After a nourishing few months off TikTok, it shames me to report that I relapsed. My feed apparently reset during my hiatus, because the funny videos that hooked me all those years had vanished, and in their place was a bot’s best guess at what would do it for a 25-year-old American woman: an infinite scroll of self-care porn.

At first, I swiped through miles of meal prep tutorials, morning routines, and supplement recs with the detached fascination of a zoo attendee. An hour into peeping glowing skin and spotless apartments, however, their ideologies started sounding a bit seductive. Once the first intrusive thought hit, they just kept coming.

What if I skipped plans with my girlfriends tonight? I mean, my prettiest, most successful self wouldn’t sling beer and tapas on a Tuesday... She’d be in bed by eight with sleepy time tea and a red light mask. Hold up. Do I need to buy a red light mask?

I was a mere double-click away from buying one on TikTok Shop when a different, more familiar voice called out from the depths of my subconscious. It said, sister, before you whip out the Chase Sapphire, run a quick thought exercise for me. I know the creators colonizing your FYP look exceedingly hydrated and disciplined and in control of their own destinies, but be so for real right now — would you swap lives with any of them? Do you really think these people are having fun?

The question feels irrelevant in a culture so obsessed with measurable returns. Like, who gives a shit if these people have fun lives? Hellooo, do you not see their toned quads and flawless sleep scores? An evening spent kiki’ing with friends won’t ensure your individual greatness. If anything, it might come at its expense. Think of the calories! The gas money you could’ve spent on skincare! The hours you could’ve spent building your Claude Code empire! Why go through the trouble of engaging with the outside world when you can experience it your phone anyway? Might as well put you first and stay in tonight.

I’d be well down the path to perfection if it wasn’t for this pesky little voice in my head — the one that keeps me from bowing to the self-care mafia and using their enticing discount codes. It’s the same voice that pipes up when I’m a wittle sleepy after work and considering bailing on plans. It pushes me out the door when staying in, on paper, would be the optimal decision. And it tells me that no matter how anyone else tries to spin it, our twenties should NOT be this God damn boring.

When you listen to oldheads reminisce about this season of life, they’re rarely nostalgic for all those nights spent working on themselves and protecting their peace. No, they tell stories about the strangers they met on sweaty dance floors. About the time they said yes to some bullshit and spontaneously altered the trajectory of their life. About all the experimenting and failing that helped them figure out who they wanted to be. Not once has a fabulous dinner party story started with someone making the optimal decision.

This was the version of twentysomethinghood my friends and I fantasized about while flipping through the big girl magazines in dentist waiting rooms and stalking our older cousins’ blurry Facebook albums. But this is not the version most of Gen Z is living.

Perhaps it was the pandemic. Perhaps it’s because going outside now seems to cost thirty dollars. Perhaps all of us born after 1997 simply emerged from the womb uniquely predisposed toward loserdom. But the biggest culprit, at least how I see it, is that almost every force once known to push young people out of their shells and into the world has been convenience-maxxed out of existence.

People only bother going out to clubs, parties, cafes, or each other’s living rooms because we have desires. For connection, for adventure, for validation, for sex, for a sense of belonging. Those cravings push us into our surroundings, which pushes us into inconveniences, which also pushes us into literally any experience worth having.

In 2026, engaging with your surroundings is fully optional, because you can satisfy all those desires by yourself at home. Just throw on Netflix to ease the boredom, post a gym selfie for some quick hits of approval, watch porn to keep the reproductive urges at bay, follow influencers so they can simulate a social life for you. Armed with nothing but an iPhone, the modern twentysomething can live a fine life without leaving their apartment or comfort zone much at all.

The path of least resistance has never looked this cozy and efficient, but it’s also never looked so weirdly unlived. This might feel like a decent tradeoff to those who already graced the sweaty dance floors and built their dinner story repertoire, but I refuse to believe my generation’s youthful vitality is being best expended tracking macros to the decimal and watching Mr. Beast compilations in bed.

Almost nothing about the infrastructure Gen Z inherited naturally lends itself to a vivacious life — third spaces are disappearing and a round of drinks costs more than the houses our grandparents bought at twenty-two. All the little choices that build a life, though, are still ours to make. And for those of us still desperate for one that feels vivid and interconnected, it seems we have no choice but to create the conditions for it ourselves.

My friend Elisa figured this out last year. A couple summers out of college, she realized her twenties looked wildly different than what she’d anticipated. Everything seemed to be going well on paper, but alas, she felt bored out of her mind. She’d always talk about wanting to meet new characters and remember she was alive outside of her 9-5, yet every week ended in the same familiar loop: work → gym → scroll → sleep → rinse and repeat until a month has flown by with no new memories to show for it.

One of those weeks, she decided to take a tiny step out of the loop and try a salsa class. From the jump, she told us she had to keep going. The movement itself made her feel present and challenged in all the ways she’d been after, but the real draw was something else. When she went out to dance, she had no clue what the night might bring.

The one issue was that no matter how many classes and clubs she tried, the only people willing to put themselves out there were rizzy Cuban abuelos. She let them twirl her around for a few months anyway, until eventually she said, fuck it — if the experience I want doesn’t exist anymore, I’ll try to make it myself.

And thus, Salsa Z, a Gen Z salsa community, was born. All it took was a Canva presentation to set things in motion, and the rest she figured out as she went. Since that day, she’s hosted dozens of meetups, met hundreds of twentysomethings in our city, and sparked a bunch of new connections by forcing people to put their phones down and dance with each other.

I suffered through a quarter-life crisis of my own last year, although mine sadly didn’t culminate in a sexy salsa series. I just started wondering if this was it — if the vision I always had for my twenties was no longer feasible after Covid and Big Zuck fried our brains and social batteries. Plans weren’t spontaneously materializing like they did in college. Wyd’s grew scarce. I figured I’d be destined to meal prep chicken and rewatch Narcos until I died.

But after enough time spent crying and desperately trying to accept that this is just the way things are now, I finally reached a breaking point. I came to three conclusions, in this order:

1. I want an interesting life very, very badly.

2. The current path of least resistance will not lead me to an interesting life.

3. I need to get intentional about this shit EXPEDITIOUSLY.

The first step was figuring out how to get my joie de vivre back, because I didn’t even know what “interesting” meant to me anymore. For those first twenty-two years, my lifestyle was handed over on a silver platter. Plans came piping hot courtesy of my mama and then the natural infrastructure of college life. But in adulthood, specifically this version of adulthood, there are seemingly infinite options for how to spend your life — and worse, infinite useless noise.

If I let the productivity bros and self-care queens on my feed have their way with me, I’d spend my afternoons optimizing workflows and my nights tucked away drenched in overpriced serums. Seeing as there’s no Andrew Huberman for creating more lifelong memories with your buddies, I’d have to forge this path myself.

I started searching for sparks of inspiration anywhere I could find them — and, yes, including on that damn phone. I know the phones are to blame for our culture’s loser-ish tendencies in the first place, but since I’m clearly not getting rid of it no matter how much I complain, I started exploring how I could make it useful in this mission. And what I found is that beneath all the hate speech and AI renderings of Peter Griffin with boobs, if I squinted hard enough, there was actually loads of useful intel on the kinds of experiences I wanted more of.

I’d come across a post that made me want to throw a dinner party, or take a pole dancing class, or start painting again, or host a quiche bakeoff with my friends, or what about a role play karaoke night! I could plan a pretty picnic at that park! Start a fun interview series just like this guy! So much inspiration for the taking, and yet, I was doing absolutely nothing about it. My thumb would instinctively flick for the next post, starving for another dopamine hit. That spark would instantly be buried underneath some influencer’s gua sha tutorial.

I needed a place to let those fleeting moments of intrigue live on before the next swipe obliterated them, and I discovered right on cue. Their extension lets me save pictures, videos, and text to my library without leaving whatever app I’m on, which is infinitely more helpful than taking a screenshot and telling myself I’ll go find it later. (I will not). Over the past year, my library has grown into an archive of every idea that’s ever made me feel something, and for the first time since whichever fated day I created my social media accounts, I’ve actually started acting on a lot of them.

I think of Sublime like my own little Google, built specifically with my interests in mind. I can search in my library for half-baked thoughts like: “I’m feeling disconnected. Want to feel close to my people. Maybe I want to make something,” and then see every idea I’ve ever felt compelled to find again: a dinner party theme I scrolled past four months ago, some girl’s cute crafts night I saw on Substack, a quote from an article that got my creative juices flowing.

Seeing all the ideas that excite me in one place has helped me paint a clearer picture of what I actually care about, totally separate from whatever tomfoolery my feeds decide to force on me that day. I can parse out what speaks to me, save it to Sublime, and their algorithm gets better at catering to my curiosity. Yes, there is an algorithm (trigger warning), but it only feeds me hand-picked saves from other users on the app. No influencers, ads, ragebait, or viral slop — just other creative people trying to make cool stuff and understand what matters to them.

Below are some ideas that inspired me this year, most of which I’ve actually ended up bringing to life. Feel free to take anything that sparks something in you, and maybe save it to Sublime ;)

P.S. My readers get 20% off Sublime Premium using the code STEPH

Themed dinner party

My favorite I’ve hosted so far has been been La Dolce Vita. Everyone cooked their favorite pasta and dressed up like a retro Italian diva. My pretzel ciggies were a huge hit.

Go create mode

Bake cakes, paint each other, design a game and play it. My friends and I made a Guess Who board with tiny pictures of everyone we know, and it’s still just as funny to play six months later.

Field Day

For my birthday, I split my friends into teams and forced them to compete in a series of mental and physical challenges while we all got progressively drunker. I even appointed a referee and hosted an awards ceremony to create real buy-in.

Smart walk

Set a weekly date with a friend. Each of you brings a topic from an article, book, or show you liked that week. Built-in conversation and you’re forced to remember what you consumed for once!

Game night

Sometimes it feels like if it weren’t for board games, I’d only see my friends on weekends and holidays like a father with split custody. Game nights are goated because they scale flawlessly: living room if you’re feeling cozy, park if you’re feeling cutesy, bar if you’re feeling rowdy.

Book club

Middle-aged women knew what tf was up when they invented book club. Especially fun if you impose a theme for your gathering!

Dance classes

Elisa was onto something here. Once she got me learning salsa, I stumbled across a little studio on Instagram and started taking classes there. Never felt so hot and cool in my life. This year, I’ve tried pole dance, belly dance, and samba!

Role play night

I was serious about role play karaoke. This is next up on my agenda.

World cup tourney

Currently planning this party for my boyfriend’s birthday. The World Cup is starting this week, which is a fantastic excuse to gather your people! Everyone can represent a country, maybe bring a food or bevvy from that culture, and compete in little games for the glory of their nation.

“Nope, wrong person. Sorry!”

I continue shuffling down the sidewalk, barely lifting my gaze to check if his suspicion is correct. He’s the second unfamiliar voice to pop the question this week, and it’s only Wednesday morning.

I stopped in my tracks the first time around, removing one of the AirPods I strategically placed in order to avoid this type of encounter. A quick assessment of his face offered no helpful clues. Is this the Canadian dude my friend dated last year? My boyfriend’s coworker I met at happy hour last week?

“Hmm, I can’t remember. Have we met?”

He offered a smug smile and his right hand. “I guess we haven’t had the pleasure. I’m Matt.”

Nearly half of men aged 18-25 say they’ve never approached a woman romantically in person, and the other half seemingly all live in Miami, Florida.

Online discourse insists that Gen Z men are crippled by loneliness and insecurity, but any Miami woman will attest: the streets down here tell a different story. At the gym, in line for Chipotle, on the street while the target is speed-walking with two AirPods lodged securely in her earholes — it doesn’t matter how little context is available, these boys will go in for the kill.

The past few weeks have yielded some of my most honorable mentions.

First was the boy with the broccoli haircut, who fittingly spawned in the produce section at Trader Joe’s. “Where’d you get that?” he asked, pointing at the banana I had placed in my cart one nanosecond prior. “Here,” I said, gesturing to the massive display of bananas sprawled before us both. “Oh. Word.” He looked at his shoes disinterestedly. “So… do you live around here?”

Then there was the sensitive lad at my favorite café. I was waiting on my coffee when he plopped down right beside me and released a sigh loud enough to grab my attention. The very moment I glanced up from my phone, he struck. “Excuse me, can I get your opinion on something?” “Uh, sure.” I anxiously scanned the counter for my order. “Basically, I’ve been talking to this girl. She’s great, super beautiful. Only problem is she won’t stop playing games with me. Can I show you the texts?”

And most recently was the sidewalk bandit who interrupted my phone call to ask if I knew of any “upscale lunch spots” in the neighborhood. I suggested the first place that came to mind and then politely attempted to flee the scene. “Hey, wait!” he yelled after me. “You don’t want to join?!”

Maybe it’s the flashy, sun-soaked environment that breeds this kind of audacity, or perhaps socially confident men self-select into Miami the way budding actors flock to LA. This city is, after all, ground zero for Gen Z’s pickup artist renaissance: a content landscape ruled by masculinity coaches pushing online courses and pickup influencers sneakily vlogging their cold approaches through Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Erick Ronaldo is one of the many Miami pickup creators making a killing in this market. He’s racked up over 1.3 million Instagram followers teaching young men how to “get dates with 8s and 9s.” For $17 a month, guys can sign up for his Modern Man Bootcamp, which includes three weekly coaching sessions and access to his personal arsenal of pickup lines.

