Gen-Z has no counter culture - and how we can fix that

    Gen-Z has a problem! What is it? Oh idk, maybe that we do not have an identifiable counter-culture. Our grandparents smelled like patchouli while they picketed for peace, not war. Our parents smelled like eggs after spiking their hair and making great music in a musty garage. And finally, our siblings smelled like beard oil and hemp as they 'revitalized' urban areas. Each of these movements stood as a counter to problems affecting young-adults in their respective time-periods. The hippies preached peace to protest the seemingly meaningless and deadly Vietnam war. The punks vehemently denied the greed and superficiality rampant through the 80's. And, hipsters wanted to escape the mundanity of suburbia, fleeing to urban areas where they enriched themselves with avocado toast and alternative music. 

Ultimately, these counter-movements faded into time as corporations understood how to placate the youth with proper advertising techniques. However, gen-z has been the most influenceable generation thus far. From what is popular online, it would seem that we all aspire to be bland influencers who have sold-out their lives and privacy to be complete phonies and consume, consume, consume. How can we offset this trend, and establish a 'culture baseline' for our generation? The answer: swing maybe too far in the opposite direction with a counter-culture!

The first step to creating a counter-culture is to define the problem affecting our generation: which I would argue is social media itself. I am not on social media anymore, but I hear about the trending topics such as the idea around "third-spaces". Third spaces are a place away from home or work, where people can commune. The internet and I agree that gen-z is lacking in these "third spaces" and suffering from loneliness. We have made our third-space the black-mirror in our pockets, with a perfectly tailored algorithm that we cannot escape. 

People used to have to go out searching to validate their interests, but now we are told everything we like or dislike is "tea". What if we are dumb and some of our opinions aren't tea. With algorithms comes perfectly tailored marketing for each individual. Before our generation, it took decades to understand how to market to a large group of people with like-minded interests, thus giving room for the birth of counter-cultures. Think of a world where the hippy movement was placated with believable propaganda before they had time to organize Woodstock :( Now we allow The Man to know our every like and dislike and know exactly what can sway these in another direction. We need to be the generation to do something about this because we have been the most affected by it. I know far too many kids that died from depression, no doubt in part from social media use. I myself know that social media made my teen years much, much harder and now we are letting those disastrous effects creep into our young adult lives. We are putting up almost no fight against this because we are addicts. If we can't succeed we need to at least get the ball rolling for the generation below us that is currently growing up in a world which spoon-feeds them literal poison (iPads).

Every "punk/indie/y2k baddie" influencer that smokes cigs and wears a lot of layers in an effortless way might look the part, but they aren't countering culture at all. They are playing perfectly into Mark Zuckerberg's creepy, lizard hands by branding their alternative aesthetic using the most mainstream devices. Hippies were not profiting from smelling bad and having white-people dreadlocks. So, since pop-culture begins and thrives online, gen-z's counter-culture needs to hop OFFline.

I hereby adopt (because I did not make this up) Delete Day for my community. A day where gen-z can come together and participate in deleting an account or app that is making life more miserable and less social. Eventually I want this to be a community picnic where clubs and local organizations set up stalls to get sign-ups from people looking for alternative ways to spend their precious time. 

Time to Counter the Culture!