The Uncurated Generation
Exploring Gen Z's turn towards "Day in My Life" videos, offline communities, and hybrid social spaces in their search for belonging and genuine interaction during the era of cringe.
Born in 1997, I’m what we call a zillennial—young enough to know that you should always type in lowercase to keep everything nonchalant and old enough to remember an Instagram feed without ads. Unlike my peers who were born in 1996 and are completely (wink emoji) millennial, I am a bit of everything. I'm a bit of both. And for me, being a zillennial has also brought about an ability to have observed very interesting things about people and cultures around where I live, especially here in Sydney Australia.
Sure, every generation that’s passed before us has had their fair share of feeling lost, tired, and exasperated with figuring out their lives. However, as the years have rolled by, where we stand today right now (with Gen Z being the immediate generation who is going through their adolescent period: those aged between 13-25) they are witnessing a coming age that’s far more volatile and turbulent than when I was a 21-year-old back in 2018. And why I say this is because this generation is the first to live their formative years online.
Last year, one of my Year 12 students revealed to me that he and his friends have had instagram since Year 6. Where their brains were — and still are — developing, where they’re still in the thick of crystallising their identity amongst their friends and families, where their professional careers are currently being carved by a very thin jobs market, and where their love lives are looking more and more transient as new dating apps flood the market, and as they begin to form their political beliefs in a shit show of a geo-political arena, the countless liminal spaces they will occupy during their adolescence — the ones we all shudder at when remembering our own place within them — are all on display; on social media, in 4K, as a live picture or as a reel with background music.
Terrifying stuff to think about. Especially for a 20 something year old. But, difficult as that may be, humans are an incredibly resilient species. The same is true for this younger generation. The kind of panopticism which millennials and Gen X have historically shuddered at, is something which Gen Z have been subject to during the entirety of their young adult lives. It is what has enabled them to echo-locate their way through the labyrinthine of human relationships with more skill, precision and accuracy than pods of bottlenose dolphins navigating offshore waters in the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, the Gulf of America).
Take Instagram for example.
In 2013, I launched my Instagram account. And for those of you were there to ride the earliest waves of the rainbow labelled camera, you and I know that Instagram is nothing like what it used to be a decade ago. Flat lays of curated food on dining tables carved the path for newbie lifestyle and foodie influencers we see today, Matcha lattes at Creasion Cafe boomed in I think 2016 and are now coming back nearly 9 years on, and french toasts with fairy floss were still a thing at The Tiny Giant in Petersham.
Curation and caring about how we’re perceived by our peers has always been an intrinsic quality of the adolescent human condition and social media — it’s not new. What is new though is the way in which curation, today, has transformed. There has definitely been almost a weaponisation of it in recent years. Where 2013-2017 social media was defined by commercial contracts and partnerships between influencers and brands – again, fuelled primarily by an older base of millennials who were, then, young professionals in their mid to late twenties – Gen Z who were still in high school saw right through the largely commercialisation and heavily sponsored landscape on Instagram then. This was when their rebellion started.
Amidst a field of accounts whose content seemed far too curated, cold and commercial, Gen Z started manoeuvring social media in their own way. But caught with the short end of the following-to-follower-count stick, they descended on TikTok in the summer of 2018 — a new space which promised less Truman Show like sponsoring and more of what they wanted (and were physiologically inclined) to post about: themselves.
Enter: the unhinged storyteller
A short form, turned long form style of videos and vlogs that captured the behind the scene of their lives, and even comical challenges that were tangential to what the rest of adult society had already been accustomed to on Instagram.
Gen Z wanted authenticity and boy did they get it. They quietly made their fame with monumental followings on TikTok somewhere between 2018 and 2022, and carved out a fairly anti-influencer movement amongst themselves. But while they were anti-influencer for a short period of time, the eldest of their prime members (those aged 20-23 today) started graduating from high school and entered university — an incredibly formative time in their lives. And as the years proceeded to roll on, said members graduated from university, scored their first internships and – for the first time – signed employment agreements for their full time permanent tech-sales job at multi-billion dollar companies listed on a stock-exchange.
"Now, charged by a premature amygdala and an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex, adolescent competitionism for social, financial and sexual capital (which has always been a rite of passage for young people) is now being broadcast live as if it were The Hunger Games. But instead of handing them aids, we have handed them the keys to the weapons cabinet — an unregulated market of apps; cryptocurrency trading platforms, dating and hookup apps without the age verification, political misinformation on X, whacky theories, and newspeak-level vocabulary from the manosphere and incel culture on Reddit. But even with all the weapons at their command, said social, financial and sexual capital has never come within an arm’s reach, even though it is always one tap away. And so, with their lives — trials, tribulations, and triumphs — phenomenally more visible to their contemporaries than their predecessors, and even with all this at their fingertips, the result isn’t more freedom, but more paralysis."
