Gen Z’s Sacred Discontent: Reclaiming Forgotten Selves and Humanity in a Commodified World
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
We urgently need to have a societal conversation about Gen Z and social media—what it’s doing to them, and what we’re letting it become. Yesterday, I caught an NPR segment—now lost to me—that wrestled with this very question: Do we need rules—personal, ethical, structural, societal—around social media use? I say yes, and not just for youth, but for all of us.
As someone grounded in Cultural Studies and policy, I often justify my own media consumption—my daily dives into social platforms and even this blog—on the basis that staying informed, particularly about Texas and national politics and policy, as part of my scholarly and civic responsibility. But I’m also reflecting more and more on what’s being extracted from us in the process—our time, our attention, and increasingly, our sense of self.
Today, I came across a Reddit post from three years ago that captures this generational dissonance with chilling clarity (r/nosurf, 2022). I’m sharing it below because it deserves to be preserved. The post’s title—“Social media has dehumanized humanity and has destoryed the original thought process”—initially appears to contain a misspelling. But on closer reflection, “destoryed” may well be intentional: not a typographical error, but a poignant neologism. It suggests more than destruction—it implies a loss of narrative, of coherence, of self. “De-storied.” That’s the condition of a generation trained to curate and broadcast their identities through platforms that extract, distort, and erase. And that, I believe, is worth thinking about.
It aligned with the NPR conversation with a young artist who shared that in the music industry, there’s an expectation to post five times a day—not to express one’s art, but simply to be seen. He spoke of social media as dehumanizing, turning participants into unwitting addicts. He and another young woman spoke of how social media splinters the self, turning moments of meaning into consumable fragments, turning what should be a good life into labor, and attention into currency. She noted the irony of how creativity is suffocated in the process.
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| Source: https://tinyurl.com/52998ptb |
These testimonies mirror the profound concerns raised in the Reddit post, which reads less like a rant and more like a manifesto on what we’re losing: our inner lives, our original thought processes, our relationships, our attention spans. It mourns the collapse of interiority—the “room of mirrors” effect—where we project ourselves into an infinite hall of curated images, until nothing remains but reflected fragments.
In contrast, true creative recovery requires stepping outside the algorithmic grind and into the rhythms of embodied life—walking barefoot on grass, reading books for no reason other than joy, connecting with people in real time and shared space, nourishing the self in ways that cannot be tracked, monetized, or optimized. These are not indulgences; they are quiet, radical acts of resistance.
As I reflect on these ideas—especially the haunting Reddit post lamenting how social media is "destroying civilization’s original thought process"—I’m reminded of the Aztec concept of teotl, the sacred, animating force that flows through all existence. In a balanced life, our metaphorical cup should be filled with teotl every day. This is the path of purpose, where we align with our creative life force and find fulfillment not in metrics, but in meaning.
Looking back on my own digital presence, I see my blog—now two decades old—not as part of that machinery, but as something closer to an archive of resistance and care. It also feels like teotl, a special purpose I have in this life.
Without teotl, there is disconnection—from self, from spirit, and from community. But with it, each post becomes more than a reflection; it becomes an offering, a replenishment of something sacred in a world that often forgets what is sacred. In this way, the blog has never been about performance, but about presence—about honoring memory, truth, and the slow and patient labor of sustaining hope.
When I launched the blog in 2004, I wasn’t chasing “likes” or followers. I was driven by a deeper purpose: to share critical information, to bear witness, and to leave behind a digital record that others could learn from and build upon.
Long before the cloud, I ran a listserv of over 700 people for seven years in the early- to mid-1990s. But each time my computer memory filled up and crashed—a fate that befell me more than once—I lost everything. Those moments were devastating, but they taught me something invaluable: that knowledge needs a home. It deserves to be preserved with intention, not left to vanish in the ephemeral scroll of the feed. My blog became that home.
In a moment when online platforms are increasingly co-opted for data extraction and ideological control, my blog resists commodification. My intention is to affirm what it means to speak from the margins and to archive justice, not for virality, but for dignity, intergenerational continuity, and liberation.
