Generation 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.

Between the deranged cancellations still roiling online life the Muskification of Twitter, and the undead nature of the Donald Trump-attention economy, there is no shortage of legitimate matters to depress someone like me who cohosts a podcast about internet bullshit. And yet for some reason, I’m fixated on an insignificant issue: LOLflation. The majority of you know what “LOL” stands for: “laughing out loud.” What it’s supposed to mean, when communicated via text or direct message or (less often) email, is: you just wrote something funny enough that I physically laughed. This is touching not just because it’s flattering to make someone laugh, but because it temporarily breaks the spell of the online world.

There was a viral tweet last year that read, “do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam?” The answer is a resounding yes. As bad as regular modern dating is, it’s that much worse for celebrities. In early June, actor Jonah Hill had a baby with his girlfriend Olivia Millar. About a month later, seemingly out of nowhere, his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady posted screenshots of text messages from Hill from back when they were dating, accusing him of emotional abuse. Hill has moved on but twenty-six-year-old Brady has quite clearly been unwilling and unable to do so. The couple met when the actor slid into the direct messages of the surfer on Instagram, striking up a conversation.

Everybody wants to be beautiful, but very few people are. Think across the entirety of history. Empress Sisi, Cleopatra, Ginger Rogers, Jane Birkin. You could probably count the number of actually beautiful people on ten fingers. A lot of people are good-looking or fine. But beautiful is rare. Along with everything else that Generation Z feels entitled to — success, feeling heard, holding people responsible for their ancestral guilt — they also insist that we recognize their beauty (whether they have it or not). Their Instagrams are filled with beautifully taken photos, with beautifully poured lattes, on a beautifully curated grid. It doesn’t matter if they look like Shrek because it’s all done so damn beautifully.