What we can learn from Genz: new languages for self-expression, community building, and coping with our earthly demise. Gen Z sets itself apart from previous generations in first-world countries in a few important aspects. Firstly. there's a more pronounced racial and ethnic diversity and is set to be the most acaemically prepared so far. These factors are especially significant considering the politically divisive time we were introduced to. 9/11 marked a paradigme shift, beyond it being an attack on mainland US, it was an attack of the neoliberal ideals that the United States had been championing since the end of World War II as the one true form of civil organization. The 2008 crisis and Great Recession only served as a violent reminder of the fragility of our economic system, how a model dependant on exponential growth crashes once there's nothing left to build upon. Millenials in particular were heavly affected,as they were coming of age during that time and led to incredibly bleak prospects for their future financially, left with few job opportunities and student debt over their costly college education. What sets Gen Z apart from past generations is that we didn't grow up with a particularly positive outlook for the future during our youths, the prospects of having better paying jobs then our predecesors. Instead, we were met with a world with growing instabilities economically, politically and enviromentally. Furthermore, through online sources, we are constantly reminded that the earth is on the verge of perishing, and it's up to the youngest generation to save us all from our impending doom, despite having limited individual power.
It now appears that 9/11 and the subsequent "war on terror" may have shaken irony out of out of the lazy cynisism into which it had settled and, rather than rendering itself obsolete, has made ironic critique more urgent than ever.
A decade of dark humor. How comedy, irony and satire shaped a Post 9/11 America. Ted Gurnelos and Viveca Greene, 2011.
As we try to navigate through the myriad of social, political and environmental problems we inherited from our fourfathers, we found comfort in unusual spaces: The Internet. Our dexterity with living between the physical and digital realms is the final important trait that seperates us from pevious generations: Boomers grew up during the television industry expantion, Gen X saw the computer revoltion take shape. Millenials came of age during the Internet explotion; but many of us have little to no memory of the world before smartphones and the Internet: In my case, I vaguely remember being no more than 5 years old searching for Kirby: the animated series episodes on Youtube for free (and subsequently finding a creepypasta video of Sonic the Headgehog(creepypasta being an Internet subgenre for amateur horror.
CAL FER UN DESGLOSA,ENT DELS ALTRES TIPUS DE IRONIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Gen Z humor is born from the union of borderline fatalism we feel towards our future and everyone has the ability to add to the conversation, for better or for worse. We'll come back to this point when analyzing the ability that memes have to effortlesly create a collaborative design project, but for now, we need to understand the base of all Gen Z humor: irony. The definition of irony is, simply put, the juxtaposition between what seems to be and what actually is. The basis of the joke is the willfull act of hiding the truth between layers of irony, of which there are three. Gen Z humor operates on one of the top tiers of Layer 2. In extreme casees, meta-irony, which is the more common of the two in memes, the truth is hidden under so many layers of irony that you question if the speaker themself what they are truly trying to say. There are three points I want to prove by using memes as a case study gor Gen Z's behavioural patterns online, and their ramifications offline. First, as I mentioned before, the community building that these memes foster. Despite the scrutiny that social media may recieve from older generations, the ability to shed your skin and navigate a boundless universe, frees us from our physical constraints (more on that later). Secondly, we need to recognize the benefits that the Internet has had on Gen Z as a whole linguistically. As I explained in the previous segment, memes are all about creating a new language with the audiovisual possibilities they offer. Thirdly, our nihilistic humor serves as a coping mechanism, whch are conscious strategies we use to reduce or handle uncomfortable emotions and feelings.
