This one’s for Kendra.
I don’t envy being a young person right now. I’ve drafted a good number of posts about how to work with Gen Z’s, or why and how the young people could be better motivated. Sure, fix them, and throw all sorts of solutions. But I empathize, because I don’t want to be where the late teens and young adults are at right now.
The need to succeed consistently is ever pressing. Just because the internet never forgets. In my generation, the internet only came about later and only for the richer people. Not everyone was posting, but everyone wanted to create their own spaces. There was a ton more individuality, with MySpace and blogs being the baseline. More blogs were made than being read, I feel.
But the current content production has pushed things to such an extreme. I see student work being such a high level, and therefore, a student can’t just be a student and try brand new approaches. Maybe there might be brand new approaches, but the algorithm doesn’t favour them. It favours what works, and unfortunately, as humans we tend to choose familiar over new most of the time.
Therefore, if someone doesn’t do well the first time, it just ends up being a mental hurdle to jump through. I personally did a lot of things for fun, and fun became my go to reason for doing something. Fun doesn’t exist so much now, because there’s not a lot of time to do fun things. The time spent to do a video should have been to make a great video, not a mediocre fun one. At least, that’s the tone that the majority of the world seem to be going towards.
I know there are a lot of smaller minority groups, and within these groups, there are new possibilities. I also know they are almost endless. But I know that indie is the new mainstream, and the obscurity level is now intensified even more. So if I want to stand out, I have to stand out so much more than everyone else. Sometimes, the only way to do that is to be absolutely viral, and that pushes people into behavioral extremes.
But sometimes all we wanna do is have fun.
So that’s why I think it’s tough to be a young person now. I would love to help as many people as I can to reclaim their fun. I know it takes time, but I just wish my best to share hope as much as I can. Hope for some fun, which is why I really enjoy Kendra’s zines. They are fun, and they hold Kendra’s hope. You should buy some hope, from Kendra. I’ll let you know when they’re ready for purchase.
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