“Trying to find your way as an adolescent can be difficult when your childhood was a protected cocoon, and you were always told not to care what anyone else thinks. Suddenly, it matters what other people think. Suddenly, you have to be an adult, and that’s stressful. Between student loans and tree houses, we’d all choose the tree house.” (Twenge, 2017, p. 30).
In other words: Adulting sucks.
An existential message dwells in that idea.
What does it mean to face reality as adults? To be a person experiencing anxiety, weariness, and fear of everything all the time because of the constant feeling of the world’s end?
The logistics and practicalities of making a living add challenges to adult responsibilities. In the middle of being physically and mentally strong to be productive, professionally qualified, balanced, competitive, socially acceptable, emotionally skilled, etc., adults live at the edge of being disposable and irrelevant. The effort to make a living is as complicated as it is the enterprise of being socially accepted, emotionally equalized, parentally adequate, physically healthy, communicatory effective, sexually active, etc.
What is the price of being an adult? To pay attention to oneself and focus on economic success and social validation. That trend starts early in the youth and continues to be present in young adults’ lives (Twenge, 2017, pp. 243-253). We should remember that current times are individually demanding. For that reason, we tend to be highly self-centered and selfish, using all our physical energy and cognitive resources to manage and respond to reality (Twenge & Campbell, 2009).
Every day, we must struggle against numerous motifs. Anxiety, competitiveness, rejection, self-doubt, material needs, contrastingly difficult gaps between personal views versus actual events, validation, social recognition, despair, weariness, depression, etc.
It can be added to that situation other risks collectively experienced. The cost-of-living crisis, natural disasters, extreme weather, erosion of social cohesion and societal polarization, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, political turmoil, etc.
In the middle of inward concerns and external challenges, how would we aspire to enjoy our lives here on Earth? Who will desire to grow up being aware of what is recently happening? “Maturity fears:” Young people are wise despite all appearances. They do not want to grow up. And they have good reasons to avoid that idea (Twenge, 2017, pp. 57-65).
§1
There is more than that at play within the adult becoming.
Online time and other media pollute everyday activities. Restricted to United States teenagers, it can be said that young people spend time using online apparatuses. How much time? “The short answer is: a lot. iGen high school seniors spent an average of 2¼ hours a day texting on their cell phones, about 2 hours a day on the Internet, 1½ hours a day on electronic gaming, and about a half hour on video chat in the most recent survey. That totals six hours a day with new media –and that’s just during their leisure time” (Twenge, 2017, p. 64).
Texting. Posting. Tagging. Listening to music. Watching videos. Taking photos. Sharing things: links, files, news, etc. Social networking refers to online activities inundating every corner of our lives. Why are we spending time on that? Compulsiveness and self-presentation are common motifs these days. Exposing the Self and the constant search for positive commentaries reveal something more than affirmation needs and personal interests. It shows changes related to time use (Twenge, 2017, pp. 73-74).
Her thumb [is] on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then, another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There's a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then '28 Things You'll Understand If You're Both British and American.' She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend's mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They're home. (Twenge, 2017, pp. 69).
It is true. We are always using devices without being aware of the reasons supporting that. Young people are contemporarily engaged in online activities. Adults are not getting behind, indeed. What does that mean? Shortly said: compulsiveness and self-presentation impulses reveal the difficulties of disassembling reality and simulacrum around quotidian situations.
Let us develop that idea.
§2
The Wanderer and His Shadow (Nietzsche, 2018). The idea of disappearance and the pleasures of loneliness are lost in the times of older generations. It belongs to old-fashioned cultural coordinates. Steppenwolf: A Novel (Hesse, 2002). Siddartha: A Novel (Hesse, 1982): those books are privileged examples of existential considerations made by those who wandered reality seeking incomplete answers to ill-stated questions about living, capability possibilities, and meaning –i.e., secessionists’ experience (Sloterdijk, 2013, pp. 109-190)
Those days seem gone.
