I read a post from a Gen Z writer Freya India that was equal parts thoughtful, poignant, and painful to read. Here are a few excerpts.
There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
But perhaps the best example of anemoia is the popularity of ‘90s high school videos, like this one trending on TikTok. Or this one on YouTube, with millions of views, captioned “Phones? No. We had each other.”
This video has nearly 30,000 comments, some from Gen Xers nostalgic for their ‘90s youth—but many from Gen Z, aching for a world they never experienced. Older generations might dismiss this as teens wanting to be different and reject modern culture, as they often do. But the comments reveal something deeper:
“The whole concept of a real ‘childhood’ is completely out the window at this point in time and that’s extremely sad to me. Btw I’m 15, born in 2003.”
“I’m 20 years old so I wasn’t even conceived at the time of this video but it leaves me feeling empty. My highschool experience was nothing like this. I remember short bursts of people living in the moment but EVERYTHING revolved around our phones, Snapchat/Instagram status. It almost makes me angry because I’ve never had simple straight forward interaction as shown in this video. Even looking at people in the background, they are completely present and not buried in their phones. Everyone seemed a lot more social. I’m jealous of millennials/gen x, yall experienced a golden time to be young and free.”
“As someone who graduated in 2015 this looks like such a nice time. Not a phone in sight. People actually talking face-to-face. I wish I could have grew up in an era like this.”
There were hard times, of course—the ‘90s weren’t all bliss; no era is. But the world we inhabit now is so markedly different. New technologies cheapen and undermine every basic human value. Friendship, family, love, self-worth—all have been recast and commodified by the new digital world: by constant connectivity, by apps and algorithms, by increasingly solitary platforms and video games. I watch these ‘90s videos, and I have the overwhelming sense that something has been lost. Something communal, something joyous, something simple.
I am grieving simple joys—reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours—where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained. I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news––a moment in world history––without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected.
But I never knew it. Maybe briefly, as a child. But most of us in Gen Z were given phones and tablets so early that we barely remember life before them. Most of us never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram. And the freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while without the pressure of Read Receipts and Last Active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing stupid likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.
Now, the next generation? Gen Alpha? I can only imagine the loss they will feel. They are on track to never know friendship without AI chatbots, or learning without VR classrooms, or life without looking through a Vision Pro. They are being born into a world already anxious and atomised. My guess is that one day they will find family photo albums and hear stories about how their Millennial parents met and be hit with anemoia.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give future generations a real-world childhood. We can prioritize play. We can delay entry to social media platforms until at least 16. We can encourage young people to just hang out with each other, without supervision and without smartphones. We can take elements of childhood from previous eras and re-introduce them in modern life. But we have to remember what has been lost. When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the phone-based world that degraded them.
We have to start somewhere. I suppose what I’m asking for here is some sympathy and a little more grace. It’s easy to mock Gen Z and Gen Alpha for their soaring screen time, to roll your eyes at teenagers wasting their youth in their rooms, ruminating about themselves, and feeling hopeless about the future. But they are trying their best to keep up with a world so agonizingly different from any before it—and it is the only one they have ever known.
So please. Next time you cringe at Gen Z for not coping, for not feeling cut out for this world, remember how painful it is to think that the good times are over. Then imagine how much more painful it would be to realize you never knew them.
