Gen Z

What concerns me most about their generation is how they view people as disposable. Living, breathing people with souls and stories, feelings and knowledge, experiences and memories, are demoted in some inhumane way into commodities in an endless surface-level-only catalog of humans.

They’re merely a swipe left, an unfollow, or a keystroke away from being deleted out of one’s life. There is no sympathy, no sorrow, no remorse, no compassion, just a dead, stagnant apathy.

In this twisted, self-obsessed wasteland of emptiness, it’s loneliness, mental health issues, anxiety, depression, and suicide that dominate and thrive.

“Would it be strange if I just stopped talking to her altogether?” my friend, in his early 30s, asked me.

“For her, no,” I replied. “In fact, she will probably stop before you do.”

The glow from his smartphone screen illuminated his contorted face.

“See that’s something I just can’t understand,” he said. “I could never do that to someone.”

Therein lies the difference in generations. At some point, and I think technology is the reason, post-millennials stopped seeing people as people, and probably because they were born into digital lives. Where once generations were relatable, slightly different from the next, suddenly reached an abrupt drop off into a black abyss. Treating people with kindness, respect, dignity, and simply as people has been replaced by a language of sarcasm, memes, gifs, and caring as little as humanly possible. It makes the former generation look ridiculously sensitive for expressing care and treating people like people. And yet this generation will grow up to own businesses, run companies, and govern nations.