Remember this? It’s November 12, 2018. Stop reading this if you’re not me. If you’re future me, that’s okay. Do you remember? Right now I’m wishing I had a dictionary for every second. It would contain every meaning a word has ever meant to anyone, like you could type in a date and a person and know what it meant to them then. So I’m writing one down, just for me, and you, future me. Even though Pierre Bonnard once said, “The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.” Even though Kathy Acker once said, “It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.” Time does those things too.

Words have origins, etymologies, beginnings, so they must also have endings, “exitymologies.” Where did that word come from, where is it going, and where does it end? Who used it first and who will use it last? In our crazy unprecedented beginning and end times, it seems that words are not enough. We need new words for new concepts, new experiences, new feelings. Words are magic, that’s why it’s called spelling. Neologisms abound, there are plenty of new portmanteaus, there seems to be new slang every day, crystallizing out of ones and zeroes and melting back into irrelevance, meaninglessness. We are living in an age of earthquakes and tectonic-level linguistic changes. Whole sentences are spoken, and people reply, “None of those words are in the Bible.”

I think about this stuff a lot. Is that still true? I think about how words often considered essential and/or phonaesthetically beautiful might fall into the service of upcoming hyperstitional and accelerating semantic shifts.

If I was in charge, aurora, which now refers to an outside electrical phenomenon in which wondrous light smears across the sky, could come to mean a moment or place of transcendent realization within the infinite data streams of the future, and I think the Greek afterlife word Elysium ought to come to signify a self-designed, idyllic virtual reality. It only makes sense. Felicity means intense happiness and a colonial American Girl doll, but in two hundred years it could evolve to denote the maximum amount of pleasure a consciousness can experience within a specified time frame, a measurement unit in a hedonistic future. After they abolish suffering. Gossamer is cloth right now, but why shouldn’t it become the fragile, filmy boundary between two adjoining realities or universes? I think jubilee is wasted on the British as “special anniversary,” far from its biblical origins, and should come to signify a moment of collective ascension, gathering, or communal ecstatic realization within a networked consciousness, and kismet can be the algorithmic path that that consciousness is most likely to follow. Like used to mean like, but we’re like moments away from its evolution into a catchall term for any expression of acknowledgment or validation. Organic can go from “carbon-based” to anything chaotic or naturally occurring, anything not precisely engineered or simulated. Serendipity now is for events occurring by chance in a nice way for girls who own three-plus crystals, but soon it can mean an unexpected but beneficial outcome in a deterministic, algorithm-controlled society. Our talismans bring good luck, but in the future language I’m imagining for us, they’ll be any piece of code capable of influencing probabilities in quantum computations. Right now the period of life following childhood is youth, with its pleasing reminders of the second person and the noun form of warm, left over from the proto-Germanic, but it could eventually mean the early stages of an entity’s existence, no matter how long that period lasts in the time to come, a time of extended life spans and foggily characterized “entities.” I’m just throwing out a few ideas. I know real slang rarely draws on the phonaesthetically beautiful.

We are creating the world we live in through what we call things, and our world shifts faster than it did before. With the hyperdemocratic nature of the internet, our Gen Z post-post-post-everything Joker defense mechanisms, our tendency toward the extreme, we are made of every way that everyone has ever used the words we have been called or choose to call ourselves. Now that the seas are rising and the forests are burning and information moves through the air, we can redefine and invent at an unprecedented speed. The world made us, and now it is time for us to make the world (the one you live in). We become what we behold. We built cities with LEGO, families with Sims, planets with Minecraft, websites with code, ourselves with filtered images, and now we’re building our world with words. These are some words that briefly built a world I briefly lived in.

Autism

Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism. I tell him that I’m surprised that these girls I’ve met at parties, with their thousands of Instagram followers and beautiful boyfriends, are autistic. Ivan says I shouldn’t be surprised. My surprise means that I don’t know what autism is. I do know that I was insulted when my friend Gideon called me an “autist.” I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t like it. I do know that there is a spectrum. In first grade I had a crush on a boy. This boy had a special helper. Some of the other kids were jealous. They missed their moms. They wanted to sit on the special helper’s lap. They wanted to play Yahtzee with her. They wanted her to braid their hair. They wanted attention from her, but she belonged to the boy. When she explained that the boy was “special,” the other kids stopped being jealous. They accepted that they were not “special,” or maybe they understood that when she said “special” she meant something specific. I was in first grade and I didn’t know that sometimes words can mean many different things. I did know that I wanted to hold the boy’s hand.

Those art girls are definitely special. That’s why they get a thousand likes when they post a photo. I get eighty on a good day, but I’ve been called special a thousand times. My dad thinks I’m special. Ivan thinks I’m special. Gideon thinks I’m special.

