Over winter break, I caught up with all my friends about their first semesters at school. Most of them are freshmen because they took gap years, so I am technically a year ahead of them. One particular conversation I had with my friend stuck with me. We talked for two hours about how awkward and socially-inept our generation has become.
Next time you’re in public, whether at a party, bus stop, café, or walking down the street, pay attention to the teenagers and young adults who are by themselves. 90% of them will be on their phones. Most of them are not doing anything important or urgent. For some reason, people feel like being alone somewhere means you are automatically a loser. Their solution to this is to stare at their phones and attempting to give off the impression that they have friends elsewhere that they are texting.
Social media and smartphones in general have completely changed the way we interact with other people. It’s easy to see a text and take time to craft the perfect response, or to simply ignore it and never answer. The real world does not work like this. You don’t have time to think about a few different answers and pick the best one when you’re in the middle of a conversation. You also can’t walk away when you don’t feel like continuing the conversation. This is why so many people describe our generation as awkward. We don’t have the same social skills as our parents and grandparents. Most of our messages are either half-formed thoughts that we expect the other person to decode, or carefully crafted messages we’ve spent hours analyzing.
There’s also the phenomena of people being completely different texters and in-person conversationalists. I bet you can think of at least five people in your life that are completely different online and irl. A perfect example of this is dating apps. You can spend forever talking to someone on Tinder or Snapchat, but when it comes to finally meeting them in person, maybe you find out they’re super shy or not as witty and bold because they don’t have the time to ask their friends for help responding to your message. Even if they aren’t weird or super different than online, it is still such a strange feeling interacting with someone in person after having only “talked” to them online. It feels like your brain completely separates the online person from the actual person, to the point that if you never end up meeting the person, you can pretend as if those conversations never happened. Think about it- when you text your mom or your home friend, are you actively imagining a physical conversation with them? For all you know, a robot could be typing on the other end. Obviously this isn’t the case, but it still feels incredibly inauthentic to communicate solely or mostly with someone over iMessage or Snapchat or Tinder dm’s. Just some food for thought.