A quick scroll through his account offers a sneak peek of the exclusive seduction tactics behind the paywall, including openers like, “Are you a time traveler? Because I see you in my future,” and absolute panty-droppers such as, “Excuse me, where did you get that? I mean… that smile.”

It’s no issue that his flirting techniques sound like they were cooked up by Mickey Mouse. Men don’t follow Erick for his AI-generated rizz — they’re there to watch his aspirational displays of hyper-confident masculinity. “Guys like watching other guys pick up girls because they don’t have the balls to do it themselves,” according to Polokidd, a fellow Miami pickup influencer with 1.6 million followers.

What some chalk up to a lack of testosterone, however, others might call tough timing. Hitting on random women in broad daylight has always required a healthy appetite for discomfort, and Gen Z guys never had much incentive to build one. Swiping on apps and sliding in DMs was standard practice by the time they started dating, plus traditional displays of masculinity were undergoing a very public cultural review.

For the past decade or so, shooting your shot online has been the easier option and the more rational one. Behind a screen, you can edit, unsend, or ask the boys group chat for feedback. Worst case scenario is she leaves you on read. In the real world, there’s real risk involved. You might fumble your opener, get curved in front of a live audience, or worse, end up in some girl’s viral TikTok as the freak who can’t take a hint.

Lately, some guys are deciding that discomfort is precisely the draw.

Ben, a 27-year-old living in Miami’s particularly flirty neighborhood of Brickell, told me he prefers cold approaching not only because it’s more efficient than waiting around for responses on the apps, but because it’s a great exercise in friction-maxxing. “I mean, you can’t ask ChatGPT to help with a response,” he explained. “You just gotta be yourself and see if she’s into you or not. There’s no better way to improve yourself and stand out as a man, too.”

He’s not wrong. For a generation raised on Hinge roses and fire emoji story slides, the classic cold approach is undoubtedly any guy’s best shot at making a lasting impression. Just one important question remains: Is it working? Do women even want to be asked out by a total stranger?

It seems that for most, the answer is YESomgpleaseGODplease* but with some very crucial caveats.

Although there’s no shortage of eager men lurking on the apps and in their DMs, Gen Z women are quite loudly yearning for IRL meet-cutes. The girls are out here stealing Sweetgreen salads, buying men drinks, even doing laps at run clubs — all for a shot at retiring from the humiliation ritual that is online dating in 2026. At this point, landing a response to how’d you two meet? that doesn’t start with a like or swipe is the reigning status symbol of our time.

Alexis, a 24-year-old Miami native, told me she recently deleted all the dating apps in hopes her next boyfriend will come and find her in the wild. While she’s all for men shooting their shot, she does really wish they would work on their aim a bit first.

“I would love to be asked out in person, but not how these Miami guys are doing it,” she says. “It’d be cool if he saw me at a coffee shop and asked what book I’m reading. Maybe he drops a note at my table. I don’t know, I just want the interaction to be genuine. These guys always manage to turn me off.”

Alexis is far from alone in her critiques of the rizz circulating Miami’s streets. My girls group chat provided similarly exasperated notes:

These rants have historically been capped with a half-resigned welp, that’s just Miami men! and I’ve always been inclined to agree. That is until this week, when I wandered deep into enemy territory: the strange lands of Gen Z men’s dating content.

I’d long suspected that guys like banana boy and the sidewalk bandit were not acting in isolation. The cold approaches my girlfriends and I field are too eerily synchronized to be coincidence. It’s always the same exaggerated confidence, same flagrant status signaling, same manner of spitting game like they’re reading off a teleprompter.

Finally, after watching enough pickup advice to irrevocably nuke my TikTok algorithm, their source material was revealed.

At first glance, it all looks like standard dude-to-dude dating wisdom — you know, thumbnails promising better rizz, more numbers, hotter chicks. Scroll long enough, though, and the messaging takes an unexpected turn. Somewhere between “eye contact ratios” and “conversation escalation checkpoints,” it grows increasingly unclear whether you’re being trained in the art of seduction or being onboarded as a door-to-door salesman.

Topics like chemistry, compatibility, and what it feels like to connect with a human woman take a backseat to quotas, reps, and sexual market value ratings. Cold approaches are treated less like meet-cutes and more like sales performance reviews. Who cares about a mutual spark? Did he open strong? Did he display high value? Did he maintain frame? Did he get the close?

Even getting laid, the ostensible end goal of any pickup artist, mostly exists in the abstract. Clavicular may spend his nights roaming Miami’s sidewalks rizzing up ladies for content, but Gen Z’s it-boy of the month says he feels mostly indifferent about the opposite sex — impressing them, dating them, sleeping with them. He told The New York Times a few weeks back that simply knowing he could have sex with a woman is in some ways better than the deed itself, which he gains nothing from.

This new crop of manfluencers may market their content as advice for getting girls, but their messaging tells a very different story. If a woman is referenced at all, she’s a mirror to assess his own standing, a stress test in his quest for self-mastery. Above finding hookups or a connection, the objective here is becoming That Guy. An alpha. A boss. A high-value male. Someone who picks up chicks not because he needs anything from them, but simply because he can.

This is where the Gen Z pickup artist diverges from his fedora-wearing predecessor of the early 2000s. The archetypal pickup artist, for all his ethical shortcomings, was at least pretty clear on the mission: meet women, convince them to sleep with you. They called themselves artists because they treated seduction like a craft, swapping feedback and fresh insights in anonymous forums to help each other understand (and of course manipulate) the female psyche.

The big names in Gen Z pickup are operating under a brand new set of incentives. The tactics they promote don’t necessarily need to work, they just need to hook the guys watching their content at home. In fact, the more insane his pickup line, the more bewildered her reaction, the better his clip will likely perform.

Unfortunately for the millions of impressionable men tuning into their advice, the same hyper-confident, contextless, copy-paste approach that looks sick in a fifteen-second clip is not landing quite as smoothly on Miami’s sidewalks.

All the single women I know and have scrolled past in TikTok comment sections are craving the same things: chemistry, understanding, a cinematic story they can flex to their friends over spicy margs. The dating tips being fed to their mate pool just so happens to be optimizing for a very different set of objectives.

The promise of a catch-all blueprint for talking to women is hard to resist, in particular for Gen Z guys. Imagine spending your formative years in a global pandemic, learning how to flirt almost exclusively behind a keyboard, hearing both “shoot your shot!” and “leave women alone!” on an endless loop, then one day trying to rip cold approaches like they’re no biggie.

Suddenly one of these pickup influencers pops up on your feed and promises to cut right through all that confusion. He offers you a clear system to follow — complete with metrics, scripts, and a fully-formed persona you can adopt. For the exclusive new price of $17 a month, all your uncertainty will at last be relieved... I mean, who among us wouldn’t fold?

Although it’s still very much in beta, the cold approach revival is signaling something hopeful: young people want to get outside and meet each other! Both sides of the gender divide are clearly starving for connection, and no matter how clumsy it’s looking in Miami, flirting in the wild is a massive step in the right direction. Perhaps after enough reps are cleared, the formulas will fade away and leave room for something more real.

it feels weirdly scandalous to admit that i like life and feel hopeful for the future. anyone under thirty knows it’s better insurance to curate your online persona with a tasteful hint of despair — because if you’re not living life miserable, are you even paying attention? if you’re not on SSRIs because the knowledge of global suffering is too much to bear, are you even, like, ensouled?

snark aside, i really do believe gen z’s reflex to demand better is our generation’s greatest asset. when something feels unfair or illogical, like a policy, a workplace rule, or a societal norm, we refuse to shrug and accept “that’s just how things work.” we ask the right questions and we bully authority figures in their tiktok comments until we see change. that impulse is noble, truly.

the issue is that over the past few years, we seem to have overcorrected in a big way. we’ve gotten so fixated on spotting what’s broken that all we let ourselves see now are cracks. to make matters worse, we’ve turned this cynical hyper-vigilance into a status game — as if your ability to diagnose the hidden dysfunction in every situation is proof of some moral and intellectual depth.

my fear is that once enough of us accept the doom pill, we’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy. i mean, who’s going to build the better future we keep demanding if everyone’s already decided we’re toast? once dread is the collective baseline, we’re bound to become passive viewers in our own lives. we’ll scroll and isolate and numb our minds with entertaining slop until we’ve morphed into the exact consumers tech companies pray for.

so, in the interest of not letting a few silicon valley nerds dictate our entire generation’s worldview, below are my tips for maintaining a positive outlook in a digital era that rewards the exact opposite. none of them will solve climate change or keep decrepit politicians’ paws off our future, but they might help in nudging your brain back toward its normal settings.

if you’d prefer to keep your place in the misery olympics, best of luck to you. feel free to dip here and fight me in my DMs. for everyone else, i present:

you’re allowed to be happy before we’ve fixed everything

i often find myself yearning for a simpler time in history. the feeling usually hits after engaging in one of modernity’s more spiritually corrosive rituals, like wasting forty minutes watching john pork prank videos, or letting a teenager pitch me her anti-aging skincare routine on tiktok live.

next thing i know, i’m lost in daydreams of a pre-technological paradise in which i spend my days prancing through uncorrupted landscapes and my nights hosting candle-lit soirées for all the girlies in my village. i’d never hear about sydney sweeney or check a linkedin job board ever again. I’D FINALLY BE FREE!

once this fantasy inevitably culminates in me damning mark zuckerberg and my parents and whoever made the industrial revolution happen, i force myself to think critically. would my life at any other point in history really have looked like a cottagecore pinterest board? or would it have more likely involved me marrying some crusty man twice my age, spending my hypest years as his domestic servant, then dying an excruciatingly painful death while birthing his child? suddenly my little life on the prairie doesn’t seem so charming :(

i know it’s so tempting to blame all our discontentment on iphones, capitalism, or some other giant, faceless villain. but as far as historians can tell, being alive has always been really fucking difficult — just in different flavors. yes, modern life can feel like a low-budget dystopian thriller at times, but it’s also objectively the best time to be alive if you’re into stuff like religious freedom, women’s rights, antibiotics, climate-controlled housing, and your situationship not randomly dying in war.

it’s also the first point in history that most people reading this have options. like, if you’re truly convinced modern society is a disease to all it touches, you can toss your phone over a bridge, move to the countryside, and spend your days churning butter. i grew up next to the amish. if they can stay committed to that bit, you can too.

in a hopefully-not-so-distant future, we’ll heavily regulate the advancements that are spiraling out of control and keep only what ensures us a more hospitable future. but in the meantime, you’re allowed to enjoy your existence before we’ve solved every issue plaguing humanity. otherwise, what’s the point of progress? who will ever get to enjoy it?

women fought tirelessly for my right to refuse a life of reproductive servitude, and scientists spent lifetimes figuring out how to keep me alive past twenty-four. does that mean sexism has been eradicated across the globe and all healthcare systems now run flawlessly? no! and it’s on our generation to continue fighting for progress, just like those before us did.

the unfortunate reality, however, is that a perfectly fair and suffering-free world is never coming. (unless every animal on earth is replaced by chill little robots). if we keep insisting on flawless conditions before letting ourselves appreciate anything, we’ll sulk our way through the only reality we’ll actually ever experience. it’s far from perfect, i’m aware, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most humans got.

notice the boring W’s

whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread.

our feeds are not neutral observers of reality. they’ve literally been engineered to serve us whatever cocktail of chaos and failure it takes to keep our threat-obsessed monkey brains hooked. these apps know we won’t click on a thumbnail titled “yay: every flight landed safely again today,” but will drop everything for “oh no: pilot shows up hammered, plane fckn explodes.” so we get fed a bottomless highlight reel of humanity’s biggest L’s until it feels like that’s just the norm.

most of us know on some level that social media is distorting our view of reality for the worse, but knowing doesn’t magically calm your nervous system. we’re up against millions of years of evolution fine-tuning our negativity bias, plus now a multi-trillion-dollar tech industry that only profits when we’re tweaking. unless we want to end up in permanent, algorithm-induced psychosis, however, we need to give our brains more unbiased inputs to work with.

i believe this begins, as most modern remedies do, with going outside. if we let our screens define reality for us, they’ll tell us quite assuredly that dysfunction is the rule, not the exception. luckily, we still have a whole world out there to remind us that’s not the full story. the annoying part is that our brains aren’t especially interested in all the boring, predictable stuff that goes right on an average day in real life.

your shower turns on, your bus shows up, your grocery store is stocked, the NPCs you interact with mostly follow the same rules and mind their business: this stuff feels like a given because it all happens so reliably. but when you pause to think about the insane amounts of competence, trust, and coordination required to make all these boring luxuries work so predictably, it starts to seem way less plausible that civilization is sprinting toward collapse.

our feeds will always remind us when there’s something to be anxious about, absolutely no worries there. what they won’t show us are all the unsexy, unclickable wins constantly happening in the background. if we want to see reality without the doom-colored glasses, we have to notice them on purpose.

shrink your world back to human size

if unlimited access to information made anyone a better person, the most chronically online mf’er you know would be out changing the world by now. but they’re not. they’re on twitter telling sixteen-year-olds, “um, it’s not my job to educate you.” if i had to take a stab at why, it’s because the more time you spend worrying about problems you can’t fix, the less capacity you have to do anything of actual impact.

i suppose the fantasy with “staying informed” is that if we know enough, we’ll be more responsible citizens. if we study every detail of every global conflict and keep a running dossier of which politician made what offensive comment this week, we’ll eventually have enough information to mobilize. the problem, however, is that most of what crosses our feeds doesn’t come with a call to action. it’s just an endless feed of ambient doom designed to spike our cortisol.