Today, we share the same obligation of being connected to a constantly simulated and deterritorialized reality. More than that. The problem of meaning has relentlessly disappeared from the existential horizon of people –primarily young people– in favor of practical preoccupations around money, work, and the images of the Self. It is the contemporary chapter of income insecurity: Young people are more realistic than their predecessors in understanding their role in living as defined by economic needs instead of transcendental values -e.g., exploration, adventure, risks, etc. (Twenge, 2017, pp. 218-228).
That change in priorities is complemented by our attention to simulacra.
We cannot unplug ourselves. It is socially forbidden. The price is high if you do not obey. The screen-revolution refers to a dilemma: either you are plugged into the metastatic process of data proliferation and redundant dissemination of images, or you are deathly thrown up to the gray reality.
It is the mark of the times we live in.
Humans have fought to strip away the world's appearances in the name of direct access to the real. It was an expectation that we are trying to reach under the assumption that, even accepting that we cannot avoid the subjective and perceptual modeling of the real, it is possible to engage facts by a socially constructed ontology of the real (Elder-Vass, 2010, 2012).
At the same time, human lives are constantly mediated by images taking the place of the real. It is a paradoxical situation. And youngsters know that.
Harper, 12. She already has an iPhone and uses it frequently. Like many teens I talked with, she agreed that social media was mostly for posting positive things, requiring certain cultivation of one's image. "Normally, you don't want to look sad on there," she said. She uses social media mostly to follow her friends on Instagram: "If your friend is, like, out doing something, you can see all the cool things that they're doing," she says. "No one does anything bad on it –we just see what each other is doing." (Twenge, 2017, p. 69).
Kevin, 17. “I feel like we don’t party as much. People stay in more often. My generation lost interest in socializing in person –they don’t have a physical get-together, they just text together, and they can just stay at home.” (Twenge, 2017, p. 86).
I’m with you. But only virtually. Instead of meeting real people and going outside to explore, we interact, more often than not, virtually. “Those crazy friends who were perfect partners for doing silly things, gratuitously hanging out, drinking uncarefully, irresponsibly partying, etc., are getting replaced by contacts. A similar commentary can be made around other activities: working, studying, playing, etc. Virtualization is becoming a scenario to simulated activities replacing the real at a constant rhythm. It is not an absolute fact, fortunately. But it is getting more common. “’Some kids are too attached to social media and games to interact with other people that are actually next to them,’ explains Kevin. 'They make, like, the fake online friends. Some people, like, help cheer you up online, but you don’t really know them, so you can’t really have a deep relationship” (Twenge, 2017, p. 90).
§3
Reality is highly electronically mediated. That means the presence of things is being alternated with virtual objects as spectrums of entities overriding our sense of materiality and our capability to deal with the details of the living: nuances, imperfection, differences, becoming, temporality, etc. (Baudrillard, 1983).
Some quotidian examples can illustrate that.
If you can have people online, who wants to fight around the other person's preferences and mood, changes, stories, feelings, thoughts, etc.? Better a picture of a beautiful and strange person than the imperfect human in the morning undergoing anxiety, stress, uneasiness, etc. –doesn’t it?
Are books dead? Modern TV, informational apps, and social media can provide brief, vivid, and manipulated slices of opinion, often devoid of nuance, in contrast to the content of books. “‘We distract ourselves online with unimportant things, and we are always being ‘entertained,’ wrote Vivian, 22. ‘We have stopped looking at life and its deeper meaning and have instead immersed ourselves in a world where the big stuff people think about is how many likes they got on an Instagram post.’” (Twenge, 2017, p. 203).
Who wants to deal with an extended reading or a profound critic person questioning your beliefs and ideas if you can enjoy silly but funny images distracting you from hard existential inquiries? Better movies full of digital effects and rapid events than slow movies telling you things about suffering, human challenges, love, war, history, etc. Better a long list of popular songs than an album you must listen to understand what it is about thoroughly.
You can turn off your device if everything gets complicated, no doubt. You can swipe left or right if you do not like (or like) what you see. Ghosting: if you are catching feelings, you can disappear, pretending that person does not exist, of course (Twenge, 2017, pp. 81-84; 255-261). Things and persons have become consumable and disposable at a massive level.
