“Historians will definitely skip our generation,” is a phrase commonly uttered in the TikTok comments under videos of Gen Z handling the trials of the modern world with elatedly unhinged energy. Think inflatable dinosaur costumes in life-threatening hurricanes, sunglass-clad selfie-taking as their childhood homes burn down, and questioning whether “World War III will affect the wifi” during conflict in the Middle East this summer. Proudly and prolifically, 13- to 28-year-olds dub themselves “the most unserious generation” to ever have inhabited the earth.
And can you blame them? Gen Z has inherited a hellscape of global turmoil. In the last quarter of a century, they’ve seen Roe v Wade overturned, an explosion of far-riight white nationalism, a global pandemic, world conflicts and the accelerating threat of climate change.
They could have reacted two ways. Panicked or laughed in the face of adversity. While more than a third of Gen Zers have turned to activism, aided by their online literacy, many more have opted to laugh rather than cry. And the reaction from everyone else? Widespread bafflement.
Trends often start with viral TikTok audios that become vocal stims – almost uncontrollably uttered amid normal conversations to the confusion of the rest of the room not in on the joke. (If you don’t know the significance of phrases including “I lost something once”, “It’s not clocking to you, I’m standing on business”, or “We cannot escape, we cannot come out”, this is you.) Before you know it, thousands of lip-sync videos, dances and remixes are made with the words. Endless entertainment to the chronically online – utter gibberish to everyone else. As intended.
This has all been brilliantly captured by a New York Times article that explains recent Gen Z trends can be dismissed as “twaddle” but are more like “gleeful obfuscation”. The point, the author says, is not to “get” it. The point is to not read anything that Gen Z does as beyond it all being just a bit silly.
And still, every time a new piece of slang emerges, adults rush to understand it. This desperation has seemingly led to an increase in impenetrable absurdism; The 6-7 trend, surrealist AI-animation Ballerina Cappuccina, and Alexey Gerasimov’s skibidi toilet YouTube series are all among so-called “brain-rot” terms of the year. But there is nothing to understand beyond all this nonsense being funny, distracting and addictive.
Of course, the internet has a term for this, too. Copium; A portmanteau of “cope” and “opium”. Users are surviving with silliness so successfully that it’s almost become a drug. “My personality is broken because one of my first thoughts when this happened was this is going to make a fire TikTok,” one person shared in a video captioned “copium” alongside a clip of their apartment flooding to the viral sound “I think I like this little life”. Again, you either get it or you don’t.
To be so relentlessly jovial in the presence of disaster is a form of strength in and of itself – and it’s this silly state of mind that makes Gen Z a club many Millennials are desperate to join, whether they fit the age demographic or not.
“I’m Gen Z,” Robert Pattinson – Hollywood’s most unserious lying leading man – tried to tell his Die My Love co-star Jennifer Lawrence while hooked up to a lie detector during an interview with Vanity Fair this weekend. He is, in fact, 39.
To be fair, Pattinson does have a Gen Z sensibility. Throughout his career, has been a source of willful silliness. Famously, in 2011, he told Matt Lauer in a live TV interview that he’d seen a clown die at the circus when “the joke car exploded on him”. He got so bored of questions about fame, he opted to start lying to recover from his fugue state. Other tales included being a woman’s hand model, taking a stalker out for dinner and shooting a coprophilia scene for Twilight that got deleted. “Rob being spiritually Gen Z really tracks for me,” young fans responded, welcomingly, of his chosen peer group.
Another honorary Gen Z is New York mayor Zohan Mamdani. The 34-year-old won votes not just through live debates and door knocking but viral TikTok series like Are you Okay? where he admitted there’s an old music video of him dancing topless in a halal cart that’s haunting him online. In the days leading up to his victory, Mamdani popped up on stage at numerous of the city’s nightclubs to engage young voters.
“Where so much is about struggle, it’s so important to have a space for joy,” he told the crop top-wearing crowd one night. A huge 78 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Mamdani. Change and cheerfulness; He was speaking their language.
