Average Internal Dialogue from an Old Zoomer (Troost)

Scrolling through these headlines - coronavirus, tornadoes, hornets, locusts, a fascist in the white house, the relative calm of my personal life has never taken on such a sinister edge. And yet, I have expected some armageddon-esque global catastrophe to happen for a long time. Maybe not so soon. I still have to remind myself: extreme poverty, famine, attrition, and persecution have remained more or less reliable components of human existence. The weird calm in my own life then seems, I guess, more and more like The Truman Show. The question remains of what ​"out" looks like, and whether there are a director and producers to face.

The higher the death count rises, and the longer my family and friends are able to remain calm, the more ​I ​ remain calm, the more I am pulled back in time. When I was twelve, I had an emotional breakdown at the realization that climate change was, most likely, not going to stop. Since then, I’ve had a lot of time to make peace with the fact we will most likely run ourselves into the ground. ​Us, ​ not the socioeconomic elite, not the two hundred countries controlling forty percent of the world’s wealth, not China, not the police, not Trump. Us, as in all of us who turn our heads away. It’s too much. Since that moment, facing the slow deconstruction of societal stability has been much easier. But should I have accepted this? Responsibility is a slippery concept.

What I do know is that screens have had major influences over my upbringing (no offense to my parents), and I have learned to look at reality through a numbing and distancing window. My generation, exposed hundreds, if not millions, of times more intensely to crimes and catastrophes, has been traumatized to numbness. I have noticed a repeated shortcoming of my own generation, which is to assume we are morally inept. Some of us may be, but I don’t think this is the case for the majority. Rather, current events have kept more of us struggling with mental health than meets the eye, and the immensity of all the problems we learn paralyzes us like a deer in headlights. I have faith many of us will create emotional survival strategies eventually. The generations before us, who have personally faced food shortages, intense recessions, far more violent discrimination, and a host of other obstacles, have done it. Why can’t we.

Since March, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat have all become overt battlegrounds, and our real selves have mistakenly breathed life into the rhetoric. On the screen, we see our shared limitations to political fervor (post and be done,) and shared wild hopes for a more radically just society. But these reflections don’t go away when we put our phones down. We go to bed spinning over it. This online duality comes off to me less as a reflection of our truer selves, but more as a funhouse mirror or Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised. We see twisted, disagreeable, and fiercely desiring sides of ourselves, and convinced of our individual monstrosity, allow our online personas to bleed into our breathing ones. I think much of this blending will most likely be recognized and separated; many of us have already stepped away.

I think a big factor in this has to do with how much of our lives are invested in communication platforms that are still learning how to behave. Maybe if we use social media less for entertainment (not that it should be erased) and more for substantive communication, our common sense of etiquette will evolve. As I said before, this is already happening. We have posted less and called each other on a more regular basis. Several friends have told me that the police brutality riots, Trump’s recent antics, and general coronavirus reactionary posts have scared them off of their favorite platforms. They don’t want to identify with it any more, and instead want to live more cooperatively.

A reason I think divestment from social media will happen on a wide scale is how intensely communicative our generation has become, and how intensely reliant on others’ perceptions we have become. In many situations, this is a good strategy. We often don’t have enough information to understand a concept or event adequately, and other people’s viewpoints can be helpful. Trusting others for advice makes us more receptive to ideas we may otherwise not want to consider, whether an article or a heartfelt conversation, and we become more likely to retain what we absorb. When other people start to share how disillusioned they have become with social media, it becomes much easier for us to recognize this feeling in ourselves.

What I worry about though, is that many of us still trust others to determine our sense of urgency. This is part of why we achingly turned to celebrity twitter, The NYT, Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, The Guardian, our friends and family to figure out what we should do. For too many of us, the final decision to not act is not our own. We see how many others struggle, and normalize how much pain we are in. We don’t see a better alternative. Others have not found it, so it must not be there. But justice is not a sasquatch. We ​cannot ​ trust others to decide for us when is the right time to rise to the occasion. We must participate in our society, and like the communicative beings we are, inspire others to decide for themselves to contribute. This, I hypothesize, is one of the big lessons for my generation.

Casey Troost is a rising junior studying social science at Oberlin College. In her spare time, she likes to read, write, and apply for internships. The last item was a joke. Her Goodreads records are about as homogeneous as America, and she cannot stop wondering why the people she meets are so strange.