You can choose a new Netflix series and go to YouTube and listen to music or dedicate your time to seeing puppies doing their thing instead of trying to talk to the person you love but makes you constantly reconsider what you say, think, believe, desire, buy, do, etc.
You can watch videos of people working out instead of going outside and walking, jogging, playing, or training your body until exhaustion.
“Okay, we didn’t work, and all memories, to tell you the truth aren’t good. But sometimes, there were good times. Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be starts for great wars like ours” (Díaz, 2012).
You can take photos of yourself and enhance them instead of facing the human, too human imperfections. It is easier to desire an image of someone saying the things you want to hear than to have uncomfortable conversations with someone who is not faultless and immaculate, but it would be there if you need it despite your defects.
It is easier to ask ChatGTP to resume your students' homework instead of reading them, commenting on their flaws, and giving them feedback they do not necessarily want to hear within a long and tense conversation. Do not care if you have to pay for that. You will have more time to go to the couch to scroll your device meanwhile the TV is on, with Netflix getting you suggestions that you will not attentively watch and check your notifications full of puppies' videos (again).
§4
People smell. People snore. People sweat. People are hungry. Sometimes, we can be happy. Occasionally, we can feel miserable. People can be lovely, or they can be mean. Your eyes can be beautiful. Mine can be weird. You can have a fantastic voice. I should sing only in the shower. I am a bit lazy. You are a hard worker. You can listen to me carefully. I can talk all the time about me.
Sometimes, your partner can sleep. Sometimes, it is challenging. Stress, boredom, homework, do-to-lists, unfinished tasks, job intricacies, money, health, news, social media, etc. Those things can have an impact on sleeping in everyone. And you share the bedtime with your own issues while your loved one is emotionally and mentally struggling with the mundane things that keep us up.
People are not as beautiful the moment they wake up as they appear in their photos or videos. You know you love your partner once you have kissed and hugged that person in the morning without having had a shower, got adequately dressed, brushed their teeth, etc.
People at home can be noisy. Or extremely quiet. It all depends on the mood. And you must be careful in reading that mood, risking being impertinent, unbearable, or unkind.
People sing. Or they can cry. People laugh. Or they can cry out. People have concerns. Or they can have motifs to work hard and be happy. They can have a beautiful moment at dinner. Some minutes before, they can be rude because you said something untimely.
Your partner can be a fantastic company to enjoy friends, places, situations, etc. Your partner can also represent a nightmare because they may hold you from your desires and decisions. “No relationship, no problems,” says young people these days (Twenge, 2017, pp. 242-250).
Marriage Story:
Being alive. Somebody needs me too much. Somebody knows me too well. Somebody pull me up short. And put me through hell. And give me support. For being alive. Make me alive. Make me alive. Make me confused. Mock me with praise. Let me be used. Vary my days. But alone. Is alone. Not alive. Somebody crowd me with love. Somebody force me to care. Somebody let come through. I'll always be there. As frightened as you. To help us survive. Being alive. Being alive. Being alive (Baumbach & Sondheim, 2019).
You get the picture.
Dealing with people and figuring out how to live is exhausting. Love is one of the most privileged scenarios to understand that situation (Illouz, 2012 and 2021). Humans are bewildering and arduous. The incarnated experience of living among others is demanding and constantly changes depending on spatial-temporal coordinates.
In contrast, being online saves you from all quotidian issues related to managing imperfect living beings because all you have is the simulacra of others –others that can be shut up as soon as they reveal themselves as complicated creatures living in challenging times. An image on a screen can be more colorful and manageable than its tangible counterpart: human, too human persons with all their all-puzzling lives.
The point is that interacting with actual events and people is demanding and requires effort and the ability to face our limits and mistakes critically. Indeed, social media protects us from the materiality of others and earthly experiences in favor of constant availability and conflict-less access to simulacra.
But the price at play is high.