That some pieces get widely read and shared is gratifying, but it is never the goal; rather, it is a testament to the power of collective truth-telling and the deep hunger for narratives and scholarly and intellectual analyses rooted in love, memory, and resistance.
We must ask: What does it mean to be human in an age where every thought, every laugh, every experience is filtered, compressed, and served back to us for profit? What becomes of the self in a system that rewards visibility over authenticity, virality over vulnerability? In such a world, the soul risks erosion, hollowed out by constant performance and disconnection.
And so, we are called to remember. To return—intentionally, reverently—to teotl, the sacred animating force that reminds us of who we are beneath the noise. This is not merely a cultural gesture, but a spiritual imperative: to invoke the divinity within, to reclaim the depth of being, and to root our lives in something more enduring than an algorithm or a curated persona. In doing so, we resist the flattening of our identities and thus, our humanity, and affirm a way of living that honors the memory of community struggles, the wisdom of our ancestors, and the sacred responsibility to carry their dreams forward.
The answers to this conundrum we find ourselves in aren’t easy. But the questions are urgent. Well-being and mental health are at risk. It’s time we started asking them—together.
Reference
r/nosurf. (2022). Social media has dehumanized humanity and has destoryed the original thought process [Post]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/zmfcvu/social_media_has_dehumanized_humanity_and_has/
Systematic digital capture, synthetic programming, and superficial content. Web 2.0 its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and have rendered Gen z into an unconformable and "connected" social machine. They have greatly increased connectivity but they have destabilized society. Social Media, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering, and have inflicted severe damage and disrupted the continuity of the original thought process for Gen z.
The continued development of algorithms and Web 3.0 will worsen the already collapsing situation. It will certainly subject people to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on future generations. It has already led to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering. Web 2.0 and Its future counterparts will survive and evolve to an extreme form of parasitic and interconnection. Sites like TikTok, short video feeds, mass consumption, are the cancer of modern society, and are destroying civilization's original thought process. It has already led to a low level of physical, psychological, mental, and physiological thought processes artificially constructed in seconds rather than in “original thought.” Only at the cost of permanently reducing invasive algorithmic systems and ensuring extreme regulation can ensure survival of the original thought process system. But it will come at a great cost and society, (especially Gen Z) will not reach maximum fulfillment. There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent social giants and invasive big tech/data companies from decoupling from future “generations", if they can even be called that. Millions of "human" children that are all seeking for each other’s approval and no longer are able to understand inner identities. The consequences would be a hivemind with no true individuals only constituents. Both in the digital and physical form, if there is not already a hybrid of the "metaverse". Technology with the abilities of full interaction, like touchscreens, and hyper modern logos, designs, and layouts have all contributed to the streamlining of data, causing the decrement of attention spans in the sense of superficial reduction, meaning that data is turned into over-simplified forms of aggregated info for the brain, which has disastrous consequences to the mind, turning it into a quasi-like state.
Gen Z (and other future generations will) have formed dual identities: the “social media self” and the “body” and there is barely any connection or recognition of the two by either themselves or as you can see (or not see) older generations. Think of the intricate unspoken understanding of the cliques and popular kids, nerdy kids, sporty kids, etc that takes place at each and every school and town, think of your own upbringing, imagine being your adult self and walking into a random high school and having this insane complex, imaginary order of operations that to you is invisible, but for every student it is all they know. For the vast majority of students school and school life is quite possibly all they have ever known for their short time they’ve experienced so far here on earth. Don’t forget how creative humans are and how many of them have nowhere else to turn for a variety of reasons except to think and think at all times about these interactions with their classmates: who they like, who they’re trying to impress, who they don’t like, etc; a lot of what it turns into is all about the people around them and how they can seek positive reinforcement from these people and that’s where the separation begins of the “social self” and the actual “self.” Add to that the complexities of the internet, that we cannot even begin to comprehend as adults and that’s probably how you end up with millions of human children that are all seeking for each other’s approval and no longer are able to understand their own inner identities. Coiled with the net, that’s what’s evolving with future generations, hiveminds with no true individuals, only constituents semi-chronically online and virtually connected.
