The Reality of the Digital World

The dating world in 2025 is nothing short of hell. Last week, I corrected a man who called me the wrong name on a dating app, and he responded by calling me aggressive. This isn’t anything new, and I’m definitely not an angel in these interactions either. In a post-pandemic world, romance seems to have fizzled out. For the most part, when the pandemic shut the world down, Gen Z was in high school and middle school. Normally, this is the time to learn what you want out of a relationship, and most importantly, it’s when most people learn how to flirt. While this may seem like a slightly superficial issue, it’s a symptom of the greater disease that is Gen Z’s lack of independence and intolerance for any gratification that isn’t instant. 

Adolescence is the time to define your identity outside of your family. You push boundaries a little bit more, and it’s when you start to think about your future more seriously. During the pandemic, people turned to social media for a connection to the outside world and a sense of community, but those parasocial connections didn’t just disappear the second the world opened back up. We got used to viewing the world as if we are an audience, not active participants. We adapted to having a screen filter our interactions, and we never developed those crucial skills to build resilience or find an identity outside of what we’re told to be. 

In an era of rapidly cycling trends, it’s getting increasingly harder to find individual identity. Influencers flood every inch of social media telling the consumer what they need to stay relevant. Wellness and beauty products, even vitamin supplements, are hawked on every corner of the internet to “fix” problems we didn’t know we had. Cortisol face, low canthal tilt, and a wide ribcage are now things to be self-conscious about, but no worries, here’s a product to resolve your ugliness you didn’t know you had! This isn’t an incredibly new phenomenon - we all remember the Tati Westbrook x James Charles Sugar Bear Hair gummies incident in 2019. But since the pandemic, we have become an increasingly virtual species, and these products seem to pop up on a weekly basis.

 We have lost all sense of self that isn’t spoon-fed to us through a sponsored post, and more severely, we have lost all patience to see and solve this issue. For the most part, everyone is aware that social media is bad for us, and it’s just telling us to buy or use things we don’t need, but our world has become so digitalized that no one wants to give that up to solve these issues. The problem is that if we cut ourselves off from social media, we’re not any more likely to interact with people more because they’re also on social media, and most of Gen Z doesn’t really engage in small talk or basic interactions. Walking into a college classroom five minutes before the lecture starts won’t be met with conversation. Instead, most people are on their laptops or their phones with earbuds in because that simply isn’t as rewarding in the moment as a thirty second video with a stupid punchline.

The primary transgression isn’t necessarily the new insecurities forced onto people, or even the digitalization. Beauty standards and new technology are constantly changing, and they always have been. The problem isn’t even the commodification of the human experience because that’s also nothing new. The heart of the issue lies in the apathetic normalization caused by our reliance on, and quite frankly, addiction, to instant gratification. The attention span of the average person has decreased dramatically with the advent of short-form videos, and the time that it takes to care about this problem doesn’t seem as worth it compared to the instantaneous change from swiping to the next video. We have lost the art of being okay with discomfort for the sake of improvement, so we just sit complacent with the knowledge that we’re melting our critical thinking skills.