Gen Z at 25: Reflections on stuff like meaning

I noticed it in March, but to be honest, it probably started much sooner than that.

After breaking up with my fiancée in the dumpster fire of 2020, I emerged into a brave new world. At the time, I was working at a pathology lab, and I started feeling the breathlessness at my desk. It was strange — yes, I was working in healthcare at the height of a global pandemic, but it’s not like I was seeing the horrors of the ICU. 2020 was hard, no doubt, but I was mostly insulated from its societal carnage. I’d drive to work in no traffic, study for grad school, and sip coffee with friends in socially-distanced spaces. It felt scandalous to be so hopeful and liberated, which is why the breathlessness bothered me.

I shrugged it off when I moved into remote work, chalking it up to excitement. Maybe so. I started waking at early hours, confusion settling in over the darkness. Fall came and yielded to Christmas, then the New Year, and into March. I had to temporarily suspend grad school for financial reasons, and remote work was getting harder. The WFH life was requiring long hours, and it was harder to parse out real life from job life. A lot of people were counting on us. Yet, I was hopeful. I actually had money. I was in my early 20s. At any moment, the restrictions could lift, I could meet someone, work could slow, and I could resume grad school at the right time.

Then, I received a call from HR, terminating my employment. I was being laid off, along with a slew of others. The pain surprised me the most. This wasn’t even the field I wanted to be in; it was supposed to support my writing career, and I was already bone-tired from this job. Still, it hurt. I applied and applied to all sorts of positions in a similar vein, and no one bit. This was debilitating since all the headlines spoke of the “Great Labor Shortage”, and that jobs were more available than ever. Was I some kind of idiot? I had savings and filed for unemployment, but it was too late — the breathlessness and insomnia transformed into something insidious and subtle. It gnawed when I woke at 10am and intensified as I forced myself to send out applications. As a child, I had wanted a career that made valuable contributions to society, something that displayed the hard work of societal change, and I could see that ideal hemorrhage before me. I found my breath constantly suspending and worst-case scenarios dominating my emotional landscape. I noticed myself obsessing about the months passing, and I thought of time in terms of years. 10 years from now, I will be 34. That’s the age to have three kids and be advanced in a career, to have a mortgage and an IRA. I also began envying high schoolers, or kids even younger. 10 years from now, they’ll be in college or graduating, and they will have all of their 20s stretched before them. Me? I’ll still be trying to figure it out, and I’m losing. I fantasized about my college years, and what I could have done to avoid wasting time. Maybe I should have networked more, posted more videos, created a Twitter with eloquent one-liners. My hair started graying in the front of my head, which did not help, and every time someone asked how old I was, it was all I could do to spit out, “24”. In short, I was having a premature crisis of meaning, otherwise known as the Quarter-Life-Crises.

I am a member of the oldest year of Gen Z. I was born in February 1997, so I am placed at the very beginning of a new era. I am a part of the first generation in world history that has no memory of what life was like before the internet. Boomers scoff at us, Gen X (often) parent us, and millennials try to be us. We are captivated with ourselves, our beauty, and our progress. Yes, we have a more complicated existence because of the internet, but I’m not here to write about the nuances. There is a lot of self-focus I see within my generation. After all, it’s never been easier to access information and people, so harnessing the internet to continue falling for ourselves is natural. Any one in history with this kind of power would do it, too. Yet, even with all the self-absorption I see within myself and my peers, I recognize the strange pressure to have it all together. In our quest for self-fulfillment by self-focus, we suffocate under our own grand images and end up, well, breathless.

Maybe it’s because of this harnessing that the Gen Z internet elevates youth and prizes contribution. The beauty industry is one of the most lucrative in the world, with some of the most famous influencers being under 30. Somehow, meaningful contribution means amassing influence by way of good looks in posts and likes or decorating a Linkedin with experiences and certifications. Having 10 million followers on TikTok is not doing the hard work of authentic change — I’d venture to say that it’s having an audience that likes the feed, and rarely anything more. When did meaning become synonymous with attention?

Are there exceptions to these sweeping statements? Of course. I would be foolish to dismiss the good work some are doing. But meaning cannot be constructed and maintained from public achievements or internet influence alone, because people are fickle things. The internet is so young, and we still have no idea the longevity of a person’s influence over a long period of time. The feeds can be anything from curated pics of hot girl summer to community outreach PSAs, but it’s all the same in the end — an experimental tableau with results to-be-decided. And even if I’m wrong about that, I am right about the vanity of youth and achievement being the stuff of the good life. Meaning has to be grounded in something deep and unflappable, like a presence to the moment and a thoughtful acceptance of one’s limitations. Also, as a person who grew up in a faith tradition, I’d like to think that meaning is in something that’s unshakeable and eternal, which is a direct antithesis of the ephemeral nature of the digital age.

Gen Z turns 25 in 2022. I turn 25 in two months. I’m daunted, but I’m no longer breathless and shaking. I’m still re-training my brain to not think in grandiose terms like years, and it’s a slow process. I’m learning to take myself less seriously and to be ok with my singular journey. I’ve been through a lot — as we all have in the last two years — but a quarter of a century is hardly anything. There’s still lots to uncover and lean into, to plant and mature in. If real meaning and change come from this steady-ness, then I want the next 25 years to be steady in forming deep bonds with others, serving the vulnerable in my community, learning, asking questions, growing, and, as the ancients would frequently say, memento mori. One does not need a post or an experience to let people know that they’re a human being living a meaningful life.

And, as a product of my environment, I think that’s enough. *brown girl shrug emoji*