“woman brutally murdered in town you’ve never heard of”

“corruption scandal discovered in country you couldn’t locate on a map”

“goldman sachs just decided no one under forty will own a house EVER AGAIN!!!”

one of these notifications hits your lock screen before breakfast and you’re now moving through your day feeling like a powerless NPC in some rigged simulation — as if your fate has been predetermined by powerful villains who want to see you suffer. and, to be fair, that’s not entirely off base. neither you nor i can control if some greedy guys in suits decide to wage war or tank the economy. but it would also be untrue (and wildly unhelpful) to move through the world as if there’s no agency left for any of us.

the most grounded, high-impact people i’ve met all have one thing in common: they shrink their world down to the parts they can actually touch. they don’t spend their nights reading vindictive thinkpieces or policing influencers’ political opinions. they’re out doing small but tangible stuff, like helping their friend find a job, mentoring a kid, picking up a new skill, cooking for their neighbor, or volunteering for a cause they’re especially passionate about. they’re aware they can’t fix a geopolitical crisis this week, but they can solve a handful of issues in their immediate orbit. so they go and do that.

our brains were simply not built to metabolize every instance of suffering and malfunction on this planet. evolution gifted us stress and anxiety to handle problems we could actually do something about. no food → go hunt. storm coming → find shelter. bear trying to eat mom → throw rock. now, cut to the safest, cushiest time in human history, and we’re even more frazzled than our cave-dwelling ancestors because we’re using that same ancient, hyper-local hardware to process global politics, gender discourse, and some rando’s ten-part exposé on her husband’s affair — all on top of navigating our already-confusing twentysomething years.

it’s awesome that we care about the world and want it to function better, but it also helps to remember what our brains were actually built to do, which is solve the problems we can see. deciding to mute news alerts for a bit isn’t an act of ignorance or some intellectual sin. it will help shrink your universe back down to human scale, where you can still make the plot move forward.

don’t let the internet build a worldview for you

crazy ironic coming from the girl who’s currently shoving her worldview down your throat, i know, but i really think we need to stop outsourcing our critical thinking to strangers on the internet. everyone loves to blame tiktok and instagram for poisoning our generation’s brains, but my real beef is with the platforms that pretend they’re more cerebral — basically anywhere you can spend hours reading semi-eloquent people’s takes on why everything is worse than you realized.

at least when i’m thumbs-deep in short form brainrot, i know i’m committing an act of self-harm. it feels like drunk-eating mcdonalds at three in the morning: cheap, naughty, zero nutritional value. these discourse-heavy apps are more like a salad from the cheesecake factory: marketed like the healthier option, but still absolutely going to ruin you.

my main gripe with the discourse™ is how easily it can sweep you out of your own reality and into a much heavier, more abstract one. i could spend the nicest night out surrounded by happy twentysomethings, but the second i get in bed and see some reputable journalist post about gen z’s loneliness epidemic, my nervous system assumes we’re in crisis. i might be hanging out with my boyfriend feeling totally safe and at peace, but if a writer i follow drops a piece called newsflash: good men don’t exist, i’m reflexively side-eyeing him across the couch.

sometimes it’s necessary to engage with ideas that challenge your beliefs or help you recognize bigger, darker truths about our world. but maybe, just maybe, spending half your day absorbing random people’s hot takes, conspiracies, grievances, and viral-ready theories on what’s really wrong with society isn’t the healthiest use of a barely-developed frontal lobe.

growing up with an iphone in hand means you barely got a chance to build a worldview of your own before social media force-fed you the most paranoid, hyper-critical version. relationships, jobs, politics, the future: every facet of life arrived annotated by an overwhelming number of strangers before you had enough real-world data to reach your own conclusions. it’s really hard to hear your own thoughts, let alone any hopeful ones, when your brain is flooded with this constant stream of commentary.

it helps to remember that a lot of the content we’re consuming has been carefully crafted by creators whose literal job is to diagnose and escalate as many issues as they can see. there’s just no monetary incentive in assuring the masses, “hey, maybe some stuff is chill actually.” even if they’re right, though, and there really is some new cultural crisis you could spend your evening spiraling over tonight, ‘tis not your duty to do so. you can simply scroll past the yapping, let your mind get quiet, and conserve your energy for the handful of problems that actually belong to you.

our attention is our most valuable resource, and wherever we spend it shapes the way our brains experience reality. we can hand it all over to our screens, where each scroll offers a neatly packaged interpretation of what’s broken, who’s to blame, and why we should brace for impact, or we can place our focus in what’s in front of us, which resists such tidy conclusions. real life is messier, harder to summarize, and it’s still ours to shape.

the initial symptoms are harmless: a whispered “bare minimum” here, a well-meaning “never settle” there. if left untreated, however, the afflicted can expect to be commenting “dump his ass queen omggg you deserve better” on unsuspecting couples’ TikToks within mere weeks. those at highest risk are gen z women like myself: impressionable, inexperienced, and already skeptical of the alleged virtue of heterosexual love.

the first modern outbreak, as best i can trace it, began in the summer of 2023, when TikTok dating influencers like The Wizard Liz, MJ Gray, and Margarita Nazarenko unleashed a seductive new dating doctrine across millions of young women’s FYPs: the oh-so contentious princess treatment.

though they instructed women to “lean into their feminine energy” and “let him lead,” their message, beneath its provocative surface, had very little to do with submitting to or depending on men. this was about self-preservation — strategies for staying in control, guarding your emotions, and never giving anyone enough access to truly hurt you. the framework was simple: set your expectations princess-level-high, and if a man fails to reach them, simply peace out and onto the next.

their pitch was irresistible for a generation of young women raised between divorce hearings, i hate my spouse dinner-table bits, and sitcoms about naggy wives picking up after carefree man-children. if there were two lessons about love many of us absorbed from the prevailing culture, they were: one, partnership isn’t the sanctimonious ideal it’s cracked up to be, and two, the ROI on it looks particularly shitty for our kind.

i, as i’m sure many other observant young women did, came to this bleak conclusion all on my own. long before the princess treatment prophets took hold, i was on the ground doing their evangelical work. i can recall being but a wee child, looking around at the models of straight relationships available and thinking, damn… i lowkey don’t want to be the woman-half in this whole ordeal.

most of them seemed anxious. undervalued. weak. but i, i assured myself, i will do things differently. perhaps women before me had to sacrifice and compromise and all that unsexy stuff because they couldn’t hunt mammoths or cash their own paychecks, but i, a modern woman with earning potential and a DoorDash subscription, needn’t settle for less than sheer excellence in my romantic endeavors.

and i can’t lie, in a specific time and place, this framework was effective. like, really effective. i once navigated the hellish waters of modern dating with truly unshakeable poise. women far and wide commended my man-like confidence, my refusal to entertain mediocrity, and my mysterious talent for always being courted while remaining perfectly unscathed. i sniffed out the slightest hint of complacency like a bloodhound and made sure to bail before any man got the chance to disappoint me. i felt feared, adored, and most critically, in control. and yes, i’m aware i was dating less like a princess and more like a dictator — but an effective one, nonetheless.

when the princess treatment prophets stepped onto the scene and started spreading the good word far and wide, i cheered them on from the rafters. finally, i rejoiced, women are waking up. i’d seen too many strong soldiers fall weak in the face of men who offered them nothing but crumbs. i saluted (still do) today’s young women for demanding better behavior from men than most women before us could’ve dreamed of. if the tenets of princess treatment have helped even a handful of them feel confident enough to walk away from a bad situation, then i believe it’s been a W for womankind.

but it’s only now, after my jersey has been hung in the rafters of the dating scene and adulthood has given me a swift kick in the butt, that i can finally see the less flattering side of all this progress. it’s clear to me now that the same woman who once believed she’d mastered the game, who never compromised her boundaries and who never settled for less than perfect behavior, will inevitably find her hard-earned instincts betraying her when she finds someone worth staying for.

because unlike the princess treatment prophets would have you believe, their guidelines are not ones for real, messy, human relationships; they’re guidelines for never getting hurt. and true intimacy, i’ve come to learn only in these past few years, is learning how to get hurt a million little times and how to stick around anyway.

take my relationship, for instance. i’m surely biased, but i’m pretty sure my boyfriend is, like, the LeBron James of boyfriends. he anticipates my needs with creepy accuracy, supports me in everything i do, and approaches conflict with a patience i didn’t even know existed. unfortunately, however, he is a human and i am an only-halfway-recovered princess with an unpredictable hormonal cycle, so he does something that triggers every alarm bell in my nervous system at least once a week. maybe he’ll show up late to our plans, or claim he needs “personal space” when i’m trying to crawl inside his sweatshirt, or leave my text on read for eight-and-a-half hours leaving me to believe he has been kidnapped or has met his untimely death. (ok that one’s obviously fresh.)

if i brought his offenses to the princesses of TikTok, i’m sure they would order his immediate, court-mandated dumping. what do you mean he doesn’t answer your texts within the hour and permit you to crawl inside his skin as you please? and even now, with all my healing and all my heaps of love for him, i still hear the PTDS demons whisper: time to pull back your energy, princess. you should never feel less than completely adored. come to think of it, you know what this smells like? DANGER. should we run? QUICK, WHERE DO WE RUN?

but time and time again, sometimes even as a surprise to myself, i don’t run. i sit in it. it’s unsettling and weird and i literally despise every second, but i sit in it. i’m forced to do things once unthinkable to the formidable princess-dictator, like ask for reassurance and admit when i’m feeling insecure. God, she’d be disgusted. i’ve even learned how to have the kind of conversations where you don’t stand on business like an unbothered baddie who knows her worth should, but instead swallow your pride and meet your partner in the middle, even when your precious needs have to take the backseat.

sitting in this discomfort — letting yourself feel insecure and unsexy and out of control — feels like the total opposite of power. trusting a man enough to depend on him feels like self-sabotage. showing empathy to someone who just hurt you feels like weakness. it makes perfect sense that a generation shaped by instability and rewarded for self-reliance would cling to a dating doctrine that promises to keep us safe from all the risks of loving another person.

we’ve been shown that vulnerability invites exploitation, that caring too much is embarrassing, and that the person who stays more detached always wins — all lessons from a culture that taught us safety is worth more than connection. but what these princess treatment prophets won’t tell the millions of young women who hang on their every word, and what i couldn’t see until now, is that the price of constantly avoiding discomfort is your own humanity. if no one is close enough to hurt you, no one is close enough to know or love you either.

this may be a message that only resonates from the other side, once you’ve retired from the mean streets of casual dating and feel safe enough to heal the instincts that once protected you. but what i wish i could’ve told younger me, at the height of my PTDS, is that vulnerability is not weakness. and control, that feeling you’re always chasing, doesn’t come from avoiding your emotions; it comes from sitting with them. perhaps most shockingly, men aren’t opponents to outmaneuver or contestants to score; they’re just people, and they deserve compassion and grace just like you do.

in a world that glorifies independence and protecting your peace, it’s actually a radical choice to leave yourself open enough to be hurt. i’m not fully there yet, i don’t know if i’ll ever be. and honestly, i do hope i can keep a bit of my PTDS unhealed: the strong sense of self-worth, the lofty expectations, the conviction that i deserve at least a liiittle bit of a pedestal.

but what i hope for myself, and for all the other deranged princesses out there, is that we start choosing trust in small ways, even when guarding our emotions feels safer. that we choose to lean fully into our connections, even though prioritizing ourselves is the savvier investment. and that every so often we choose to take the riskier route, because the possibility of getting hurt is the only thing that makes love real.

matthew and i immediately discover that we have zero internet knowledge in common, seeing as he’s on shrimp-stack and i’m trapped in sydney sweeney think piece purgatory, but that doesn’t stop us from having a delightfully chaotic conversation.

on the pod you’ll find out:

(2:00) who the hell i am and why i refuse to capitalize my sentences

(7:10) why matthew is always talking about shrimp and why you probably should be too (fun idea: take a shot every time we say “shrimp” and lmk if you make it out alive)

(20:30) my takes on why gen z’s dating scene looks like a convoluted mess

(27:15) if we think our generation will conquer screen addiction or we’re all destined for a lifetime of doomscrolling

if matthew’s shrimp talk moved you, check out his substack and consider donating to the shrimp welfare project! 🦐

on day one of their six-week quest for love, sexy elevator saleswoman, olandria, and self-proclaimed cowboy, taylor, chose to couple up. the pair was invested primarily in each other for a solid three and a half weeks (roughly the equivalent of a common law marriage in love island time), so naturally it made for reality TV gold when he dumped her for another girl out of the blue.

this act of betrayal sent women from all corners of the world into an uproar — not because the masses believed their fling would stand the test of time, but because olandria is, like, really fucking attractive. taylor on the other hand… well, he’s definitely there. beauty is in the eye of the beholder, i know, but to me and millions of other beholders, olandria is undeniably hotter than the man who did her dirty.

you tell me if you disagree.

love island fans were stunned that this boyish-looking cornball could A) pull such a baddie and B) forsake such a baddie — all before we knew what hit us. even after taylor told his castmates point-blank that he never felt any chemistry with olandria, many women rejected his explanation, flooding social media with their own theories instead.

“he was just intimidated by her beauty.”

“he knew she was too good for him.”

“he’s definitely gay.”