I think I’m special. That’s why last night between texts with Gideon I Google “Do I have autism?” I know I don’t even before I click through the two-minute quiz. If there is an interruption, I can switch back to what I was doing very quickly. I am good at social chitchat. When I was young, I used to enjoy playing games involving pretending with other children. I find making up stories easy. I do not find it difficult to imagine what it would be like to be someone else. I am not autisic, but there are questions that give me pause, questions I hit the agree button for. New situations make me anxious. I like to collect information about categories of things (e.g., types of cars, birds, trains, plants). When I talk on the phone, I’m not sure when it’s my turn to speak. I tend to have very strong interests, then get upset if I can’t pursue them. I tend to notice details that others do not. I know that I am not autistic—but I do have trouble existing in this world. I want to know why. I wish I could Google “Why am I the way I am?,” “Is there a word for it?,” “Are there other people like me?’’

It seems like everyone is being diagnosed with autism these days. My generation has the most autists in history. If something is different, we have to name it. That’s how language works. I want to matter and understand and know who I am and why I feel so strange. We young people hate binaries and love spectrums, but spectrums are vast and the scale scares us. This is why we live in the age of identity politics. This is why we need names. This is why we have asexuals and pansexuals and demisexuals. This is why we get even more specific with fraysexuals and quoisexuals and placiosexuals. This is why each of these identities has their own flag with their own colors. It feels so good to love a flag. To look at a pattern and know that it is yours. I only know two people who look at the American flag and feel like they belong. I get angry about identity politics. I read a little Marx so now I know that it is class that divides us and that capitalism will up and appropriate and commodify and then start using any words you use to define yourself to sell something to you. That doesn’t mean that the words don’t matter. Sometimes I laugh when I hear the words demigirl or trigender or otherkin, but other times I spend my evenings taking quizzes to see if I have autism. I understand the urge to belong, to have an identity with a name and know that out there, there are others like you. We all want to belong. We all want to be special.

Based

How do I begin to explain this word? By its opposite? There’s Based and Redpilled and then there’s its opposite, Cringe and Bluepilled. A “normie” won’t know either of these terms. A “normie” might not even know what normie means.

When I say “cloud” I’m not referring to the things in the sky, unless that is where our data is kept. (Like how avatar was a Hindu deity and now it’s a cyber identity, or how wiki used to just be the Hawaiian word for quick, or how a browser used to be a person who perused.) It’s 2018 and I start saying “based,” even while wondering if it will become the Gen Z equivalent of “groovy” or “cat’s pajamas.” I don’t quite mean “to use [something specified] as the foundation or starting point for something.” When I say “based,” I’m not sure what I’m saying. Knowyourmeme.com, an online encyclopedia for all things new and cyber and in flux, does not separate the word based from the word redpilled: “Based and Redpilled is a phrase that has been used on sites such as 4chan and Reddit to agree with and praise something, particularly something controversial. The opposite phrase is Cringe and Bluepilled.” Unlike many encyclopedias, Knowyourmeme .com allows for comments. One commenter says, “This description is very unbased and bluepilled. Irony awareness levels 0.” The idea that a dictionary or an encyclopedia can be edited and commented on is based.

Based does not have to mean right-wing, but it’s often seen in reference to things that are red, things that disgust you. It’s a way of saying “cool” or “I agree” in a language of a “right-wing” social group. But they do not own this language; nobody does. Based means different, and in our homemade cyber echo chambers, to lean toward the right has become an act of radicalism.

The American rapper Lil B or The BasedGod is the original source of the word based. Am I allowed to use etymology like that? No, but I’m going to anyway. There was a time when our whole generation laughed at the same jokes, listened to the same music, and loved the same rapper. Lil B was different from other celebrities. He followed everyone back, and if you sent him a selfie with his name written with Sharpie on your hand he would post it and you got to share a little of his fame. He replied to direct messages and retweeted fans and liked our selfies. This was radical, and it’s how he very briefly transcended the classic limitations of celebrity. He was all-seeing and all-loving. He was like God. He had the power to really, truly create. True creation is the creation of something out of nothing that can become nothing again and anything in between. Humans and words are the only things I know that have this power. We both are born. We both can do good. We both can do evil. We both change. We both die. Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created here on Earth? That’s a quote from Spy Kids 2. We humans have run out of control, turned into something he didn’t intend. This is what happened with The BasedGod’s word.

Based was the term he used for his life and musical philosophy. Being based was a lifestyle that involved radical tolerance of others and revolt against societal rules and expectations. Shock was good and it was based. Currently, the top definition on Urban Dictionary is from 2009, written by a user called Young Silence:

Based

Is when you dont care what people think

its a way of life

Doing what you want

how u want

wearing what u want

ex.

the LV book bag looks gay on you

idc im based

As we make up new words, they are added and sorted by how many votes they get. On the internet, time moves at hyperspeed, but Young Silence’s words remain on top unchanged.