Now enter: the Day In My Life videos.
They seem to have taken our for you pages by a storm and that’s not because I’ve liked any of them to build my algorithm — I’ll have you know this was not a proverbial brick which I’ve placed down, I promise. Vain at first, they capture the pedestrian life of young corporate professionals. Humble and effortless as they appear however, these are formulaic: there’s a lazy morning wake up shot placed ever so carefully to capture a rising sun-ray that pierces the blinds, a matcha-latte-in-hand shot while walking down George Street, a keyboard clacking session in front of two monitors, and then the all infamous lunch run as the camera is taken to 0.5x, extended by an arm in front of (or beside) their torso — the subject now successfully metamormposing into a crane. It’s a move that not even Master Mantis from Kung Fu Panda could pull off. From a production value perspective, these videos are as valuable as the Adidas Sambas that unofficially sponsor them. But from a cultural value perspective, they are priceless.
The allure is not the actual content itself, but the way in which they can galvanise an entire generation of people who’ve grown up undisputedly the most unique from each other. People feel represented by them and take comfort in knowing they’re “in it” together. In a time where social media timelines have been littered with hustle bros and young tech billionaires and sports apparel wielding millionaires reminding us all of the infinite amount of decisions we should have made when we were 21 years old, it is no surprise that DIMLs have such thrust. They give inclusive access to the lives of quiet quitting (and quietly yearning) young professionals who are now feeling the full force of 8 hours of daily work. They are today’s poems — they represent us.
According to a 2022 Gallup Poll, 54% of Gen Z employees — slightly higher than any other generation — are ambivalent or not engaged at work. They simply don’t enjoy the work that they currently have, which more often than not are entry level positions at multinational companies.
New York University Stern Professor, social psychologist, and author of The Anxious Generation, Johnathan Haidt said: “The more connected a generation is, the more lonely it is.” This sentiment rings true for Gen Z and might explain why DIMLs seem to be the perfect microscopic escape hatches from the reality of their lives.
This isn’t the only remnant though. In the same way Gen Z have turned to DIML videos for emotional validation, they are also shifting their search for connection offline, to places like run clubs, bouldering or pilates classes. These activities have silently become the new breeding grounds for “genuine” relationships. The barrens of dating apps like Hinge and Bumble have been apparent for some time now and people are turning to these new spaces to seek real connections; organic connections that are less curated.
Where spaces like pubs, nightclubs and bars may have been the traditional avenue of choice to find love for millennials and their parents and older siblings, they now prove to be too much for a fickle Generation of young humans who’ve spent the larger part of their formative years identity-forming behind an oleophobic screen. Bars and restaurants remain almost like sets of a Hollywood movie — aspirational and cinematic for where we all want to live out our most embarrassing laughs with family or warmest of reunions with old friends. But for Gen Z, instead we are seeing each other choose karaoke, house parties, raves and music festivals. This is no mistake.
— Of course, it is important to recognise that Gen Z exist in a period of immense personal and collective economic uncertainty, astronomical house prices, stagnating wages, exhausting global geo-political instability, and ominous (but real) threats of an AI driven workforce which will probably replace their entry level jobs —
But, there is an undeniable socio-spatial ecology that is underpinning the direction of Gen Z’s movements and where about, and currently it seems that spaces which blur lines, those with a social hybridity, are those which we’re turning to. Because am here to run at this run club or am I here to rizz up Veronica from the suburb next over? Am I here to boulder because it’s my hobby, or am I here to check out his bulging biceps as he catapults across the studs along the wall. Am at this rave because I love the musical artistry and environment, or am I here to give shoulder rides to guys and girls to as a means to semi-publicly test and triangulate my “bi-curiousity” (whatever that means). Am I at karaoke with my mates to let loose or am I here because we’re all tired of having to navigate the complexities that come with mingling and losing friends in the club?
So yes — we’re all fumbling through our twenties in $180 sneakers and a vague sense of purpose. But I don’t think that’s a crisis. I think it’s kind of beautiful. Because maybe showing up to that pilates class, or DMing someone after a gig, or filming your boring lunch is just our generation’s way of saying: “I want to matter to someone.” And maybe, if we’re lucky, someone will see it and say “same.”
Hint from the ‘unc’ author: someone will always notice that in you.