“you can’t look like THAT and not want HER.”

frustrated commenters churned through all the familiar excuses, none quite willing to confront the less palatable reality, which is that olandria is exceptionally beautiful and she still got rejected.

the way women scrambled to rationalize olandria’s rejection revealed just how much it struck a collective nerve. i don’t think the breakup itself left viewers feeling particularly heartbroken, but i do think it challenged an illusion that many women quietly cling to: that if a woman is beautiful enough, that sort of thing shouldn’t happen to her.

when a smokeshow like olandria is rejected, criticized, or abandoned, it momentarily shatters this illusion, and other women will scramble to piece it back together for her. this is rarely done by prompting genuine reflection or accountability, but instead with quick-hit affirmations like, “you’re just too hot babe!” and “they couldn’t handle you!” it’s easier to soothe the sting with flattery than to face the unsettling truth that implicates us all — that nothing can protect a woman from getting hurt, not even a perfect face.

in constantly pointing to a woman’s beauty as the scapegoat in her interpersonal conflicts, we seem to have formed a gender-wide circle jerk of delusion — one that reinforces the same beliefs about women’s worth that keep us anxious and vulnerable. every time we tell a friend, no matter how pure our intentions, that she was overlooked, passed up, or left out because someone else was intimidated, insecure, or jealous, we add fuel to the narrative that her desirability is the only trait driving her life forward, whether it’s the reason things come together or fall apart.

with enough social conditioning, the psyches and group chats of hot women start to run on this logic:

“that boss who always suggests edits on your canva presentations isn’t high strung; she’s jealous of you.”

“that guy who love bombed and ghosted you wasn’t emotionally immature; he was scared of how badly he wanted you.”

“that one friendship didn’t implode because you two were toxic for each other; she just got tired of living in your shadow.”

“olandria wasn’t rejected by taylor because he didn’t like her; he just couldn’t handle such a bad b*tch.”

of course, beautiful delusional women and their beautiful delusional friends do not spawn out of thin air. they are the inevitable result of a world that shows a little girl, practically fresh out of the womb, that her beauty is the most valuable asset she will ever possess.

the messaging starts early and harmless enough, perhaps with some old church ladies pinching her cheeks and gushing, “this one’s gonna break hearts!” or later on, hearing her mom reminisce about scoring every job and boyfriend she ever wanted because she once had perky boobs and weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. by the time this little girl is a fully baked woman, it’s been reinforced in a thousand other subtle ways that beauty is her golden ticket to always feeling powerful, safe, and in control.

and to be fair, the world does tend to deliver on this promise — at least on the surface. beautiful women do, in fact, exist in an entirely different reality than most people. (read inside the hot girl economy for more on this). dinners and vacations are complimentary, validation comes on demand, and random acts of kindness wait at every corner. not to mention, fitting neatly into the prevailing beauty standard of her time remains one of a woman’s most reliable routes to upward social mobility.

so, i get it. when your looks have usually been the reason new doors open, it’s not surprising you’d assume your looks are also to blame when doors shut. desirability becomes the primary filter through which you experience the world, and through which you assume the world experiences you.

you don’t need to watch love island or get inducted into a girls’ group chat to see this same logic at work. just google “the dark side of pretty privilege.” you’ll stumble down a rabbit hole of tiktoks, articles, and reddit threads, all from conventionally attractive women insisting that being hot makes their lives incredibly difficult.

they say other women are too jealous to befriend them. co-workers plot their downfall behind closed doors. men are too obsessed, too intimidated, too lustful, or too insecure to treat them right. some of these creators have even gone as far as to argue that conventionally attractive women are at higher risk for sexual assault. they fail to clock these experiences for what they more often are: misogyny, run-of-the-mill human messiness, or (brace yourself) their own behavior… no, the explanation is always the same, plastered across every platform: they’re just too darn pretty.

this brand of pretty woman victimhood, while, yes, deeply annoying, is mostly just sad. because when a woman decides that being too sexy is the root of all her worldly problems, she skips the part where she might reflect and learn something new about herself, her relationships, or the flawed systems she’s operating within. she misses every opportunity to develop the kind of awareness and emotional intelligence that would actually bring her closer to the connection and peace we can assume she’s after.

and this “dark side of pretty privilege” propaganda doesn’t just flatten the women pushing it — it erases the experiences of women who don’t fit conventional beauty standards, who still face all of these issues and worse. these women are rarely offered the same sympathy or viral attention, because when an average-looking woman is excluded, overlooked, or mistreated, no one gasps. no one rushes to shower her with affirmations about how she’s too physically perfect for her own good. we’re only baffled when it happens to someone like olandria from love island, because deep down, we assume a woman that gorgeous will receive exactly what we were all promised: power, safety, and control.

the sooner we can decenter beauty as the root of attractive women’s inevitable pain, though, the sooner women as a collective can start untangling the messy illusion we’ve been sold. because if jaw-droppingly hot women get screwed over just like everyone else, it’s probably not proof that beauty is a curse, but that it was never the security blanket we imagined.

rewriting this narrative might inch us closer to accepting that fitting neatly into the beauty ideal, while absolutely a form of privilege, won’t shield women from the things we fear most: being used, abandoned, betrayed. and in that case, it’s probably not the cornerstone our identities should be built on. maybe then we’d waste less of our time anxiously striving to stay sexy and skinny and ageless into eternity, and spend a bit more of it building a sense of worth that sticks when no one’s looking.

it’s called #ihatemybf, and it’s become gen z’s go-to hashtag for showcasing the endlessly creative ways they cheat on, lie to, and manipulate their unsuspecting boyfriends. from talking trash about his hairline to flirting with his father, absolutely no offense is too drastic to be meme’d. in fact, the more diabolical the premise, the more rabid young women flock to offer their support.

the comment sections on these posts are always a spectacle in themselves, brimming with enthusiastic replies like, “i love to see women in male-dominated fields,” and, “liking this because it’s relatable, NOT because it’s funny.” i even once scrolled past a comment from my seemingly demure ex-classmate that read, “cheating is only ok when i do it bozo. 🙄”

to the uninitiated eye, these memes look like proof that the podcast bros and reddit mods were right all along — that modern women are morally bankrupt nymphomaniacs with no respect for traditional values.

reality, however, is not that clear-cut.

to understand the sudden proliferation of #ihatemybf memes, we must examine the trend’s origins. this hashtag supposedly spawned after some guy on X said, “that phase where you slowly start hating your girlfriend is crazy 😭,” and hordes of men perked up to say they, too, have experienced the fated i hate my girlfriend phase of a relationship. this girlfriend slander prompted women across the nation to launch a swift counterstrike, and alas, the #ihatemybf trend was born.

@user2738300303030202#ihatemybf #mybfchopped #henrydanger #relatable #trending #fyp

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

given this context, it’s unlikely that young women's taste for cheating memes is some mass confession of serial infidelity (which honestly sucks for me because that'd make a great headline). it’s more plausible that this trend is just the latest flare-up in gen z’s ongoing gender war — a relentless feedback loop of provocation and retaliation, engineered by and for the chronically online.

for many gen z women, the seeds of this online conflict were planted around 2017 — first with the cultural reckoning of #metoo, then with the explosive rise of dating content that repackaged shitty male behavior as female empowerment. the latter, most notably exemplified by the wildly popular podcast call her daddy, normalized a simple yet potent thesis: men are gonna do you dirty, but you can do them dirty too.

before we knew it, women everywhere were posting tips for bugging your man’s phone and proudly sporting “cheat on him” t-shirts. whether this yapping prompted actual behavioral shifts or just louder online posturing is up for debate, but the cultural impact was felt regardless. a new flavor of paranoia settled in across the gender divide.

#ihatemybf content marks the latest escalation in this online tit-for-tat, fueled by young women’s drive to claim a sense of control in the dating market. whether consciously or not, the women circulating cheating memes are waging a sort of ideological warfare — forcing men to experience the same type of insecurity that’s historically been their privilege to impose.

and it’s certainly not just young women approaching relationships with this defensive hostility. gen z men, especially in more conservative circles, are growing increasingly paranoid about the prospect of emotional betrayal. whether or not they’ve fully swallowed the red pill, millions of them have been exposed to the manosphere: a corner of the internet where women are often cast as hypergamous attention-seekers who are loyal only when it suits them.

@kyleandjackieoWho do you agree with?? Fresh&Fit or Jackie O?? 🤔

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

clearly, both gen z men and women are obsessed with cheating — discussing it… threatening it… getting weirdly invested in evolutionary psychology to figure out how to evade it... but drown out all the online noise, and one question remains: is everyone actually doing it?

a quick google search suggests yes. articles that call gen z “the most unfaithful generation” and others that claim, “vast majority of gen z are cheating on their partners” paint quite the foreboding picture of young people’s romantic prospects. pair these headlines with viral tiktoks that declare, “statistically, gen z is the least loyal generation,” and there’s a pretty compelling case that most of our peers are betraying each other.

i, however, suspect all of these claims are bullshit, so i sent an anonymous survey to my readers and asked them myself.

136 gen z men and women answered, “how common is cheating in your social circle?” and although it’s a relatively small sample size (i tried my best, ok?), their answers tell a very different story than the one being pushed online.

• 60% said cheating is rare — they hardly hear about it

• 38% said it’s somewhat common — they know a few cases

• 2% said it’s very common — most people they know have cheated

another narrative that has picked up media traction is that gen z is not technically cheating more, but rather opting out of monogamy all together. for instance, the new york post, fox news, and several other outlets have reported that 59% of gen z wants an open or polyamorous relationship — which surely sent half their readership into cardiac arrest. i just hope they read long enough to see that data was pulled from ashley madison: an app quite literally built to help people cheat on their partners.

though this data is clearly absurd, i ran another sanity check just to be thorough. i’ve personally seen too many hate comments on polyamorous couples’ tiktoks to believe gen z is the free-spirited bunch fox news makes us out to be. so, i asked my readers: which best reflects your thoughts on non-monogamy?

• 12% said i'm in / would be in a non-monogamous relationship

• 36% said not for me, but i get the appeal

• 39% said i think it's weird, but to each their own

• 13% said i think it's a bad relationship model for anyone

what those publications may be picking up on is that gen z has more progressive beliefs about sexuality on average, which is true, but what they fail to account for is that we’re also far more risk averse and far less promiscuous than our millennial and gen x counterparts. to put it plainly: gen z is quite slutty in theory, but not in practice.

if you think indulging in sexual content is cheating, then sure, our generation is doing it at olympic-level standards. but when i polled my gen z readers, only 11% said they consider watching porn in a relationship to be cheating. that number climbs to 25% for liking thirst traps on instagram, and spikes to 80% when it comes to swiping on a dating app.

people seem to weigh these micro transgressions based on how likely each is to lead to an offline encounter, and because technology can facilitate that in just a few taps, it’s easy to assume gen z is leaning into the ease of it all. but that assumption overlooks a key detail: when you’ve been swimming in a nonstop stream of hyper-sexualized content since middle school, there’s not much incentive to go and get the real thing (which might help explain why gen z is reportedly having less casual sex and craving more traditional commitments than their older counterparts).

even if we did want to cash in on this convenience and cheat our little hearts out, we’re also way more likely to get caught. 50 years ago your grandpa could start a whole second family and gaslight your grandma to the grave — but in 2025, between location sharing, snap scores, screenshot evidence, and unsolicited “hey girly” DMs, even the most talented of two-timers are struggling to succeed.

still, both gen z men and women point to some rampant, generation-wide infidelity as good reason to avoid vulnerability altogether. the thought of committing to someone only to end up betrayed feels so inevitable, so baked into the modern dating experience, that some would rather sit it out entirely, or arguably worse, stay stuck in a constant rotation of low-stakes, half-committed situationships.

the real tragedy here is that if each gender looked past the onslaught of sensationalized content fueling this mutual distrust, they’d probably realize there’s no real gender war. there’s just a mutual fear of getting hurt, and it’s this generational aversion to emotional discomfort, not some dramatic rise in infidelity, that’s holding both sides back from the kind of relationships they want.

she’s always known it, too. there were hints everywhere — doors swinging open before she moved to reach for them, tips piling up twice as fast as the other waitresses’ at her summer gig, local boys clumsily vying for her attention. but when she moved to new york city for college, something seemed to shift overnight. her beauty was no longer a subtle edge, it was her golden ticket to a whole new reality.

from the moment she got settled in her shoebox apartment downtown, molly’s DMs filled up fast. older guys with blue check marks slid in with invitations to swanky penthouse parties, VIP tables, and dinners at restaurants she could never afford. they offered to cover her ubers, usher her past lines at manhattan’s most exclusive venues, and introduce her to the wealthiest bachelors in the city: celebrities, athletes, tech millionaires — you name it.

naturally, she said yes. what college freshman wouldn’t? if it weren’t for these invitations, she’d be surviving on dining hall credits and dodging bouncers with her big sister’s fake ID.

molly quickly learned that these new, generous friends were known as nightlife promoters, and that they played a unique role in facilitating her extravagant nights out. they were paid to bring attractive young women into venues, ensuring the environment looks appealing to male patrons with fat pockets. she came to understand that she had a job too: show up on time, wear something flattering, and drink loads of free champagne.

this exchange (though she’d be hesitant to call it one) felt too good, too easy to be true. all it took was a few hot instagram pics to fast-track molly into a lifestyle that most people couldn’t fathom, let alone attain. she and her new nightlife friends giggled mischievously about it behind closed doors, wondering how this system could be so blatantly rigged in their favor.

what they didn’t yet understand is that young women like them are the foundation of new york’s nightlife economy, and that without their enthusiastic buy-in, the system would completely unravel.

