The millennials are not alright

Status reports from the formerly extremely-online

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

When your book just could have been an email. —Kate

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We all agreed J.D. Vance killed the pope the same way we still say Lea Michele can’t read. Where do these internet inside jokes come from, and what happens if they break containment? This is a really fun one, if I do say so myself!

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A photo I took of myself this morning

I’ve long thought that if you’re wondering what the internet is doing to Gen Z, just take a look at millennials. Even though I grew up on a very different internet than today’s 20-somethings, the anxieties and habits and hangups instilled in me are rooted in the same fundamental systems. The algorithms may have advanced and the mediums may have shifted, but ultimately we all are in some way fracturing ourselves into two, optimizing and presenting the online half for constant feedback while absorbing the internet’s relentless response IRL. Meanwhile, everything from our careers to our communities to our entertainment shifts ever further into these online spaces, making it increasingly difficult to ever opt out.

It has occured to me, as I have tried and failed and tried and failed to expand this thesis into a book, that maybe my real problem is what they call a “skill issue.” I was having a hard time articulating what I was feeling in a way that broadly resonated, and more recently have felt a little embarrassed for the two-year period of my life in which I was trying to pass off what was perhaps an individual struggle with being raised online as some kind of societal problem.

I still can’t say that’s not entirely the case. But last week, purely by coincidence, a handful of other long-term internet power users shared what’s become of them after 15-plus years of the same online exposure—and I finally saw my own experience reflected back.