I find it particularly fitting to describe memes as a system to confront trauma and instability, given the constant bombardment of doomsday messages that can easily leed anyone to a prolongued state of stress, even potential resulting in something akin to C-PTSD(Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). This shared sense of dread, stress and hoeplesness is what the National Library of Medicine describes as collective trauma, which refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affects an entire society. Collective trauma is not just a recollection of a historical event or a terrible situation that a large group of people endured. It suggests that the tragedy is embeded in the collective memory of the group. Like all forms of memory, it compromises not only a reproduction of events but also a reconstruction of the trauma to make sense of it. The problem arises when this humor becomes a defense mechanism rather than a coping mechanism, activating unconsciously at the slightests discomfort, thus making clear communication difficult. The essence of Gen Z humor lies in hiding the true intentions of the speaker
Before moving further. I believe it is important to explain why I'm using terminology closely associated with themes of PTSD, such as coping mechanism, trauma, apathy, and so on. In 1988, the term Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(C-PTSD), was by Dr. Judith Herman. C-PTSD shares many symptoms with PTSD, including behavioral difficulties like impulsivity, aggresion and self-destructive behaviour; dissociation and depersonalization, emotional difficulties in interpersonal relationships and somatization of intense feelings.. The difference lies in how the symptoms are developed. While PTSD is often associated with a "singular" traumatic event that significantly impacts one's mental stability, as the name implies,Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is developed through prolonged exposure to stressful situations, thus the sense of extreme instability materializes is trauma. When our bodies experience stress, they release a hormonal chemical cocktail into our bloodstream, activating our sympathetic nervous system, which, in turn, triggers our fight, flight or freeze response to extrenal stimuli. This response is designed as a short-term solution so once the stressful situation passes, the hormones in our body regulate themselves, allowing us to think clearly and make the necessary decisions to navigate the situation. However, constant exposure to traumatic events overwhelms the nervous system to the point where the body stops chemically reacting to itself, and the hormonal cocktail ceases to be released. As a result, our body can only respond to emotional or psychological threats with apathy, as it lacks the necessary chemical response. In using terminology associated with PTSD and C-PTSD, I'm trying to highkight the impact of prolonged exposure to instability and how it shapes peoples' coping mechanisms, that includes the development of nihilistic humor as a defense mechanism 
We have a lot to worry about, our economic future, academic succes, protecting eachother from opressive systems of power(alltogether with a fear of intimacy powered by a sense of perfectionism), the deteration of the planet to the point "climate anxiety" was coined to give name to the generalized dread the younger generations face when thinking about Earth's futur; making it all the more difficult with the fatalist rethoric that social media and news sources love to shove into us to keep viewers hooked. Dealing with so much all at once is not an easy task, it doesn´t feel like a possible one with how overwhealming it is, so it comes easy tp prioritize and compromise in some aspects of our life to take the world on. The easiest one to compromise is the one that is most in our control, our personal life, but is there more to it? Our values are shaped by the omnipotent presense of capitalism, our economical system and the dogma we rely on for our financial livelyhood, it upholds values such as: individualism, productivity, sucess, perfectionism. What all these have in common is that they benefit a system that sees its population as machines of mass-production. Incidentally, a quality that has no place in this system is vulnerability, as they stunt workflow. Claiming agency over our feelings and holding them hostage,as one of the few resources we still feel we have full power over is a way to keep ourselves afloat. Over the past decade, aespecially after the 2020 Confinment period, mental well-being practices and self-help content has enhanced how much we worry about our mental health. Allthough deplorable mental health records have been at an all.time high, the problem is still treated as a personal one. In other words, the problem is framed as a bipdroduct of the individual person's short-comings rather than an issue in the very fabric of society, a system that prioritizes production over people's personal needs.
German philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains in The Palliative Society how under modern-day capitalism, it isn't the State or some other hierarchical power that directly supresses us, due to the fact that in first-world countries the public display of discipline via violence has become...outdated, more so to seperate themselves from "the less civilized" global south/s(arcasm).
Pain used to be the basic tool of repression, so the counterculture reaction to it was to reject it. Dominant power has a habit of consuming and controlling conterculture by adopting surface level changes to fain progress to not adress the root issues, so in neoliberal societies, pain remained but it was turned to a source of motivation, auto-optimization and self-improvement. Thus, suffering. seemingy, becomes unrelated to power and domination and becomes a medical condition to "fix" to achieve the best version of ourselves. Disciplinary governments and institutuions are replaced with the pathologization of negative feelings and emotions. We feel free-willed, but we involuntarily exploit ourselves under the pretense that we are improving ourselves; a self-inflicted pursuit for happiness and perfection, the pursuit of the affermentioned values that confrom the ideal, ends up being a far more efficent tool for obidience.
same pony different, sympathic nervous system
Estoy en terapia o en clase de oratoria?
Estoy en terapia o en clase de oratoria?
I don't think we're alone in being a generation with struggles, but I can only speak for the one I am apart of. I see it in myself, and friends, and strangers I meet at work, I see small symptoms that are reminiscent of C-PTSD, unsurprising, considering the tense and irregular conditions we grew up in. Systemic problems, many of them inhereted, are reframed as personal ones, individualizing the healing process. We want to be the best version of ourselves to those we care about but unmet emotional needs and unstable sentimentality are treated as a hindrence to your productivity, so you avoid dealing with them alltogether or What becomes lost is the chance for important affective relationships, an understanding of yourself in relation to others and motivation to grow. Above all, we lose touch with the huge archive of feelings we harbour. But what's so important about them anyway?