It has been documented that social media causes unhappiness, loneliness, depression, and suicide attempts in adults and young people (Twenge, 2017, pp. 94-97). How can we understand social media promises that being online represents the ongoing connection with others online-ly able to pay attention to your actions, thoughts, feelings, etc.? Is that true? How is that affecting us? “I often feel lonely.” “I often feel left out of things.” “I often wish I had more good friends.” (Twenge, 2017, p. 99). Why is it so easy to feel lonely and sad if we can be, at the same time, constantly connected?
§5
It is essential to say that the argument here is not about ensuring the past was better in that it was more centered on reality than it is these days. We suggest that simulacra and individualism coincide completely within the contemporary digital environment. The following image completely catches the whole point:
Relationships generally conflict with the individualistic notion that “you don’t need someone else to make you happy—you should make yourself happy.” That is the message iGen’ers grew up hearing, the received wisdom whispered in their ears by the cultural milieu. In just the eighteen years between 1990 and 2008, the use of the phrase “Make yourself happy” more than tripled in American books in the Google Books database. The phrase “Don’t need anyone” barely existed in American books before the 1970s and then quadrupled between 1970 and 2008. The relationship-unfriendly phrase “Never compromise” doubled between 1990 and 2008. And what another phrase has increased? “I love me.” (Twenge, 2017, p. 256).
Simulacra install reality effects around everyone and everything. Another way to put it: it is the reality effect that accounts for the support of simulacra. Simulacra are not opposed to reality in that they are not strictly associated with entirely false representations of things. Instead, simulacra are affiliated with partially dematerialized scenarios of things that promote individualized perspectives constantly sustained on digital reproductions. The highly shared possibility of customizing all lives is not gratuitous. Simulacra can let us establish connections between us and things that are not necessarily produced in terms of material qualities and quantities. Simulacra are generated without hard references -i.e., objective facts, objects, and persons. No territory. No substance. No bodies. No events. No people. Just digital equivalences of reality: simulacra are not false representations but algorithmically generated simulacra whose material absence does not affect their possibilities of producing meaning and connection (Baudrillard, 1983).
§6
Thirteen-year-old Athena is on a roll, telling me about how she thinks technology has affected her generation. When she hangs out with her friends, she says, they are often looking at their phones instead of at her. “I’m trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look At. My. Face,” she says, emphasizing every word in the last phrase.
“They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking at their Apple Watch.” “What does that feel like when you’re trying to talk to somebody face-to-face, and they’re not looking at you?” I ask. “It kind of hurts,” she says. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation didn’t do that. I could be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”
Once, she says, a friend of hers was texting her boyfriend while they were hanging out in person together at her house. “I was trying to talk to her about my family, and what was going on, and she was like, ‘Uh-huh, yeah, whatever,’ so I took her phone out of her hands, and I threw it at my wall.” I couldn’t help laughing out loud. “You play volleyball,” I said. “Do you have a pretty good arm on you?” “Yep,” she answered.
[…]
At 13, Athena has not only never known a world without the Internet, but she can barely remember a time before smartphones. This is the only world she has ever known—yet she’s not sure she wants to live in it. (Twenge, 2017, 347).
§7
It is central for humans to appropriate the world by symbolic means. By exchanging meanings taking place as linguistical means, we engage reality. But reality must be there within the extended production and reproduction of symbolic means. The relation between language and reality is dead if one of the aspects at play disappears. Reality by itself is inaccessible. Symbols, words, sentences, images, etc., are inventions without ontological existence beyond their linguistic reality.
What contemporary people –primarily youngsters– seem to be aware of at the moment of asking for reality in contrast with the images of the world is a fascinating and disturbing fact: simulacra kill the real part of the symbolic exchange.
Because simulacra are founded on illusions, they depend on their own existence and logic. If you suppress the human task of deciphering reality, you will find symbols merely circulating and involving no more than other signs within an infinite and materially empty chain. Simulacra affect reality at the level of its disappearance. Simulacra do not reflect a profoundly diverse reality: images and data display their existence as created simulacra whose only requirement are their models and wide circulation and consumption. In that sense, reality risks becoming irrelevant as a supporting source of images and information. Even more, simulacra stress the non-need for a profound reality to establish its veracity. Between credibility and complete falseness, simulacra rely on their production and circulation. Who cares about reality if our images and highly shared information give us what we want: a pure simulacrum of a desired reflection of the things we want to see, hear, feel, and think that does not have to be necessarily related to reality to produce the desired effect we ask for it? Screens can display enhanced photos and information. Does it matter if they are true? What does it matter if images directly refer to the effect of a reality represented as a product we show as authentic as possible but improved simultaneously?