you can find real girls like molly on tiktok, recounting weekend escapades in new york, miami, and LA — nights spent hopping between VIP tables, being whisked around in escalades, and indulging in opulent feasts — all on someone else’s dime.

take jadexe, who says pretty privilege in miami gets you comped dinners, unlimited alcohol, and joy rides in foreign luxury cars. or michellespublicdiary, who claims that being beautiful in new york means you’ll never “sauce out a cent of your own money again” because “literally everything is free.”

the comment sections on these posts are riddled with suspicion, and rightfully so. like, what’s the catch here? are these girls actually just sugar babies? escorts? paid influencers? at the very least, they must be models, right?

no, not necessarily.

many of these young women are what i would call really hot regular girls (RHRGs for short.) they’re not sex workers, nor do they usually have modeling careers or massive social media followings. they're more likely theatre majors at NYU, or aspiring nurses, or recent grads struggling to afford rent.

for decades, these exclusive perks were typically reserved for models — women with agency contracts and industry connections. but social media has democratized this system, allowing the new generation of RHRGs to access similar lives of luxury.

rather than relying on exclusive model networks to fill up nightlife venues, promoters now recruit newcomers straight off flights from their hometowns — wide-eyed young women who will gladly go out with them 5 nights a week. as these women hop on tiktok to document their extraordinary nightlife adventures, the pipeline grows stronger. more girls see it, more girls want in, and soon enough, the system is expanding.

having lived in the debauchery capitals of the world, new york and miami, for all my adult life, i’ve become somewhat of a sociologist on matters of cities where obscenely rich men and obscenely hot women coexist. i’ve also known many an RHRG, and have grown fascinated with their unique role in fueling the nightlife economy.

unlike in an explicit transaction, RHRGs aren’t directly compensated for their time, nor are they expected to engage in overtly sexual activities. instead, their beauty and perceived sexual availability are the “goods” in this exchange. while sex itself is certainly a motivator for the men bankrolling these lavish outings, it can’t rationally be the sole one — otherwise, they would be paying for sex workers’ services directly.

nightlife venues depend on RHRGs to stay afloat, since men tend not to spend recklessly unless in the company of beautiful women. yet, despite the undeniable profitability of their time and energy, directly compensating these women to come inside is not an option. that would shatter the fantasy: for the men, that the experiences they’re funding are simply spontaneous fun, with attention from attractive women being a natural byproduct; for the women, that they’re not trading anything at all for the perks they receive.

to maintain this delicate illusion, nightlife promoters often act as middlemen to facilitate the exchange. here’s how it works:

a. nightclubs, restaurants, and luxury event organizers need to make money

b. wealthy male patrons, often called “sponsors” in the meme world, will spend exorbitant amounts of money to be surrounded by beautiful women

c. nightclubs, restaurants, and luxury event organizers work with promoters to get beautiful women inside

d. promoters lure beautiful women inside with promises of access and free shit — all of which is typically comped by the venues as a marketing expense

in cities like new york and miami, top-tier nightclubs can generate annual revenues upwards of $50 million, with much of this revenue coming directly from bottle service. a table of rich guys will drop anywhere from $2,000 to $50,000 on a few bottles in one night, as alcohol is marked up by as much as 1,000%. obviously, this degree of wasteful spending is not done just for luxury’s sake. it’s all part of a wider, more primal spectacle.

at their core, these venues are arenas for male status games, where excess wealth isn’t just flaunted — it’s basically set on fire for sport. securing the most visible table, ordering the most obnoxious champagne parade, gathering the highest concentration of beautiful women who they mayormaynotbesleepingwith in their section — each is a costly bid for dominance, a move to establish their spot in the social hierarchy.

a close cousin of the nightlife promoter is the client promoter, who works not with venues, but with ultra high-net-worth sponsors and their entourages directly. think big-name athletes or leo dicaprio types. client promoters are tasked with curating groups of beautiful women for private parties, yacht outings, or last-minute trips to st. barths. unfortunately for our dear RHRGs, these invites seem more often reserved for models and well-known IG baddies.

regardless of his tier, a male sponsor’s motivations for participating in this economy are fairly straightforward. the incentives and outcomes of an RHRG, however, are not always as obvious. sure, free sushi and celeb sighting are cool, but at what cost? does the VIP access justify serving as a prop in men’s primal pissing contests?

well, depends who you ask.

and depending on your personal philosophies, you’ll see the beautiful young women in question as empowered, exploited, or something in between. regardless of your stance, the hot girl economy will keep on running. the only thing that might disrupt business as usual is if RHRGs stopped buying in and started warning their younger counterparts about the trade-offs.

but do they want to? or, when all is said and done, do the benefits still outweigh the costs? i asked a few RHRG friends (who prefer to remain anonymous) the following question to assess their thoughts on the matter.

one RHRG living new york put it like this: “i would tell her to go live it up while she’s young. have fun with your friends, eat at crazy expensive restaurants, build your professional network if you can. but in the same breath, i’d warn her not to derive too much validation from the men at these parties or to expect to form genuine relationships with them. i’ve personally never felt ‘taken advantage of’ because i was always aware of the superficial nature of this all. but whether you like it or not, being attractive is a literal currency for girls in new york and businesses use it to drive revenue, so you might as well use them right back.”

another RHRG from miami had a more cautious view: “i will say i’ve made some amazing friends in the nightlife scene, but there’s a lot of binge drinking, a lot of drugs, and not everyone has good intentions. i’ve heard some scary stories about girls blacking out and waking up in apartments they don’t remember going to, or getting their phones taken by promoters at parties for hours bc ‘no pics allowed.’ you need to be smart if you choose to be in these spaces.”

no matter how tempting it is to assign binary labels to the women taking part in these dynamics, either as unassuming victims or as masters of finesse, it’s clear that many are acutely aware of the risks and rewards at play, and have learned to navigate both with discretion.

each RHRG’s motivation to participate is unique. some see the nightlife scene as a sort of launching pad, in which they can leverage exclusive spaces and networks that would otherwise not be within their reach. others see it as a temporary loophole in the system — one that lets them live far above their means, at least for a while. but as one nyc-based RHRG pointed out, the party can’t last forever.

“i don’t regret my party girl era. i met cool people and i got into plenty of rooms i never would have on my own. but at some point the promoters stop hitting you up as much, and suddenly there’s a new group of younger girls getting invited instead. when you’re out of it, the whole thing feels kinda weird looking back.”

acceptance in these circles hinges on fragile currencies: youth, beauty, cash. while you have the right assets, playing the game feels logical, almost inevitable. the invites roll in, the perks stack up, and for this moment, the system adores you. but like in any economy, each participant is only as valuable as the contribution they make to keep the machine running. access is never truly owned, only borrowed — whether you’re a sponsor, promoter, model, or RHRG. and when your time is up, the game certainly won’t stop without you.

i’ve long felt impassioned about this subject, because if there’s one thing i’ve learned from a decade of content consumption, fifteen seasons of love island, and hundreds of tear-laden conversations with my friends, it’s that twenty something year old girls are not enjoying dating.

as if love wasn’t already complicated enough, gen z is now forced to contend with a host of unforeseen adversaries, including but not limited to: dating apps, situationship culture, phone-based relationships, and a media landscape that’s poised men and women as mortal enemies.

you can find a million and one pieces of content that lament the state of modern dating and wallow in the seemingly impenetrable nature of these obstacles, but that is not what we’ll be doing here. what we’ll do instead is figure out how to have a good time in spite of these less-than-ideal circumstances, because we are not quitters!

despite what the headlines may report, i’m confident that it’s still very much possible to enjoy dating in “this day and age.” in fact, i had lots of fun going on dates when i was single. (unless you’re my boyfriend reading this, then it was fine or whatever…)

given my rare, positive experience, i feel it’s now my civic duty to put the girls of substack on-game. you may not find the most tactical insights here if you’re trying to secure a husband in the next 3-5 business days, but if you’re a single girl in your twenties who wants to:

1. ease some anxiety

2. stop stressing and start having fun

then you’ll likely find something useful below.

sooo, without further ado:

tip #1: don’t go grocery shopping while you’re hungry

🚨 warning: obligatory self-help tirade incoming. we’ll get into the good stuff after.

a wise woman once said never to go grocery shopping while you’re hungry, or you’ll end up with a cart full of junk food. or maybe i made that up? who’s to say. regardless, the principle still stands: don’t date while you’re desperate for someone else to fulfill you, or you’ll end up with nothing but high cortisol.

maybe i was born at the right time, evading the generational brainwashing that millennial women endured, or perhaps i’m just a natural-born hater, but growing up, i never quite understood why some girls would fantasize about finding their future husband — as if this mythical man would appear and make their lives finally make sense.

i wondered: “do they realize they can get married and it can suck?” “what if this husband guy goes away, or he never comes at all? will they just lose it?” “aren’t there more fun things to daydream about, like eating snow cones with your friends?”

if you think i’m exaggerating, please read this poem i wrote when i was 8 years old.

turns out little steph was onto something, because this mindset has been the ultimate hack for enjoying dating as an adult. now that i’m slightly more eloquent, i can express it like this: searching for your “other half” or your “missing puzzle piece” is so poetic in theory. but in practice? it’s kinda tragic.

fixating on outcomes and made-up markers of security will only rob you of your capacity to enjoy the thrilling uncertainty of a fresh connection — and more critically, to feel complete as you already are. dating gets more fun (and, ironically, you get more favorable outcomes) when you start to relinquish some of this craving for control.

for all the lovergirls out there who got angsty reading that message: no, you shouldn’t abandon the quest to find your soulmate. that said, it’s still an incredible long-term investment to build a life that is full to the brim — regardless of your relationship status.

because, reality is, even if you lock down that fairytale relationship you always dreamed of, you still need to be cool and confident within it. otherwise, you’re gonna have a reaaal bumpy ride. you’ll only be able to unclench your jaw and truly enjoy your relationships when they’re born from a place of wanting — not needing — so try going all-in on your own life first. then, the real fun will start. 💅

tip #2: keep your tummy full

so, if the goal is to avoid grocery shopping while you’re hungry, then naturally, you need to stay well fed. this can be achieved by filling up your life with things that nourish you, like intimate friendships, fun hobbies, and a great sense of self.

let’s work backwards though, and assume you’re already submerged in the trenches, sick to your stomach because derrick from hinge hasn’t texted you back in 6 hours.

take a quick break from stress-biting your nails and try asking yourself this: if derrick didn’t exist, what would i like to be doing right now? better yet, what would i like to be doing if men didn’t exist at all?

if the answer is that you’d still prefer to be tweaking under your duvet, then there’s some added work to do here. but if the answer is that you’d like to try a new dance class, or facetime a friend you haven’t seen in weeks, or sip wine out of a fancy chalice while you paint sunsets in the park, then get up and do it right now!

it seems that in many instances, you don’t even like derrick that much. but for one reason or another, you’ve decided that his attention and validation are now the fuel you require to feel energized throughout the day. the reason is likely that your tummy isn’t full.

so, try filling your life to the tippity-top with people and plans and ideas that excite you. you’ll likely find that once you’re keeping yourself satiated on your own accord, derrick’s attention will no longer be a necessity — it’ll just be a sweet little treat.

tip #3: firstdatemaxxx

as i argued in tip #3 of my guide to touching grass, i’m a proponent of the idea that your plans should usually be nonrefundable. in this context, it means that if one morning you wake up and decide that it’s finally time to put yourself out there and set up a date, you should do it. and if date night rolls around and you really really really don’t want to go, you should still do it.

if you’re meeting people online, first dates can feel like homework. you don’t even know this person and suddenly you’re forced to feign excitement about eating tapas with them? it’s a bizarre ordeal.

still, picture this scenario: you get dolled up, trek all the way to this date, aaaaand… it absolutely sucks. you dip out hurriedly to get on the train home, where you sit with your fists clenched, bemoaning the fact that you wasted eyeliner on this night. suddenly, the cute guy across from you looks up from his book and asks why you look so pissed off. you two end up giggling the whole commute home, he takes you on the best date of your life, and then you two live happily ever after. the end.

whoops, i always skip to dramatics. i suppose an alternate scenario is that you end up hitting it off with the first dude. point is, no one meets interesting people or builds good lore when they don’t leave their house. no one makes movies or writes songs about people who don’t leave their house. no one really learns anything about themselves or the world when they don’t leave their house.

from this point forward, no more complaining about “the state of modern dating” if your screen time exceeds 7 hours a day. just go on bad dates, go on good dates — go outside and experience the world as it was intended. ok? ok.

and if you hate this tip because you hate first dates, please see tip #4.

tip #4: men love [silly] bitches

if you think first dates feel like glorified interviews, i am here to assure you that there’s no first date rulebook — you can make the conversation as deep or nonsensical as your heart desires. if you don’t care how many siblings he has or what he thinks of working from home, then literally don’t ask.

the cool part about a first date is that they typically don’t know much about you, so this can be an opportunity to reinvent yourself. you can play a character… subvert expectations… get silly with it... if you’ve always wished that you could be completely bold and socially confident, just try it on for the night. the best part is, if you like how it feels, you can keep it!

if you don’t know where to start, try writing a list of 10 fun questions in your notes app. these will be your armor to protect against small talk and awkward silences from now on. if you want to really amp up the theatrics, steal this script:

say, “can i ask you something kind of serious?” take a dramatic beat — perhaps clear your throat obnoxiously — then whip out one of your prepared questions. for instance, “who do you think was the hottest war general to ever do it?” then sit back and offer an inquisitive stare until you receive your answer. (bonus points if you ask that one and he’s not vaguely homophobic in response).

you’ll find your own brand of silly along the way, but here’s my case for committing to the bit at all costs:

1. it will lower the stakes of meeting new people

2. it will make you more socially confident

3. it will lead people to find you bizarre and hot in equal parts, which is arguably the finest concoction to be

tip #5: get your mind out of the gutter!

social media is uniquely adept at pitting people against each other, and in recent years, straight men have been public enemy #1. this is in part for good reason, but to all the women out there who still want to date men and enjoy it, you gotta stop ragging on them.

when you repeat ad nauseam that “all men are trash,” the trash will almost surely continue to find you. this is not only because your perception cements your reality, but also, because science says so. i recently wrote about this thing called reciprocity mindset, which argues that people tend to live up — or down — to the expectations you set for them. this phenomenon is especially relevant in romantic relationships, where your standards define your experiences.

so, if you want to attract good people and have a fun little time, try being purely and utterly optimistic about your dating life for just one week.

swap:

• “i don’t trust men” with “i trust everyone until they give me a reason not to.”

