The first disembodied generation

Our lives revolve around technology these days, whether we like it or not. Even if we don’t work in a tech-y field or care much at all about the latest technological developments coming out of Silicon Valley, our lives are shaped by digital advancement.

Take the way we communicate. It’s so different from when I was a kid. Video calling? That was something futuristic. Unheard of. Now my kids talk to their grandparents on FaceTime every day.

If the internet was a one-way street, the Zoomers wouldn’t be much different from us. If it was basically super-TV, their emotional calibration would be recognizable.

Email. I didn’t have one until a couple of years into high school. I remember when we had dial-up. No, I remember when we got dial-up! My parents had one email address, and they checked it every week or so.

Of course, we can’t forget texting. We carry on conversations with 10 different people all over the country. Or maybe all over the world! We also have social media. What is that? Imagine telling yourself about X and Instagram in 1992. What a world this is.

Zooming ahead

The profound impacts of technology are so great, and we are constantly in the midst of it. I’m not sure there’s enough time to stop and really realize how it’s changed both our world and us. It’s changed us all, not exactly for the better. But I think it’s changed some more than others, and I think it’s changed Generation Z (the Zoomers) the most.

It’s hard to get my head around the Zoomers. I know them, I see them, I hear them, but I can’t quite understand them. There's something profoundly different about them, beyond the usual generational gaps: the music, the language, the clothing, the general aesthetic sensibilities. It’s something deeper in the way they think and, most importantly, feel.

All generations have a spirit that isn’t so easily understood from the outside. It’s the logic of the time in which they were brought up, the essence of the world at that moment in history. Sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint direct connections between economic realities, global conflicts, collective anxieties, broad societal changes, and how a generation is, for lack of a better word.

The Zoomers have that too, of course. It explains some of who they are, but not all. At a deeper level, the real difference between the Zoomers and the rest of us is technology — and how they and their feelings were shaped by technology.

Emotional calibration

The emotional calibration of the Zoomers is different from ours. All of us — Boomers, Millennials, Gen X’ers, and any of the Greatest Generation that are still alive — were emotionally calibrated offline. Even if we have since embraced the technological world with open arms, even if we are just as plugged in as the Zoomers are today, the way we emotionally relate to others and the world as a whole was shaped offline.

If the internet was a one-way street, the Zoomers wouldn’t be much different from us. If it was basically super-TV, their emotional calibration would be recognizable. They might have 50,000 channels to watch instead of 35; they might have digital access to every book in the world rather than going down to the library just to brow a few thousand old titles; but our difference would be merely a matter of degree.

8 billion ways to cry

But the internet is not super-TV. It isn’t a one-way street. It’s not even a two-way street; it’s an 8-billion-way street. It’s another world, and it’s the world they grew up in. The real thing that altered the emotional calibration of the Zoomers was extremely early exposure to social media, comment sections, algorithms, and pervasive anonymous interaction.

It’s profound, fascinating, and sad. I don’t think I can begin to accurately explore what all the implications are. I don’t think I can actually explain it, really. I don’t think any of us can. Only Zoomers can do it, but they would also need to be self-aware of all these facts, historically literate, emotionally robust, psychologically fearless, and with a real, strong sense of the worlds before them and what they actually were. That’s a tall order for any generation.

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Different cement

I don’t know how to explain all the ways the Zoomer’s emotional calibration is different. But I can feel it, and you can too. And I know the reason. It’s the technology. The social aspect of the internet shaped a different of kind of emotional base for them.

Can it be reversed? I don’t think so. I think they will forever be different from us. Even when they get older and enter more mature seasons of life, they will remain different. The foundation was poured with different cement.

This is why they are, somewhere deep down, something of an enigma to the rest of us. We were raised in an embodied world. The Zoomers were raised in a disembodied one.