What if life is just kind of unsatisfying, and that's okay?

A response to Gen Z nostalgia

I wrote something recently about how I basically agree with Jonathan Haidt’s take that smartphones are harming young people’s mental health and real-life interactions are good, though I worried that the kind of future he wants to see will be hard to achieve given this country’s auto-centric suburban sprawl, regulatory barriers, and poor understanding of land use policy. I wasn’t planning to say any more on the subject, at least immediately, but then I saw this.

The essence of this piece in Haidt’s After Babel substack (which I encourage people to read) is that an increasing number of Zoomers (or whatever you want to call people who grew up in the smartphone age) feel something like nostalgia for the rose-tinted before-time that they never got to experience - the analog age - a time before touchscreens and social media, when kids could be kids and grow up more or less like the generations before them did. To quote the author, Freya India:

I am grieving something I never knew. I am grieving that giddy excitement over waiting for and playing a new vinyl for the first time, when now we instantly stream songs on YouTube, use Spotify with no waiting, and skip impatiently through new albums. I am grieving the anticipation of going to the movies, when all I’ve ever known is Netflix on demand and spoilers, and struggling to sit through an entire film. I am grieving simple joys—reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours—where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained.

This piece feels so strange to me. On the one hand, I’m tempted to dismiss it as yet another example of misguided weaponized nostalgia, a wrongheaded longing for a romanticized time period that never truly existed.

But on the other hand, I totally get it, because this is an emotion that I’ve experienced so intensely in my own life that I’d feel like a lazy hypocrite for simply writing it off. So let me explain.

I graduated from high school in 2009, putting me about halfway between the high school kids in this video from ‘99 and the Zoomers who are apparently gushing over it today. I grew up in that strange, liminal period we now know as the flip-phone decade. The aughts (or noughties as I just learned they’re called in British slang). But I’ll venture a guess that my childhood was probably more similar to those kids from ‘99 than the kids today. When I was in high school, taking out your flip-phone in class was so verboten that you could actually get suspended if a teacher caught you with it in hand. And while discs had mostly replaced those oh-so-cool VHS tapes by this time, we still didn’t have streaming services and therefore had to rent movies from a place called The Movie Hut or something. The good ol’ days.

We also played. At least once when I was a teen, I remember shooting a paintball gun from a moving motor boat while driving it. My friends and I hung out in-person. We’d see movies together, go spelunking or swimming in a lake at night, and explore the deep woods on our own, with no adult supervision to kill our buzz. Some of those experiences were a lot of fun, and probably good for us in a developmental sense.

But you know what? I also HATED growing up. Absolutely loathed it. I too felt nostalgia for ages past (90% of the music I like was written before I was born) and couldn’t wait to reach adulthood and leave all the stupid teenage bullshit behind. What I’m realizing now is that that was a pretty normal way to feel.

Of course, once I actually got there, that is, once I reached my early 20s, landed my first grown-up job and start making it on my own, there was a profound sense of disappointment in the vein of “high school never ends.” I’d been looking forward to the future for so long that once I arrived, it felt underwhelming and unsatisfying, which made me quite sad. I wasn’t nostalgic for the past, I just knew that I wasn’t content with the present either.

But here’s the thing: that’s probably just a normal part of the human experience. The present will always feel a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying (to paraphrase a famously un-cancelable filmmaker). Or, to quote a less problematic source (the Buddha), life is full of duhkha (discomfort or dissatisfaction) and the challenge of overcoming it is inherent in the human condition; something we’ve been trying to do for thousands of years.

Here’s another hard-to-digest quote from India’s piece:

We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis.

Well, guess what? Millennials fooled around before PornHub existed, and dated without dating apps, and I’m perfectly willing to admit it was probably better in some ways, but it also resulted in so many of the girls at my high school getting pregnant that they formed their own “maternity club.” That was not better overall. I’m sorry, but it just wasn’t. Rates of teen pregnancy have been falling for years, and that’s an extremely good thing.

Along those same lines, here’s one more little anecdote to drive this point home. A type of nostalgia that I totally understand is for the video rental store. I remember how exciting it was go to the Movie Hut (screw Blockbuster) as a kid and rush over to the classic sci-fi section to see if any of my favorites, or a new addition, was available for rent. I discovered some of my all-time favorite movies this way. But I also remember something else about these places. Separated by little more than a beaded curtain was a room with a giant “XXX” above the doorway. This place was off-limits anyone under 18 (though I occasionally snuck a peak when my parents weren’t looking), but it existed, and that meant that a hairy old man could walk up to the check-out counter with a sticky old tape of Deep Throat or Debbie Does Dallas in hand, plop it down on the counter and creepily wink at the high school girl behind the register (something I remember witnessing at least once). The good ol’ days, huh?

Look, I’m not trying to completely dismiss or undermine the challenge young people face today growing up in such a wildly different technological landscape. Again, I pretty much agreed with Haidt’s take from the get-go, and in recent months, I’ve been surprised to learn just how bad it’s gotten. I mentioned before that while most of us had flip-phones as teenagers, we were never allowed to use them in school. I thusly kind of just assumed for a long time that most parents would be smart enough not to give their middleschooler a smartphone. I honestly had no idea how common this problem was.

After I wrote my initial response, I sent it to a friend who’s a bit older than me and has three kids under 10. What he said genuinely shocked me: “You have to understand, as a parent, it’s almost impossible to limit your kids’ screen time.” Given this person’s argumentative nature, I decided not to push him on this point, but in my head, all I could think was, “Really? You can’t just like, I don’t know, not give them an expensive device they don’t need? For real?” So believe me when I say that I’m not trying to simply dismiss the argument Haidt and company are making here. I sympathize.

Nor am I criticizing the specific Zoomer who wrote this. By all indications, Freya India seems like a skilled and thoughtful writer who will probably go on to do more significant things with her career than I ever will. But I want to close this thought with what I found to be the most utterly heartbreaking part of her piece. At the end, she writes:

So please. Next time you cringe at Gen Z for not coping, for not feeling cut out for this world, remember how painful it is to think that the good times are over. Then imagine how much more painful it would be to realize you never knew them.

This makes me so sad, because I’m sure that she and many others sincerely feel this way. All I can possibly say to them is, with all due respect, you are mistaken. The good times are NOT over. At least, they don’t have to be. Perhaps if enough people tell themselves this bleak story, some of that darkness will seep into reality, in the same way that cynical and divisive “tough on crime” politicians can still get elected during times of record low crime. As with so many things, telling ourselves that things are worse than they really are can result in things actually getting worse, given our natural human tendency to overreact. We are the tales we tell ourselves, after all. We underestimate the degree to which our beliefs shape the world.

So, with that, I’ll leave you with a piece of music from a (probably worse) time that I feel some (probably irrational) nostalgia for. Thanks for reading.