• “there are no good prospects out there” with “the world is literally brimming with cool people and i want to meet them all.”

• “dating apps ruined dating” with “dating apps are a convenient tool, but there’s still a whole physical world out there for me to enjoy.”

• “i don’t have another failed talking stage left in me” with “fuck itttt, we ball.”

say this stuff to your friends, say it to the people you date, say it to yourself in the shower — just say it all out loud, even if you think every bit is dangerously naive. you might just notice an unsuspecting pep in your step, and people might even start meeting your newfound expectations.

tip #6: don’t prove the podcast bros right

in the same vein, it’s probably smart to refrain from advertising your taste for losers, narcissists, and guys who don’t care if you live or die. you would think this much was obvious, but obviously, it’s not. spend five minutes on tiktok and you’ll find some variation of the below sentiment with thousands of replies to the effect of, “yas queen slay queen so real.”

call me a party pooper or a pick-me, but to all the girls reading, please know that these jokes(?) are way more damaging than you’d think. not only will this mindset award you a lifetime of subpar or even harmful relationships, it also incentivizes men to be annoying and poorly-behaved.

if you’d like to date decent humans, try doing the literal opposite of this. inform everyone around you that you only date people who treat you exceptionally well. it will motivate them to follow suit.

and if all this isn’t good enough reason to go cold turkey on the “i <3 red flags” rhetoric, just remember that andrew tate has made millions from preaching that women are turned off by respect. each self-deprecating comment you make is an extra dollar in that little freak’s pocket.

tip #7: don’t be a passenger princess

love ‘em or hate ‘em, one thing men have gotten right about dating is putting themselves and their needs first. they’ll watch the game when they feel like it, stay at the bar with friends ‘til closing, and generally just move how they want — regardless of their feelings for anyone else. women, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the wants and needs of whoever currently has their affection. us sweet little souls...

we consider this approach the more moral one, and deem anything else plain selfish. but the unfortunate reality is that there’s no prize for being “correct” here. all you get is a victim complex and battered confidence.

committed relationships require a different degree of consideration, obviously, but if you find yourself bailing on friends when your situationship commands you to “come thru,” then it’s time for a reframe. expeditiously.

it all circles back to principle #1: don’t go grocery shopping while you’re hungry. when you cling onto romantic connections from a place of lacking, desperately chasing those fleeting feelings of security and control, you tend to be shitty to yourself and the people who already love you.

most girls reading this can probably relate to the experience of being in a toxic or codependent relationship, feeling like you’re doing donuts down the freeway while someone else has control of the wheel. suddenly your mood for the day or your plans for that night are entirely at the whim of someone else’s decisions. you’re constantly ungrounded, waiting for their approval to bring you back down to earth.

if that’s how you’ve felt or currently feel in your relationships, i have good news: it doesn’t have to be this way! it’s up to you if you want to hop in the driver’s seat and start taking accountability for yourself. all it takes is a little reframe.

instead of this: ugh billybob won’t let me know if he wants to hang out tuesday or thursday… how am i supposed to plan my week now?? i just have to sit around waiting on his response?? fml fml fml ;(

try this: billybob has his own life and priorities, but so do i. i’ll plan my week how i want, and if he decides to put effort into seeing me, i’ll assess then.

or

instead of this: why hasn’t billybob asked me to be his girlfriend yet?? is it because i’m an unlovable swine?? or because he’s a gaslighting manipulator?? could it be both?? *cry, doomscroll, panic, hit vape.*

try this: billybob hasn’t asked to be his girlfriend yet. let me think about how i feel, or maybe i’ll have a chat with him. then i will decide how i want to move forward.

it can actually be that easy to take all the agency you’ve given to billybob and reclaim it for yourself. of course, our pesky little emotions tend to get in the way of sheer rationality, but with a little bit of confidence and a lotta bit of intention, it’s fully possible to start taking the wheel.

the high schoolers two-stepped their hearts out, breaking only on occasion to wipe their sweat with napkins and take hurried gulps of sprite. the boys twirled their crushes, the girls giggled in conspiratorial clusters, and they all screeched in unison when the DJ played a crowd fav. with their phones tucked away in jean pockets, it was clear this scene wasn’t manicured for snapchat — this was raw, unfiltered fun.

high schoolers partying isn’t exactly an extraordinary sight, but that night, it felt like one. like many adults, i spend far more time reading about today’s teenagers than i do interacting with them, so to the extent of my knowledge, they’re mostly oversized ipad kids with stunted social skills and severe vibe deficiencies. that night, though, watching warmly as a hundred teens flirted and danced and acted undeniably human, i left with one glaring revelation:

holy shit, i need to limit my screen time.

considering all the content i consume about society’s rapid decline, it’s consistently disorienting to put the phone down, step outside, and look at how little has changed since my childhood. sure, i see more dystopian cyber trucks on the road, and far more eyes peering down at screens on the train, but otherwise, the rhythms of life are strikingly similar. people still ride bikes through parks, chat with old friends over coffee, make art, and court each other on sticky dance floors.

these sweet, everyday scenes don’t tend to permeate our dopamine-flooded brains because they’re, ya know, unremarkable. no one’s racking up views for a tiktok about the time their boyfriend woke up at the crack of dawn to drop them at the airport. they are, however, going viral for a storytime about when their situationship tried to hit them with their buick. this is largely in part because of something called negativity bias — an evolutionary instinct that keeps humans more attuned to bad news than good.

dr. jamil zaki, a social psychology researcher who i will be quoting compulsively from this point forward, did an experiment that illustrates this phenomenon in a more reputable, sciencey way. he hosted a game where participants were given money to either 1) keep for themselves or 2) contribute to a communal fund. the vast majority of participants went with option 2, offering their money to the fund. interestingly, though, when given a chance to partake in some gossip and write notes for the game’s next players, participants were 3x more likely to fixate on the few who were selfish rather than the majority who cooperated.

humans love talking shit — and that’s not really our fault. evolution equipped us with a negativity bias because it helped keep our prehistoric ancestors alive. if word got out that ungabooga was a berry stealer, it was in your best interest to remember not to trust her if you wanted to survive. what this well-intentioned survival instinct did not account for, however, was that we’d end up in our current reality: spending several hours each day consuming the absolute worst highlights of humanity’s behavior.

to no surprise, it’s gen z — the first generation whose brains have formed with pocket-sized content machines in hand — who is the most anxious, hopeless cohort in history. we have spent roughly equal amounts of time letting strangers on the internet tell us what the world is like as we have actually experiencing the world on our own. this dynamic could be cool if the strangers had our best interest in mind, but unfortunately for us, they’re not exactly supportive, big sis types. they’re actually monetarily incentivized to make us as pissed off and terrified as possible.

most of what these content creators offer gen z is a grossly outsized view of how bleak out reality is — a narrative we rarely pause to question as we scroll. instead, we simply conclude that our world is irreparably flawed and getting worse by the day. we resign ourselves to victimhood, accepting we were “born in the wrong generation,” and clinging tightly to nostalgia for times we assume were easier.

this generation-wide disillusionment certainly has basis, since young people are worse off in some very real ways (i.e. crippling screen addictions and impending climate crises), but above all else, it seems that we are our own worst enemies. if we could escape the pessimism echo chambers and liberate ourselves from the notion that your anxiety over how-fucked-up-the-world-is should be worn as a badge of intellectual and moral superiority, gen z might actually be fine.

due to the aforementioned anxiety olympics, it feels like a cancelable offense to admit that i have hope for my generation. i will be dropping the notes app apology expeditiously, but in the meantime, allow me to illustrate my point with a few anecdotes.

over lunch the other day, i referenced gen z’s male loneliness epidemic to a friend who is far less online than i am. she earnestly remarked, “the men are lonely? they seem fine to me.” huh, after a long, hard think about it, all the real-life men i know actually seem to be doing alright. they don’t spend their days spewing misogynistic vitriol from the depths of dimly lit goon caves — they’re working 9 to 5’s, trying to get hotter in the gym, complaining about dating to their friends — fairly normal guy stuff.

just a few weeks before that, i mentioned offhandedly to a older woman at a dinner party, “well, you know, the dating market is worse than ever right now,” to which she responded through a snarky laugh, “dating has always been shit, honey.” oh, whoops. i watched eight different tiktoks this week that told me otherwise.

according to dr. zaki’s research, we’re all statistically inclined to overestimate the severity of societal issues. he uncovered through 30 years of national polls that the majority of americans believe violent crime has been increasing every year since 1990, when, spoiler: it hasn’t. FBI data shows it’s actually dropped by 50%.

but you know what did rapidly proliferate during that same time span? you guessed it! ‘round-the-clock access to news. oh, and also women’s seemingly-ubiquitous true crime addiction. this increase in exposure, paired with humanity’s timeless tendency to idealize the past, has landed us squarely in our current predicament: believing the world has never been worse than it is right now.

bad stuff is happening every day, obviously. but then again, bad stuff has been happening every day since humanity graced this planet. i haven’t been alive all too long, but if i've learned one thing from youtube deep dives over the years, it’s that since day one, humans been waging wars, murdering their neighbors, and constantly finding new, fun ways to inflict maximum pain on one another. the bar for decent behavior has historically been set pretty low, but in my opinion, we’re currently exceeding expectations.

that’s not the prevailing narrative, of course, because optimism doesn’t sell quite like fear does. that’s why even i, a self-proclaimed glass-half-full kinda gal, was disproportionately surprised to see teenagers having fun at that line dancing bar; it’s why i’m immediately skeptical when i hear about someone’s happy relationship, even though i’ve experienced happy relationships myself; it’s why i find myself regurgitating complaints about social “epidemics” that don’t even resonate with my lived experience — because my cognitive framework has been molded not through living, but through the internet.

inventing and amplifying new crises, especially about younger generations, is a tried-and-true way to win algorithmic favor. one week it’s that we’ll never be able to buy homes, the next it’s that we’ll never get married, then it’s that we’re so lazy that the job market is bound to collapse under our collective apathy. but here's something that those contributing to this discourse, myself included, should consider before weighing in:

there’s this thing called reciprocity mindset, which is the idea that people tend to live up — or down — to the expectations you set for them. therefore, when you put your faith in someone, they’re more likely to rise to the occasion. the inverse is true as well: if you tell young people enough times that they’re too unmotivated, too incapable, and too entangled in broken systems to build a better future, they’ll tend to believe you and meet your expectations.

this is troubling, because hope isn’t just an individual luxury — it’s the cornerstone of societal progress. when people lose faith that change is feasible, their motivation to pursue it fades. the data backs this up: hopeful people are more likely to take action — whether it’s voting, protesting, or rallying their communities. they’re also proven to live longer and enjoy better mental health.

if you’ve spent any time around young people lately, you know that “hopeful” isn’t really the first descriptor that springs to mind. if we want a better future, it’s on all of us to think twice before adding to the doomsday discourse, and to recognize that we aren’t confined to perpetual victimhood — unless we choose to be.

me trying and failing to keep up with the line dancing high schoolers ^

“cheat or be cheated on,” was just one of the many mantras that jarred me during this listen, as its casual callousness would not fly in today’s climate. yet, not too long ago, this ethos captivated millions of young women, all eagerly embracing permission to play dirty in a game long-controlled by men.

call her daddy’s messaging cast straight men as both a unified enemy and the ultimate prize, making the rules of the dating them anything but intuitive. to “win” this game, you had to watch their moves carefully, mirror their bad behavior, and often retreat before they got the chance to hurt you. the objective wasn’t to find love — it was to seize control by any means necessary.

