Why is Gen Z obsessively creating content?
I am 23 — a Gen Z kid. I open LinkedIn and thousands of kids my age (oh wait, we are young adults now aren’t we?) are calling ourselves content creators.
Copywriters, digital artists, graphic designers, content creators, vloggers, bloggers. Whatever.
Especially since the pandemic started, creation of online content has boomed. I mean what else are we supposed to do? This is the only way we connect to the world. This is us saying –
Hey! We existed.
We were alive during 2019–2021.
We were real.
This is us going back to the most primal form of human expression — art. WritingDrawingMusicTikTokDancingPodcasting are all just art. What else are they, if not art?
About a hundred years ago, a generation of young people faced something similar. They lived through a pandemic just like this. Many of them came of age during that pandemic.
Unlike us, they couldn’t reach out to the world in an instant. But like us, they found solace in art. Absurd art for their times. As absurd as our dancing TikTok girls.
In a world devastated by a great war, disease, poverty, and hopelessness — beauty arose.
Jazz, the roaring 20s, the flapper movement, The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, surrealism, dadaism...products of a post-pandemic world.
That was a generation telling the future that it existed. These movements were a literal and metaphorical hello to life and a fuck you to death.
And that is what Gen Z is doing now. Many of us saw our families die. Some saw our friends die. We missed our graduations — important rituals for us. We had our dreams put on pause for an indefinite time.
An entire generation is grieving and traumatized from collective loss.
So we cope with memes. And dancing to words on Instagram reels. We cope by touting the benefits of posting daily on LinkedIn. We cope by creating content, ebooks, comics, anything. We cope with clubhouse talks.
This is us reaching out and holding each other’s hands through a digital space.
Even if we don’t survive this, the digital imprints of our content creation immortalize us. Until we see the next sunrise, this is us clinging to life with all the stubbornness of youth.
