Dolly tried to warn us: working 9 to 5 really is all taking and no giving. “I don’t have time to do anything,” said a plaintive young woman in a video that went viral this week: “I don’t have time or energy to cook my dinner…I don’t have energy to work out.” She’s dismayed to discover how much urban working life takes from her, how little it leaves her in the way of money and leisure. The margins of her world are constricting, and she’s, “like…so upset!”
Breakdowns like this, when they voyage across the generational ocean that separates TikTok from Twitter/X, have become for Gen Z what avocado toast was for us Millennials: a symbol of the offending generation’s moral laxity and mental fragility. Older adults pass these clips around like found objects from a remote civilization. They are totems that apparently serve as our only mode of contact with a benighted tribe called “the kids,” whose barbarous customs evoke an intoxicatingly paradoxical mixture of contempt and pity.
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