As stated in the above paragraph, there is no longer “fitting in”, there is only acknowledgment on virtual platforms, group chats, etc. If you are thinking of the old days of MSM Instant Messaging. You are dead wrong, the connected social platforms, interconnected webs, virtualization, etc. All looped up into a perception that’s only based on curated feeds.
Humor, social norms, and concurrent thinking has devolved so much that it plays on the "anything spontaneous" card. It's devolved to the point that perception of this type can't even be broken down to a science, like playing on the 'every joke has a victim' rule, or even basics like contrast. I don't know whether to be impressed or depressed from the state of which humor is going, as there are two sides to every coin. There is almost always a bit of truth to perception and “bias”: are humans (or Gen Z) becoming less intelligent? And can be satisfied with condensed thought processes curated for them by peers and social giants? Or perhaps it is that these perceptions are getting more and more complicated and that require deep, deep context of the given situation, of the given influences, of the given understandings, and of the given real time analysis. Of which someone, if they were to be dropped into the modern 21st century understanding without current analysis, would lack and find alien? These perceptions, memes, and modern humor can easily be depicting of society, as the online proverb goes, reverberating around comment sections "we live in a society", there is a taste of bittersweet truth to that. Perhaps memes, in their essence, are actually a message of the collective minds that roam the internet at their leisure, experiencing the world's traumas, and releasing it in the internet in the form of a highly volatile, "relatable" meme. Maybe I am too simple, maybe I lack the understanding of the world, as these memes, they just do not give me the clearance that I thought I would have visiting a place like the internet, where knowledge roams free. A place of enlightenment ; corrupted, tainted with agenda, propaganda and worse - the memes are the essence of the impurity we pick up on the world, the internet being its catalyst. So be wary, for "memes", feeds, etc they may give you a shot of dopamine, but they might just inject more than just that within your psyche.
I hope humanity can recover from it and disconnect from the corporate machine that is feeding all of this, by entering a new phase of enlightenment where our natural values (community, family, relationships, etc) become an actual goal for people, where social media becomes a dirty word, shameless self promotion gets frowned upon as opposed to being a virtue to be proud of, encouraging people to unplug from the curated grid and think for themselves and celebrate individualism. I don’t have high hopes and I don’t see that trust in the media is waning, the veil of manipulated narratives being lifted. We’re at the dawn of human 2.0 (there’s probably a better term for that, that’s just what I call it) and during this transition there’s gonna be more and more conflict between those who are deeply uncomfortable with the new reality and those who happily succumb to being part of a hive mind for the the mega AI machine in exchange for the comforts it provides. It’s only been 10 years since social media (excluding its infancy) and the camera phone, which is a massive disruption to humans’ self perception.
This is a room of mirrors, endlessly reflecting the image of another over and over again. Until previously undetected defects in the glass turn into an indescribable array of chaotic light. This is the corridor we’re running through. Aligned to where it leads, but at full speed forward, one dubious step at a time. And along the way, picking up the breadcrumbs of corruption. There’s no stopping here, but we can find an alternate route if we’re lucky.
In Its current form, our infinite attention is the almighty god of the algorithm with its infinite hunger, in us, the parishioners, who are slowly shaping themselves in this impossible image, developing our dependence on consumption. Consume, produce, consume, produce, like a well-oiled illimitable machine. The collective hive-mind absorbs our consciousness, developing and distorting our ideas, opinions, morals, and principles. Constant duplication of what appeared immediately, but the source material has long been destroyed. A chaos of heterogeneous constituents, the body of a system where its agents pull in mutual conjunction and feed off of each other. It killed us because it was optimized. It was an effective tool it had on hand. Optimality is the tiger, and agents are its teeth.