How is that indifference possible?
Simulacra are grounded on the non-veracity of facts. We can notice that every day. It does not matter if selfies represent people more or less accurately pictured. The apparent perfection of their lives and bodies counts by itself. It is similar to the data-effect: it is possible to describe reality by gathering data giving the impression that it works as the reality described. Charts, statistical information, briefs, etc., express quantitative graphics central to support informed decision-making processes. But everyone knows that it is critical to be careful about confusing graphics in statistics with reality at the price of interchanging Res and Qantas (Fyhrlund et at., 2005).
§8
“To simulate is to feign to have what one has does not have” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 3). The dessert of reality has no opportunity to be relevant in front of the divine irreference of images. At the moment of giving a massively accepted privilege to the generation of models of reality without necessarily being attentive to their real origin, we fall into the environment of simulacra –i.e., a regimen of radically deterritorialized information and a source of reactive passions such as depression, anxiety and loneliness (Twenge, 2017, pp. 350-351).
§9
The weight of the possible can be faced by choosing two extreme alternatives: in meeting the open, we can prove ourselves and explore the living. The old-fashioned European romantics found that alternative highly compelling. It gave them aesthetic and ethical motifs to consider life as expressing innumerable options that should not be wasted in the name of fear and illusions. Romanticism: A German Affair (Safranski, 2015). Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy (Safranski, 1990).
In the opposite direction, we can always find reasons to feel inadequate and frustrated because we cannot meet our dreams and get what we want in the ways we want. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Case & Deaton, 2021). It is too hard to succeed today. You have to study. You must excel in that. You have to pay money to study and hope you will find a well-paid job to cover the initial investment you made. At the same time, you have to struggle against the idea of always working –even if you are prepared to work extra hours if necessary.
Take Amber, 20, writing about her generation in what sounds like one exasperated breath: “If we want to have a successful life, we have to go to college, but college is really expensive, and we need to either take out loans or work full time in order to pay for it; if we take out loans, that is just going to make our future more complicated and stressful so we try to get a job but most well-paying jobs you either need experience or an educational background, so we are often stuck in a minimum wage position, with part-time hours because our employers don’t want to give us benefits, which means we still have to take out loans.”
You can start your own business and be your boss. It seems a good idea. But entrepreneurship represents high pressures: the possibility of failure is constantly present. If you have loans to pay, getting a job is preferable. What other option may be –living in your parent’s house until you get old? “A stable job means secure income, being able to buy the things we want, and feeling safe,” says Kayla, 22, who is a week from graduating with her degree in nursing. To her, stability does not include starting your own business. “We saw lots of businesses failing in the last decade or so,” she says. “I don’t want to be living out on the streets. And neither does anyone else.” (Twenge, 2017, p. 225).
Practical preoccupations are more relevant today than the ‘You can be anything’ and ‘Follow your dreams’ of a generation of romantics. To study. To work. To pay bills. To be successful. To have fun. To be safe. To be enjoyable at the same time. To be online. To be actively online and get attention. Those are demanding activities, no doubt. But those activities signal something more: an increasing sense of individualistic concerns and security requirements precisely in a moment when people are more aware of the uncertain condition of living.
Can I make it? Answers to that question are not clear. Moreover, that question can represent an unbearable weight for those without social opportunities –e.g., education, security, health, family support, etc. So, it makes sense to consider simulation as a better option. Falsely but comfortably, simulacra materialize elusion gestures usually preferable to human beings and hard facts. It can be pathologically assumed, but it is well-known that the delirious is a very reasonable alternative if you do not have the ontological scenario to become accepted in the real world.
References
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