A cardinal sin of our generation, or so I’m told, is our incessant need for instant gratification — in other words, our addiction to digital technology. We spend our lives scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Yik Yak, Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Uber, Lyft, Woofer, berniesanders.com and ISIS, just to name a few places. But it seems we rarely spend enough time with those we truly care about.
I don’t believe almost anything I’ve just told you — and I’m fairly certain Woofer doesn’t exist — but this half-baked critique of millennials is the sort of thing I’ve heard from various baby-boomer-aged high school teachers, Elite Daily writers, anonymous graffiti artists, etc. But I do say half-baked because there is some weight to these arguments, if only to a degree.
I’m sure most of us undergraduates are all familiar with this complaint from our parents: “When you’re with us, you spend too much time on your phone.” And what I’ve inferred from the annual Father’s Day and Mother’s Day social media posts is that everyone feels their parents are, at the end of the day, the people they love the most, their constant source of motivation and their reason and inspiration for following their dreams, right? And I’m sure — and not condescendingly this time, I promise — there is some part of us that admits we should spend a little more time talking with them, that the time period of sharing a roof with our parents has vanished and, sooner than we’d like to think, our parents one day will as well.
I don’t mean to be morbid; we all die. But I’d like to point out how this is one of many examples where, faced with the overwhelming knowledge of the precious and finite nature of existence, we make time for Facebook, a website very few people admit to enjoying.
But just as my column attempts to reach no further than the intellectual depth of a Banksy installation, I’ll mention I digress.
What is always lacking in this type of analysis of millennials is a recognition of human complexity. It’s as though cultural commentators, even within our own age group, believe millennials are happy at most with a “Most Likely to Improve” trophy and a hot match on Tinder. The question that has rarely been posed is, “What makes a human spend hours in the digital dimension, one that isn’t real in a physical sense?”
The fact that this question has never been asked is the reason why so many record companies are baffled by the recent spike in vinyl sales — after all, why would millennials buy something physically that they can already steal digitally? Or why, in a potentially awkward position, do they immediately reach for their phones? Has it ever occurred to culture critics to ask why millennials spend more time on their exes’ social media pages than they’d like to admit, or why they’re so eager to exhibit their perfect romantic relationships online?
A little bit of the reason, I imagine, is neural wiring — the part of the human brain that determines long-term benefits is farther away from our eyes than the center that registers immediate pleasure — so we use social media in lieu of doing work. Some of it, I assume, has to do with the social nature of primates — we may constantly interact through computers to stave off a feeling of loneliness. Perhaps evolution has favored a sort of narcissism that becomes enhanced through social media. But really, I should stop pretending I can describe the reasons why humans are so drawn to digital technology in 720 words or less.
The notion of being a member of a generation was imposed on millennials; I have very little in common individually with the person in the library sitting across from me aside from age, university affiliation and, in this case, gender. In many ways, I have just as much in common with a 90-year-old man glued to his FM radio.
Neel Bapatla is a UF English sophomore. His column appears on Fridays.