“thank god we’ve moved past this,” i thought as i switched off the episode, ready to rot my poor brain some more on tiktok, “i think anyone would cringe at this stuff today.”

then, as i scrolled through my FYP, dodging video after video about detachment, red flags, ghosters, hinge horror stories, and a never-ending barrage of dating rules, it dawned on me — our collective dating paranoia hasn’t subsided one bit; it’s simply been rebranded.

straight women are at their wits’ end with dating (as are straight men, but that’s another story) so naturally, the market for hacks, tricks, and tips is hotter than ever. anything to ease the pain and frustration will suffice — i mean, anything besides not dating men.

despite recent trends in voluntary celibacy, man-hating rhetoric, and attempts to decenter men, it’s clear that most straight women are still heavily invested in finding a romantic partner. some say the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference — and we’re not seeing much of that.

so, how does one go about dating their enemy then?

with an abundance of caution and strategy.

today’s young women are approaching relationships armed with an arsenal of tactics to level out the playing field with their less-attached male counterparts. take the ick — a trend intended for women to chronicle the petty offenses that have caused them to lose attraction to a man, like running in flip flops or mispronouncing “gnocchi.” once a naturally occurring fate, the ick has now been repurposed as a tool to help women control their emotional attachment to a new partner.

dating influencer @tinx went viral for this video in which she recommends women keep an "ick list," cataloging any unattractive behavior a man displays in the early stages of dating. this way, when the power balance isn’t leaning in your favor, or if you dare get ghosted, you can remind yourself why you’re better off without him — even if so far, he’s been “really amazing.”

these hacks-for-staying-detatched come in response to the growing belief that straight dating is doomed — a philosophy conveniently peddled by the same creators who have just the hack for you. ;) while this mass pessimism is undoubtedly rooted in real, firsthand experience, it only intensifies as each viral video reinforces the need for new emotional protections.

even the most lighthearted dating discourse, like wemetatacme’s dating polls, can make a rational woman question if her defenses are too weak. each day, followers vote on whether a man’s behavior is a red flag, a dealbreaker, or no big deal, allowing the community to gamify his fate with just a snapshot of context.

this brand of scrutiny reflects a broader cultural trend in discomfort aversion, one which is prompting young people retreat to digital spaces to assess and mitigate the risks associated with unpredictable circumstances — such as those that inevitably arise when navigating a new relationship. to borrow from myself: “in these isolated and controlled environments, our mistakes can be made in private, our public images can be meticulously managed, and our personal boundaries stay comfortably in tact.”

dating apps like better in person epitomize this anxious surveillance. their tagline, “report every f**kboy you know,” calls users to publicly identify and flag men who’ve displayed bad behavior, offering a cautionary signal to other women on the app. this is just one output of a much larger trend in f**kboy policing, like are we dating the same guy forums and public tiktok takedowns like the west elm caleb scandal.

through this lens, men are reduced to one-dimensional archetypes — it’s inconceivable that a guy might flake on one woman then marry the next. instead, they’re defined as good or bad, a ghoster or a nice guy, a f**kboy or a husband. the assumption is that, with sufficient vigilance, you can categorize them and defend yourself accordingly.

while these safeguards can be a lifeline for anxious women who often find themselves outmaneuvered, they also discourage everyone else from embracing the real, messy experiences that are required to build real resilience. most of the dating advice being promoted today helps women understand why they should leave a relationship (which is critical since this option wasn't always available), yet there’s comparatively little guidance on how to stick around and build the kind of lasting connection that so many women still crave.

tiktok is rife with rules on when women should run from a budding relationship — like this widely circulated playbook from dating coach, anwar white: “if he’s not setting up a date once a week, you’re out of there.” “if after 2.5-3 months you’re not in an exclusive relationship, you’re out of there.” “if at 2 years you’re not engaged or married, you’re out of there.” with guidelines like these, coupled with a constant stream of new red flags to watch out for, women are armed with infinite reasons to detach.

the other half of today’s dating content is anxiety-inducing clickbait that makes the hacks-4-not-getting-hurt feel that much more necessary. each scroll unveils another reason to fortify your defenses — be it an influencer declaring, “you should NEVER trust a man,” or a midwestern mom inviting you to “get ready with me while i spill the tea on my husband’s 10 year affair!” just as quickly as a healthy couple’s engagement inspires a flicker of hope, a fresh scandal swiftly snaps you back on guard.

shera sevens, or as you may know her, “the sprinkle sprinkle lady,” is just one of the dating creators who has garnered massive reach by producing fear and value in equal amounts — a sharp echo of 2018 call her daddy. she’s built her brand upon the narrative that all men are cheaters, liars, and above all, unwaveringly self-serving. she urges her followers to stay emotionally removed and tactically resourceful in response. millions of young women revere shera as their supreme authority on dating matters, as her insights offer a sense of agency in the game they’ve been taught is rigged against them.

modern women have acquired hard-fought agency in other areas of their lives — they’ve earned degrees, they’ve secured six figure salaries, they’ve optimized their aesthetics to perfection — and naturally, they crave mastery over their love lives too. surely, they figure, if they delay their text responses just enough, stay on guard for every conceivable red flag, and remain cautiously unattached, they’ll eventually gain that coveted sense of control.

the very obvious issue is that emotional attachments can’t be gamified — at least not the kind that anyone wants. no amount of surveillance or strategy will manufacture a healthy relationship, and no tiktok guru can prescribe the exact formula each person needs to find fulfillment. having fallen prey to more than a few engagement-bait videos myself, it’s safe to say that every girl on the internet could benefit from trusting her instincts just a tad more.

these headlines practically write themselves, because they’re not just relatable — they're pressing. i mean, 73% of gen z reports feeling alone sometimes or all the time. 75% feel anxious about making phone calls. most young adults average 7+ hours of screen time per day. the kids are clearly not alright.

but while i was busy bemoaning how broken we all are and how our futures are totally f✨cked, i realized the internet doesn’t really need another think piece — it needs practical solutions.

so, rather than hopping on the alarmism bandwagon and cyberbullying my generation into touching grass (edit: i will likely still do this at a later date), i’ve compiled some tips in hopes they’ll be useful to a few gen z’ers grappling with loneliness and social anxiety in our super-strange-and-complicated digital age.

as someone who’s built a vibrant social life using these hacks and who is now widely described as “a pleasure to have at the function,” i can attest to their efficacy. i’ve also made sure to consult my happiest and most confident friends for actionable strategies on how we can all try to enjoy a less anxious, more connected life.

so, without further ado:

tip #1: the obvious stuff

let’s get this out of the way: brush your teeth, go to therapy, flex your youthful vigor on some old people at zumba — do whatever you can to feel and look your best.

there’s really no way to write about this that doesn’t feel unbearably livelaughlove-esque, so i’ll keep my message brief: you need to think you’re at least a little cool before other people will.

tip #2: lie to everyone and yourself <3

i was a painfully shy kid, and my mom loved to remind me of that — even years after i decidedly outgrew it. altering my self-perception was an uphill battle, and i imagine it’s especially tough to shake this label if you’ve been carrying it with you for decades.

if you’re a shy person who grew up on the internet, you’ve likely built your identity upon any range of trendy diagnoses — maybe you’re an INTJ, or a black cat girlfriend, or if you’re a millennial, “a smol awkward bean. 🥺”

if you find joy in keeping to yourself, then by all means, go for it. but if you have any interest in updating your identity, just lie! try mentioning to a friend, “yeah, i don’t have trouble making small talk,” or “i’m super comfortable showing up to parties solo,” even if both make you want to rip your hair out.

with enough reps of white lies, you’ll either convince your subconscious that these declarations must be true, or you’ll succumb to the pressure of becoming the person you tell people you are.

chanting positive affirmations in the mirror might offer a nicely-branded band-aid, but external accountability is a far more efficient motivator.

tip #3: make your hangs nonrefundable

imagine this: you were feeling particularly inspired one afternoon and decided to book a 6 a.m. yoga class. that morning comes, and you’re consumed by unfathomable rage at the idea of leaving your cozy bed, yet still unwilling to lose that $26 deposit. you show up begrudgingly — and leave feeling zen as hell.

if your longterm goal is to build and maintain fruitful relationships, apply workout class logic to your social life.

bailing on friends is more convenient than ever thanks to social media, where people have framed flaking as an endearing and excusable quirk. it’s quite easy to turn this into a habit when the consequences aren’t immediately apparent — until you scroll past a pic of your friends riding jet skis in costa rica and they say your invite got lost in the mail.

so, say a girl at that same yoga class asks you to grab a coffee, and you’re flirting with the idea of cancelling on her to binge the sopranos for the fourth time. welp, that’s too bad — you’re not allowed.

in the worst case scenario, you leave this coffee date with a drained social battery and 8 less dollars. mid case scenario, she shares a fun fact about about taiwanese monkeys that you can re-tell at a dinner party, or she ends up being your divorce lawyer in 20 years. best case scenario, you build a mutually fulfilling friendship.

getting to know someone new can be intimidating, and at times, quite awkward. but humans have been doing it for, like, 200,000 years now, so it’s safe to assume you’re not an anomaly. you were quite literally born for this.

tip #4: skip the small talk — be insane

hate small talk? alright, then ask better, more whimsical questions. here are some starter prompts:

• what job do you think you’d have as a medieval villager?

• which forest animal best represents your aura?

• (kiss), marry, kill any 3 U.S. presidents?

i’ve posed these questions to friends, uber drivers, strangers at the bar — pretty much anyone with functional vocal cords. you’d be surprised at the enthusiasm with which people craft their responses.

it at first feels taboo to break the unspoken rules of polite socialization, but it’s incredibly liberating to realize those standards were made up by old people with no swag. you can kinda say whatever you’d like if you say it with confidence and refuse to back down.

adults rarely allow themselves to feel silly and imaginative, so if you can be the person who encourages it, you’ll not only be appreciated, but probably admired. you'll also find strangers far more enjoyable once you realize their default scripts extend beyond chats about the weather.

if you think this advice is easier typed than done, pls refer to tip #5.

tip #5: dabble in identity theft

exercise: close your eyes and think of the most self-assured person you know.

let’s say it’s your cousin billy.

next time you’re tweaking about a job interview, or a first date, or a hangout where everyone went to school together and you’re conveniently left out of every inside joke, simply ask: WWBD?

try not to overthink this — just black out and snap into character.

most people weren’t born incredibly cool and socially-adept. like any skill, these require practice and fine-tuning. you’ll probably need to fumble at first to get to the fun part, but the only way out is through.

it’s extremely useful to remember that confidence isn’t some ethereal quality bestowed upon a fortunate few. if cousin billy can learn to navigate an uncertain social situation, there’s no reason you can’t do it too.

tip #6: ditch your desire to be mysterious

question for the class: which of these hits harder?

• a. “i thought you were so nice when i first met you.”

• b. “i thought you were so intimidating when i first met you.”

i bet a lot of you chose b. it’s okay, i did too. i fear that too many years of manic pixie dream girl discourse led us to believe that being hard-to-read is the highest form of flattery. unfortunately for us and zooey deschanel, this label is pretty useless in the real world.

curating the perfectly elusive public persona is an exhausting ordeal. it adds unnecessary layers of self-analysis and performance to the otherwise simple task of just chit chattin’.

not to mention, mystery has short shelf life. intimidating people might seem alluring at first, but they aren’t routinely invited to hang out. wanna know who is? good ol’ nice people.

so, next time you’re battling anxiety butterflies in a conversation, wondering what profound insight to share or how to perfectly time your next witty interjection, just focus on something much simpler: being a sweetie pie.

literally everyone loves smiles and compliments, and luckily, it’s pretty uncomplicated to give them out. even the most unbearable kindness beats an RBF, so if you’re stressing about how to come off just-the-right-level of nonchalant, default to being a ray of sunshine instead. 🌞

tip #7: be the gift that keeps on giving

in our individualistic hellscape of protecting your peace and not owing anyone anything, it’s easy to stand out by being someone who gives.

before anyone rage-comments that being generous is an exhausting, money-sucking, thankless act, pls save it for your diary. generosity can literally be as simple as telling a stranger you like their hat, or holding the door for someone, or texting your stressed-out friend a picture of a duck riding a horse and saying “us.”  

once again, social media has popularized the practice of ghosting friends for weeks on end when you're feeling drained, or disregarding any person who doesn't currently benefit you.

while we all need brief breaks from reality, next time you’re lost in hours of anxious doomscrolling, perhaps remind yourself that tiktok can’t play with your hair or pick you up from the airport — that’s what humans are for, and most are a 30-second text away.

sure, you’re not technically obligated to talk to cashiers, or spend money on your friend’s birthday dinner, or respond to your grandma’s calls, but to become well-adjusted and well-received, you do have to give a little.

bonus tip: it’s not only polite but socially advantageous to bring a little gift to a social gathering. it will help people remember you and open the door for easy conversation (extra points if the gift has an interesting story attached).

tip #8: flash those pearly whites

“just get off your phone and smile!”

you’ve probably heard this advice from a well-intentioned family friend or some instagram dating guru. i certainly have, and i always thought it was dumb. like, i’m really going to walk through the streets cheesing like a little freak?

the bad news is that this actually works. the good news is that it doesn’t have to be weird.

next time someone gets in the elevator with you, give them a quick dad smirk. or if you’re nervous to walk into an event, try smiling for the first 10 seconds after stepping through the door. you can go back to being nervous afterwards, but at least a few onlookers will have picked up on your confidence and good vibe.

as my favorite midwestern kitchen deco quote so eloquently puts it, “smile at the world and the world will smile back.” it’s incredibly on-point in both a woo-woo way and a tactical way. a few fast smiles can inspire a whole optimism-inducing chain of events.

i force a smile at a few strangers → i get some smiles back → i subconsciously realize that people mostly aren’t as evil as the internet makes them seem → the world seems a little nicer than before → i start to smile just ‘cause.

if you liked this, check out the next edition: a gen z guide to enjoying dating

i learned this firsthand when i shed my small-town roots for the sophisticated streets of manhattan, where i quickly realized my gossip girl binges hadn’t adequately prepared me to navigate high society.

my new, well-off peers didn’t flaunt their wealth with designer logos or private jet selfies. instead, they dropped subtle signals during dinner-table debates about which aman resort has the best amenities or whether soho house was becoming too plebeian. in this world, cultural fluency was the key to fitting in.

unfortunately, i’d already racked up massive opportunity cost having spent my childhood at olive garden when i should’ve been scarfing vanilla meringue cake at cipriani (rookie mistake).

i was ready to embrace my naivety as a charming quirk, until an unconventional lifeline emerged via an instagram post from @supersnake: a raunchy meme page dedicated to roasting the one percent.

what i stumbled upon wasn’t just a collection of silly memes; it was a masterclass on the language of the ultra-wealthy. under a thick veil of irony, these memes revealed which brands, restaurants, events, and even careers were deemed cool (more often, uncool) by rich kids around the globe.

i soon discovered that supersnake is just one player in an entire ecosystem of rich kid meme pages that are sneakily exposing — and ultimately shaping — the trends of the world’s most affluent.

through their witty roasts of high society culture, these meme creators, or as i’d like to call them, “affluencers,” have actually positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of elite taste. a single roast or endorsement can decide the prevailing trends of our time, as their aspirational followers regard them as the ultimate lifestyle authorities.

