intensely lonely yet hide from human connection?

“We have to take this seriously. There are young people whose natural human instincts—instincts typically on overdrive for adolescents, like the drives to explore, to connect, to take risks, to be independent—have been numbed. Teenagers who would once stay up all night chatting on the phone have become teenagers terrified to hear the sound of a ringtone. Teenagers desperate to sneak out with their friends have become teenagers dreading plans with each other. Teenagers begging their parents to let friends stay over have become teenagers using an AI Excuse Generator to cancel plans guilt-free. This is not normal teenage angst. This is a generational tragedy. When we have this many young people scared of social interaction, diagnosed with anxiety disorders, dreading hearing another human voice on the phone, I think that calling for drastic change is the only humane thing to do. This is not a groundless moral panic. –Freya India