The Uninteresting Generation
A friend of mine loves social media. Really loves it. When she’s not sleeping, showering, or hitting me for eating the last piece of chocolate, she’s on her phone, thumbing through apps. And she wants me on board. For my own good, she says.
Try Snapchat, she says. So I open Snapchat and find a twenty-year-old at a party, talking into her phone for three full minutes instead of actually being at the party. Who wants to be friends with that person. You should do more on Instagram, she says. So I open Instagram and scroll through twenty-three identical sunsets in a row. #NoFilter, each one says. Couldn’t care less, I think. You should tweet more, she says. So I open Twitter and read a joke translated from English that I already laughed at three years ago. 228 retweets, 610 favorites. I want to lie down.
When I talk about the early internet I always sound like a deranged pensioner drifting in and out of coherence while describing some long-ago war. But when I started blogging in 2002, there were maybe twenty interesting people online whose lives I followed from a distance. Sure, half of them turned out to be disasters when I met them in person. But it was a manageable group.
Today what feels like the entire population is competing for everyone else’s attention simultaneously. Through pointed Facebook posts, through marathon Twitch streams, through Periscope check-ins, through Vine clips, through SoundCloud mixes, through Reddit threads, through podcasts, through YouTube channels. Everyone performing at full volume, all at once.
Companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google planted a hope in each of us: that by broadcasting your existence online, you might become the next big thing. It’s no longer just about staying connected with friends. The internet has already turned plenty of ordinary people into celebrities—and if it worked for them, why not you? Why train as an electrician when people will pay you millions to watch you play video games?
The first generation of internet publishers—and I’m including bloggers, podcasters, and YouTubers—helped build the expectation that everyone must push their opinions and their life and their person onto as many other people as possible in order to matter. We built the road. We shouldn’t be surprised what’s using it now.
It goes further than that. Thanks to the digital revolution, fluency in social media is now a professional requirement. The more fans, followers, and subscribers you can show, the more employable you are, the more legible to the future. The number is the credential.
But this bumps against a truth nobody wants to say out loud: most of you are boring. Your opinions are thin. You are, on your worst days, the kind of person I can tolerate for three seconds on public transit before I start looking for an exit. This isn’t cruelty—it’s just accurate.
The economy and society and culture all told you together that every tiny fragment of your unremarkable life was worth sharing with the world, and that someone would eventually reward you for it. That’s not going to happen. Because you’re uninteresting, your friends are uninteresting, and almost everything you find exciting is uninteresting.
The fact that you’ve had eleven followers on Twitter for three years has nothing to do with the fact that you only ever retweet some beauty vlogger’s posts and complain about your teachers in broken syntax. The fact that none of your Instagram photos get any engagement has nothing to do with the fact that they’re all badly filtered selfies with a pout. The fact that you have four subscribers on YouTube has nothing to do with the fact that all your videos are shaky phone footage of you being annoyed about someone from school.
You see people around you every day doing the same thing you’re doing—sharing everything, publicly—and some of them seem to be succeeding, seem to have it easy. Instead of accepting that you’re simply missing what actually matters—talent, personality, charisma—you decide you just need to work harder, post more, push further.
So you film five Snapchats of yourself accidentally dropping an apple. Your voice sounds wrong in the first four. You lock yourself in the bathroom for two hours before staring sleepily into your phone and posting "Woke up like this" on Twitter. You run your photos through automatic thinning software before uploading them. You know all of this is fake, but the likes are what counts.
All of this makes the executives at tech and phone and camera companies very happy. You’re doing exactly what they need. But you’re chasing a dream that looks close and stays far. The joy drained out of it a long time ago and turned into compulsion. You’re almost there—you just need to tweet more, post more, stream more, on and on forever.
The internet has turned some people into stars. Entertainment industries only function when they produce stars. But most of you—the ones who get pregnant by a Jochen while still finishing a trade apprenticeship, who share mobile game invitations on Facebook, who go to stadium-pop concerts and keep a sentimental album in the car—you lead lives nobody else wants to watch. Really. And that’s something you have to make peace with.
Try Snapchat, she says. Do more on Instagram, she says. Tweet more, she says. Why, I ask. If someone wants to watch me sit on the couch in sweatpants watching Orange Is the New Black all night, they can just come over. I don’t need to make Snaps or posts or videos out of that.