@laughlanding, for instance, posts rich kid starter packs to geographically map the lifestyles of the uber-privileged. each meme basically directs the wealthy on where they should be jet-setting, dining, and blowing through their trust funds — all with a cheeky nod to their own excess.

then there’s @thefakerothko, who satirizes rich kid archetypes like the miu miu-adorned social climber and the “struggling” bushwick artist who’s in therapy to learn how to gaslight women more effectively. baked into these razor-sharp jabs are endless insights into which clothes, careers, and behaviors might make or break your status as an aspiring gen z socialite.

their followers — primarily insiders who get it — consume these memes not only to affirm their belonging in high society, but to stay in the loop and out of nouveau riche territory.

take @gstaadguy, for instance, an affluencer whose high society parody account has garnered support from over a hundred members of the forbes billionare list. even he admits that his followers consume this content not just for lol’s, but to track and emulate whatever’s trending among the one percent.

it’s clear that rich kid memes transcend mere entertainment — they’re actively shaping the preferences and identities of the global elite. but what’s most fascinating about this exclusive internet niche is the tangled mess of contradictions that lies beneath the memes.

by both creating and circulating this satirical content among each other, rich kids are playing a clever game of status signaling, in which they can use ironic humor as a veil to freely flaunt their clout.

since these affluencers have built their platforms on mocking ostentatious displays of wealth, some cast them as critics of the one percent. but if these memes were really exposès aimed at shaming the ultra-rich, they’d probably be created by disapproving outsiders.

that, clearly, is not the case. these memes are created by rich kids, for rich kids. they’re more status symbols than indictments, offering the wealthy a way to display their social rank in a more subtle, creative fashion.

this is a clever move, considering the recent rise of quiet luxury and the #oldmoneyaesthetic, as well as gen z's pervasive appetite for eating the rich. in today's climate, toning down your opulence is both wise and on-trend.

so, rather than flexing your dior haul on IG, you can repost an ironic “rich guys in ibiza be like” meme, and signal to the world that you do, in fact, know what rich guys in ibiza be like. or you can comment your insights on supersnake’s “cringe model behavior at art basel” post, suggesting you’ve spent oodles of time around gorgeous women at exclusive events.

the genius of these meme pages is that the affluencers behind them are dining at the same trendy restaurants, partying at the same festivals, and rubbing elbows with the same crowds that they masterfully troll for a living. 

makes sense, right? the only way you could possibly deliver such surgically-accurate blows is if you’re intimately acquainted with the subject matter. clearly, these meme creators aren’t punching up or punching down. this is friendly fire. 

by building their communities upon this exclusive lexicon, they've created fortresses for the wealthy to laugh at their own excess amongst themselves — although it’s never really clear who’s in on the joke.

what do all of these internet micro-trends have in common?

they’re all turning young adults into hyper-optimization losers loners.

brat summer stepped onto the scene this may, boldly challenging the reign of her clean girl era predecessor. her cheap cigarettes and casual outings offered a thrilling release from 12-step skin care routines and overpriced pilates memberships.

however, now that charli xcx has officially declared brat summer over, it’s time to face reality: this whirlwind trend was but a mere fantasy for gen z.

considering our demographic is largely composed of moral purists who boast 9-hour screen times, we were obviously ill-equipped for the messy antics and ethical ambiguity that charli xcx built the brat aesthetic upon.

sure, millions of young adults blasted charli’s risqué music and posted about their wildest club rat aspirations; but more often than not, these fantasies played out indoors, watching DJ sets on tiktok under the warmth of weighted blankets.

brat summer wasn’t the first chaos-fueled trend to capture the gen z zeitgeist. each summer in our post-pandemic world, a new cultural movement emerges rallying for reckless abandon — feral girl summer in 2022, hot girl summer in 2023, and brat summer by 2024.

yet, despite the allure of rebellion, today’s twentysomethings consistently retreat to the safety of curated routines and self-improvement practices. in these isolated and controlled environments, our mistakes can be made in private, our public images can be meticulously managed, and our personal boundaries stay comfortably in tact.

when asked what exactly it means to be “brat,” charli xcx explained, “you’re that girl who is a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. she’s honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile. that’s brat.”

in this light, “brat” represents an escape from the self-awareness and perfectionism that social media natives have been shaped by. it’s a fantasy of living a carefree and unfiltered life — the kind we imagine we’d have if we’d reached adulthood in a simpler time.

the tension between our aspirations and our reality shined through as young people hopped on social media to air their frustrations about brat summer’s apparent flaws. “it’s classist.” “it’s ableist.” “it is NOT demure.”

in a now-deleted tweet, one X user lamented, “i’m kind of tired of all this tbh. is brat summer just about watching rich ppl have fun?” some gen z’ers were even shocked to discover charli xcx’s use of recreational drugs, despite the whole album being predicated on it. they’re pressed to believe anyone is still living so uninhibitedly in this day and age.

ever since our formative years of jersey shore binges and ke$ha club anthems, many gen z’ers have dreamed of the day they’d finally experience those electrifying nights out — only to reach legal drinking age and realize the club is not what it once was.

take @princess_milkyy, for example, who declared in this viral tiktok that the club is in its "flop era" and that she feels "ripped off" being young in a world that’s no longer fun. the comment section is flooded with similarly disenchanted gen z’ers questioning why we can’t seem to restore our nostalgic fantasies of wild, song-worthy club nights.

the unfortunate reality is that the world has changed pretty drastically since snooki’s days of getting crunk in the club.

fifteen years ago, the internet was a beacon of limitless potential. the american dream still felt within grasp, and pandemics were archaic phenomenons that only medieval peasants endured. things certainly weren't perfect, but there was an undeniable sense of optimism for the future.

now, as today’s twentysomethings enter adulthood in a world fraught with uncertainty and looming threats, many feel they’ve been cheated out of the coming-of-age experiences they once envisioned.

the desire for carefree, messy fun is clearly still alive, as evidenced by the viral contagion of brat summer, feral girl summer, and our deep fascination with Y2K party culture. yet, the opportunity to experience these moments ourselves seems increasingly out of reach.

so, we know a lot has changed politically, technologically, and economically since gen z came into adulthood, but haven’t our parents, grandparents, and millennial siblings faced similar shifts? they still managed to congregate, play, and stay up all night dancing… why are we the ones who landed in a party recession?

i’ve assessed dozens of theories from millennial club veterans, frustrated gen z’ers, and even proper researchers, but there’s no clear consensus.

• author and trends expert, william higham, thinks that helicopter parenting and media alarmism have rendered gen z too risk averse to party.

• podcaster and self-proclaimed clubbing revivalist @tinx thinks our FOBC (fear of being cringe) and more specifically our FOBPOBC (fear of being posted online being cringe) are holding us back from letting loose.

• user45332081 on tiktok thinks going out is just too damn expensive nowadays.

all of these factors certainly play a part in gen z’s party recession, but i think a deeper issue underlies them. gen z is the first generation to possess the luxury of avoiding discomfort almost entirely.

getting a story-like from your crush feels just as thrilling as approaching that cute girl across the bar — so why run the risk of rejection?

scrolling tiktok in bed provides just as much dopamine as a night out dancing with friends — so why spend your precious time and money?

alas, we succumb to the digital sedatives while alix earle goes out and has fun for us!

repressing our primal instincts is definitely helpful in some regards (like letting guys kill each other on call of duty rather than IRL), but becomes far more concerning when the instincts we’re repressing are human connection and playful spontaneity.

as gen z mourns the club’s untimely flop, we place the blame on social media, our parents, the economy — anything but our own loser-ish habits.

we may be up against some daunting challenges, but if we truly want the uninhibited experiences that our internet trends suggest we crave, it’s time to put down tiktok and step into the messy, unpredictable world that’s outside waiting for us.

references 💌

• the mainstreaming of loserdom

• Where Have All The Club Rats Gone?

• Gen Z is Abandoning Alcohol

• @itstrashtuesday on tiktok

A: by posting unhinged memes like these:

rajshahi indian restaurant has been serving shahi naan since 1988, but it wasn’t until the peak of a global pandemic that the family-run business exploded in popularity and amassed a cult following of gen z’ers across the globe.

arti sham, the restaurant’s owner, says she started experimenting with memes out of sheer, quarantine-induced boredom. it was only once the business’ instagram following suddenly skyrocketed from 1,000 to 25,000 that arti realized her post-ironic humor had struck a chord with gen z.

the most fascinating discovery upon joining rajshahi indian restaurant’s community (and i speak from personal experience) is discovering that the admin isn't a chronically online gen z intern, but rather a busy mother and business owner.

arti entered the meme game as a complete novice, admitting, "i'd seen [memes] around but i wasn't too sure what they were about."

it wasn't until a friend created the meme pictured below – sending her account traffic soaring – that she realized the untapped potential she might be sitting on.

arti's lack of experience makes her content that much more captivating, considering brain-rot memes like these require years of internet literacy and lore-building to produce effectively.

yet, she embraced the challenge with a playful spirit, experimenting with meme formats and even keeping a file of gen z slang to better engage with her new audience.

she stumbled upon a gold mine of engagement as her content started circulating among niche meme influencers like @northwest_mcm_wholesale and @dog_the_booty_hunter_69. dozens of similar accounts began sharing arti’s memes, and soon after, rajshahi indian restaurant was steadily gaining 3,000 new followers a week.

before arti and her family knew it, teenagers and twentysomethings were flocking from across the world (srsly, people have taken flights to australia) to get their hands on rajshahi’s renowned butt chicken, a dish that they quite masterfully meme-ified.

whether she realized it initially or not, arti got something right about gen z marketing: it's a meme or be meme'd world.

by transforming her brand into a meme of its own, she capitalized on the viral contagion that propels memes across culture. as the meme gained momentum, it catalyzed a community bound by a shared inside joke, which members eagerly engaged with and amplified.

remember, for instance, when gen z co-opted mcdonald’s grimace shake campaign and turned into a viral tiktok trend where people pretended the shake poisoned them? mcdonald's saw an 11% spike in sales – all because they let their brand get meme'd.

these examples reveal a critical insight for any brand trying to engage with gen z: rather than reflexively participating in our trends, brands should allow themselves to be a canvas upon which we can project our culture.

in a saturated landscape of brands vying for gen z’s attention and $$, humble players like rajshahi indian restaurant stand out. without the CTAs and trend-chasing gimmicks, there emerges a safe space for us to offer our support and engagement willingly, without it being taken through brute force.

big businesses must be especially cautious in the race to win gen z, as their allegiance to shareholder value makes any attempt at relatability feel painfully contrived.

i think most of my peers would agree that some companies (i’m looking at you, deutsche bank) could benefit from retracting the olive branch and simply maintaining their identity as boring institutions.

unless you’re down to get cyberbullied at scale, maybe just keep it profesh.

even a brand like SURREAL, a pioneer of eccentric gen-z advertising, is not exempt from our scrutiny.

the trendy cereal brand launched a series of poorly-designed billboard ads like the one pictured below, and while they were certainly successful in sparking brand awareness, the campaign still felt overly manufactured to many people in their target audience.

social media comments about the billboards ranged from, "knowing at least three higher-ups still had to approve this gives me the ick,” to “i don’t like corporations behaving as if they relate to the life experience of a working person or contribute to internet culture at all.”

as a result of of spending our formative years online, gen z'ers have developed a sixth sense for sniffing out digital BS. we’ve grown increasingly annoyed with big brands and their uninspired attempts to get in on our jokes.

the screenshot below says it best… we. are. tired.

so, what’s a brand to do?

it all boils down to authenticity – a LinkedInfluencer buzzword so chronically overused that it was named merriam webster’s word of the year. to truly act authentically, your feelings, words, and actions must align.

instead of chasing trends with the lifespan of a fruit fly, brands should take a page from arti's book: invest in a content strategy that prioritizes genuine engagement and a deep understanding of your audience. the result will get you a loyal community that stands the test of time.

so, you may need to sit out on a viral trend or two. you may need to set aside the crazy growth metrics and focus on genuinely engaging with your existing followers. and you may – no, you definitely – need to admit that your B2B SaaS company isn’t “demure”.

references 💌

• An Interview With Rajshahi Indian Restaurant On Instagram

• rajshahi_indian_restaurant on instagram

• itsneetie on tiktok

• eugbrandstrat on tiktok

• depravityland on youtube

  i hope you enjoyed this story! subscribe for more gen z insights (it’s free and will make me smile)🤠