Gen z

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.

If you ask anybody under twenty about their life plan, social media will likely play some part in the answer. A friend’s nine-year-old son has just launched his own YouTube channel. My prepubescent cousins are telling their parents that TikTok is “the key to financial freedom.” When I was their age, my entrepreneurial skills went as far as selling single cigarettes to my classmates for loose change. The appeal of the influencer life isn’t hard to understand. Over the last decade, it’s been touted as the sexy, well-paid, democratic career of the future. A 2019 Morning Consult survey found that one in ten young people consider themselves “influencers.” But now these micro-celebrities are trading in their tripods and ring-lights for real jobs.

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience. Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in the United Kingdom, tweeted, “A new, large study on long covid in children using Danish registry data has some very reassuring findings.

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic catalyzed a startling personal revelation. As a begrudging student of Zoom University, I came to the realization that a college degree might not be worth it. Pre-pandemic Rikki was a dutiful, head-down student at New York University with a 4.0 GPA and her eyes set on law school. But when the world locked down in the middle of my sophomore year and my university still demanded full tuition for virtual classes, I began questioning everything. Although they certainly made a valiant effort at remote teaching, most of my professors proved too technologically inept to coerce twenty-five despondent teens to attend 8 a.m. Zoom lectures about medieval feudalism.

East Austin is a Proust’s madeleine of a neighborhood: picture a zombified resurrection of Brooklyn’s 2000s Peak Hipster moment with a veneer of Instagrammable gloss on top. If an aging millennial cast a spell that encased just under ten square miles of Texas in a bubble made up of his happiest memories, this would be the result. Williamsburg, NYC circa 2008 was, as the zoomers now say, a whole vibe. Except that the zoomers did not say this, not then, because they were still in diapers. This was a millennial moment: we were still in our twenties then, clad in American Apparel-brand basics made of cotton so thin it was practically transparent, not yet cursed with middle-aged pudge. The millennial infestation was thickest on the ground in gentrifying Brooklyn.