Grave new world: Why young people are grieving a life they’ve never lived

When I was a teenager, social media was still in nappies. The modern pressures associated with it today were close to non-existent. It had flaws, but it didn't feel like it was breaking us.

Some of my best memories are house parties I attended in my teens. Someone's parents would go away for a few days, a free house would be identified, text messages would be sent, and a house party would occur. There were reliable individuals, like Ben, known to us affectionately as ‘Papa Shpald’ who would designate his Mum's home as the venue multiple times a month.

There was literally 0% anxiety that the experience would live outside of the beautifully 3D moment we were in. 

At these parties, there was literally 0% anxiety that the experience would live outside of the beautifully 3D moment we were in. Not once did it cross my mind that someone was filming, photographing or live streaming what we were doing.

Above: Parties before the introduction of smart phones were largely unencumbered by worries about who was filming what, what pictures were being taken, or whether it would end up on the internet.

We invested no time in documenting just 'how much fun we were having’ at these parties, nor did we digitally teleport our minds to someone else's world to see if they might be having more fun than us. Like everyone else, I was just 'there'. That was it. It sounds really unimpressive, doesn't it? It was. But it was also very, very fun. 

The night unfolded and then, the next morning, it was no longer the night before. If you weren't there, the party effectively didn't happen. A few photos may have snuck out of these parties to places like MySpace, but that was far from normal.

The night unfolded and then, the next morning, it was no longer the night before. If you weren't there, the party effectively didn't happen.

It sounds painfully basic; a party that people went to, and when they went to it, that's the only thing they did. And while they were there, that was the only place they were, but these now seem to be the kind of experiences young people are craving. They're incredibly articulate in explaining why they crave them, too, why they're watching videos of gigs, festivals or last days at secondary schools from the 90s. 

You can also see it in their fascination with the ways we used to capture life and share creativity; Polaroids, VHS tapes, vintage cameras and vinyl. As Freya India points out in the brilliant article A Time We Never Knew, these videos, complete with titles like; ‘Phones? No. We had each other’, are racking up millions  of views. Some of these viewers are, of course, nostalgic Millennials and Gen Xers. But a lot of them are people who didn't live these experiences. 

Above: For a long while, disposable cameras were the only way to effectively capture moments of a teen house party. 

India's article features comments on these videos, things like: “The whole concept of a real ‘childhood’ is completely out the window at this point in time and that’s extremely sad to me. Btw I’m 15.” Or: “My high school experience was nothing like this. I remember short bursts of people living in the moment but EVERYTHING revolved around our phones, Snapchat/Instagram status.”

There’s even a word for their quasi-nostalgia; Anemoia (meaning a nostalgia for a time or place one has never known).

‘Carefree’ describes a world that young people today have never had. A world they've never even had the chance to have. There’s even a word for their quasi-nostalgia; anemoia (meaning a nostalgia for a time or place one has never known). Young people are not just watching, either; they’re rebuilding. House parties with no phones. Group chats called 'Do Not Post'. Disposable cameras. Digital sabbaths. This isn’t Luddite nostalgia, it’s recovery work. 

I had the privilege of growing up in a time where people could talk and no one would film. A world, in effect, where we could be awkward, ugly, gross teenagers, and it wouldn't haunt us for all eternity. 

From India's article: 

“We never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online… Maybe I’m naive. Maybe all generations look back with nostalgia. But my sense is they don’t do it for a time they never knew. These are children grieving their youth while they are still children.”

This is perhaps the most exquisite irony of all: young people are streaming the absence of surveillance. They are yearning for a world where ‘no one was filming’ and they’re doing it by watching filmed footage of it. They’re not watching the '90s. They're watching the lives they were meant to have.

Above: "Young people aren’t rebelling against the digital age, they’re rebelling against the tyranny of performance it has created."

Now these young people are taking serious steps to model their social lives on what they're watching. They’ve been given everything, and all they want is out. Every generation likes to claim that the generations who succeed them are made of softer stuff, but in this case especially, it’s easy – and lazy – to mock young people. They are genuinely the victims in all of this.

It seems the more we’ve captured, documented and tried to optimise the human experience, the less human it feels. Young people aren’t rebelling against the digital age, they’re rebelling against the tyranny of performance it has created. Everything has become ‘content’. Nothing feels real. They’re craving a social atmosphere unpolluted by performance. And what of advertising, where does it factor in all of this?

It’s the Ad Business and the ‘Big Four’ who’ve created this horribly ironic, overwhelmingly digital, yet anti-social world young people are actively trying to outmanoeuvre.

Advertising, as I see it, splits in two. There’s the Ad Industry — the part that shapes and plays with culture, creates brand fame, builds brand love and grows businesses over the long haul. Then there's the Ad Business - the bit that tracks, targets and retargets, with the hopes of converting potential interest based on a person's data, or previous online activity. I work in the former.

The product of the Ad Industry tends to bounce between being a mirror and a window for its audience. Right now, it's desperately endeavouring to reflect the shifting desires of young people and represent them in its ads. I've lost count of the number of ads I've seen depicting authentic people having authentic fun, while being authentically in the authentic moment.

But these ads are battling a rather ugly, knotty context. As India so eloquently points out, new technologies tend to cheapen and undermine basic human values, and it’s the Ad Business and the ‘Big Four’ [Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google] as marketing professor Scott Galloway puts it, who’ve created this horribly ironic, overwhelmingly digital, yet anti-social world young people are actively trying to outmanoeuvre.

Above: Has social media made us connected, integrated and always on, or simply lonely and anti-social?

There is something deeply tragic but also eerily rational about it all. What we’re witnessing isn’t just nostalgia, it’s a behavioural immune response. The algorithms have given us everything  we supposedly wanted – frictionless-ness, instantaneousness and infiniteness – and robbed us of everything we actually needed – tension, delayed gratification, intimacy, risk, the ability to be stupid and the ability to forget it.

It was the algorithmic underbelly – The Ad Business – that poisoned authenticity.

It's less nostalgia and more ontological grief. Not rooted in memory, but in the haunting suspicion that something vital was supposed to happen, and didn’t. A life that slipped through your fingers before you ever held it. These old videos offer something that today’s hyper-surveilled world cannot: evidence of unselfconsciousness. 

It was the algorithmic underbelly – The Ad Business – that poisoned authenticity. Now it sells the antidote at scale. Just as young people try to opt out, the platforms try to sell them their own rebellion back. TikTok trends about quitting TikTok. Nostalgia served in HD, with ads. Even their grief is monetised. 

It feels off, to talk about how brands should capitalise on this - how they should sell into anemoia. I’d rather talk about what morally decent brand behaviour might look like in the face of it. Perhaps it’s giving people access to the past, not as an aesthetic but as psychological refuge? Could a brand feasibly make you feel like you used to, before you ever felt watched? 

Advertising’s obsession with futurism – new, next, better – assumes aspiration is linear. But, increasingly, aspiration is cyclical. Maybe we need to stop selling the future as shinier, and start selling it as simpler? The desire for authenticity is not anti-digital, it’s anti-performative. If you're a brand, that distinction matters.