Examining Gen Z’s obsession with standing out.
By Kyan Feser
Staff Writer
Editorial
About two years ago, I was invited to a rave for the first time in Charlotte. As a lover of dance music, I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, the bass-pumping experience I expected was far from reality.
The DJs were relegated to a stuffy, narrow room in the venue, whereas the large, reverberated hall was home to the event’s alcohol. Even worse, there were roughly 50 people in the DJ room at a given time, as opposed to the hundreds in the central room.
Throughout the night, I followed my friends around, only to spend about 30 minutes listening to music and several hours talking to people I’ve never met. I watched countless photos be taken, and drinks were drunk, all without the backdrop of music. I remember asking myself, “did barely anyone come to dance?”
To any internet-savvy teen or twenty-something, the behavior I witnessed that night is nothing new; rather, it exemplifies a modern concept we know too well: being performative. It’s one thing to dance the night away until the sun rises, enjoying the collective euphoria; it’s another thing to take a picture proving you were there, racking up likes, and going on with your life.
Pinpointing the exact meaning of performative behavior is difficult, but I see it as cosplaying an identity for the sake of being different, or pretending you’ve always identified with a subculture or trend when you just got into it.
An egregious example I remember is when my friend, a hardcore punk, was called a poser for not wearing a so-called “punk outfit” to a show. Anyone truly in the scene recognizes it’s about ideology and lifestyle first, not just your outward appearance.
However, following the disastrous rave I attended, I’ve come to terms with how everyone, including myself, is performative. Whether we like it or not, as lab rats of a digital world, understanding our communal lack of authenticity is something that, ironically, could bring us all together.
So how are we all performative? Well, think back to a time before COVID-19, when social media was vastly different. Reels did not exist, TikTok was in its infancy, and, for the most part, I think everyone knew social media was fake.
For many, social media was the highlight reel. We’d post our once-a-month cool outing, feel special for a while, and move on. There was an unspoken understanding that, deep down, we were all just as boring as one another; our hyperbolic, online personas were just for show.
When the pandemic hit, this all changed. Social media became real life.
All of a sudden, our online personas were the central way we interacted with each other. If you wanted to make friends online, you had to have the most niche profile picture, the most niche reference in your bio, and the most niche song in your story to attract people. To stand out among the internet crowd, being conventionally boring was not an option.
Our social lives were dependent on optimizing our presentation for the algorithm, and when the pandemic ended, we carried this behavior into the real world. Subconsciously, I think we all feel like there is a camera watching us at all times, and that if we’re ever caught being boring, then we’ve failed in some way.
Gen Z loves dehumanizing themselves, calling themselves “NPCs.” To the uninitiated, NPC stands for non-playable character, or the characters in video games that are fodder for the main ones. Of course, all humans are inherently interesting, but when social media is real life, humanity is overshadowed by exaggerated identities that perform well with the algorithm.
If the whole world is burning, then all we can do is stand out in it, and when everyone’s self-worth stems from standing out the most, life becomes a miserable contest of being different among the different.
Just like everyone else at that rave, a part of me was there to affirm my right to exist. The pandemic taught me that I have to be interesting to survive, so if I don’t attend niche or unknown events in my twenties, am I even alive? Am I an NPC?
In reality, my love of dance music was irrelevant to my attendance. When we engage with social media at all, our lives start to conform to whatever we feel is a life worth living, at least per the trends at a given time. There’s always a tinge of performance (even when you like what you’re doing).
So, let’s admit that we’re all a little performative. We were all raised on YouTube, Instagram, and whatever social media we had on our iPod touches. What even is authenticity when we’ve been shaped by an algorithm our entire lives?
When everyone feigns authenticity, life becomes a business convention. We’ll engage in small talk, advertise our business (also known as ourselves) and base our self-worth on how many followers we gained after the event, marketing ourselves as if we’re a brand.
None of us know who we truly are, and if we humble ourselves and accept this fact, we can discover who we are together, not divide ourselves among an imaginary contest. When you admit you want to try something new, rather than pretend it’s always been your identity, you open yourself up to the experiences other people are pretending to have.