Young Silence’s definition clarifies how this word that once meant something to someone has come to mean something else to someone else. It’s a definition anyone can agree with, for a cool new word that of course we with our mushy young brains want to absorb and use. The definition comes from outside our time of echo chambers. It is here to remind us that the definitions of words are democratic. Language is a process that we are all part of. The walls of our echo chamber prisons keep us apart. They are built by algorithms, unseen hands, powers that be and will always be, but these walls are supported by us all and the words we choose to use. We have different ideas about stem cells and borders and guns, but that doesn’t mean we need to start using different words. Politics can create its own obscurantist language of alienating jargon, and for the sake of this country I think we should all be open to learning and sharing certain words, breaking down the walls letter by letter. Based belongs to whoever uses it, whoever chooses to define it, whoever chooses to follow the definitions that they see. We all have a little voice out here on the internet, in the classroom, over the telephone. We all have something to say. Remember that people can learn and learn best when they are not under attack or being talked down to. Remember that we all think different things are #BASED. Remember that this is what makes us little meaning-making, language-shaping, tweet-typing creatures, humans so #BASED.

Cringe

Cringe is the opposite of based, but a word cannot always be understood by its opposite. In fact, opposites are dead. Binaries are dead. There are inbetweens so vast one could fall into them forever and ever, growing old without hitting the ground. Hence, we need spectrums. Spectrums are bridges over the voids created by saying, this is not that. Girl is not the opposite of boy. Gay is not the opposite of straight. Black is not the opposite of white. Everything exists on a spectrum. Spectrum is a word that elicits many responses. One of the most common is cringe. Spectrums are for the snowflakes with their identity politics and hurt feelings, for the left with the virtues they want you to know they have. That is why you will see it paired with the term blue pill.

A simple definition would be the feeling of disgust you get when something woke (see page 148) is too woke. The terms fraysexual, quoisexual, and placiosexual make me laugh. My friend Gideon explains that my laugh is not sincere. I’m not laughing with anyone. There is no joke except the one I am creating in my head. A more sincere response would be, cringe.

Like based and any of these new words I hear from Gideon, who is a true citizen of the internet, cringe is a word with an unstable meaning. One real, made-by-experts dictionary has two definitions for the word cringe. The first is “to bend one’s head and body in fear or apprehension or in a servile manner” and the other is “to experience an inward shiver of embarrassment or disgust.” The way I think about the cringe that I see on the internet is a mix of these two definitions. Fear, servitude, embarrassment, and disgust are all naturally interlinked. The idea of the spectrum is something that we are asked to accept and bow down to and never insult. To insult a spectrum makes one racist or sexist or homophobic or fascist or evil. A spectrum demands respect. It is worth respect, but the people who take it upon themselves to police this respect want people to bow down to not only the idea, but to the enforcers. This is what makes it cringe. Youth naturally find the idea that ideas are more powerful than questions to be cringe, as in cringing in fear and horror and disgust. We cringe because we are asked to accept something unconditionally. Unconditionality is a powerful and rare phenomenon. It can only be brought about through fear or love.

A common misconception about cringe is that it is commonly felt when something is too sincere. However, I would posit that it is quite the opposite. A cringe comes from the part of our mind that can detect danger. People using faux sincerity and sentimentality for political gain are a threat. We learn through feelings, but feelings can be forced into existence and the body knows this. Cringe is a response in our core, in the pit of your stomach. It is both a judgment and a fear, natural and created by the ideas we hold about how the world should be. I don’t think cringe is like hate or leads to it. Hate is dangerous. Hate can arise when someone tries to make us not trust our instincts. Hate is something we rationalize and decide to feel. Cringe is in our lizard brains, at the base of our skulls. It’s always been real, but now we are reminded, through its name, of its power. Next time you get the feeling, remember that it has a name, it doesn’t have to curdle into hatred, and that it is okay.

Doomer

Do you feel so empty? Do you want to desire again? Are you a man? Are you in your mid-twenties? Do you stay up all night? Do you go on long walks? Did you grow up on the internet? Do you work a dead-end job? Do you listen to Radiohead? Are you haunted by the ghosts of futures that never happened? Do you know what weltschmerz means? Do you feel it? Do you feel too much? Do you feel too little? Do you hate? Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you do drugs? Does it help?

Will anything ever help?

Does Schopenhauer help? Do you watch as the world falls apart? Do you care? Do you think a lot about nothing? Are you a product of these times? Have you ever felt at home on this earth? What have you inherited? Do you remember how to laugh? Do you remember how to cry? Are you doomed?

My boyfriend, Ivan, is a millennial. I don’t think he knows the word doomer, but he says that my (best) friend Gideon is doomed. He tells me to watch out because doom is contagious and I was not vaccinated. Ivan is a Jew from Odessa, a refugee on paper, drowning in Ivy League loans and loving every minute of it. He believes that true struggle and immigrant parents made him immune to doom. He’s thirty-three, lives in LA, and simply can’t afford it. When he feels empty he makes movies. Doomers are stuck. They can’t create and they can’t consume. This is the source of the doom.

It’s true that Gideon was a mess. He took lots of pills. He lived on benzos and beers. He felt nothing and everything and it filled him with fear. He withdrew from society and thesisized so hard. Then our government decided that he was worth a big fat grant and he decided that life was worth living. He withdrew from the pills and played basketball with the boys. He renounced critical theory for the summer and started to listen to Joe Rogan. He built a greenhouse with his hands. He makes minimum wage, but it is enough. Can you be doomed and then undoomed? Is doom permanent? Can you undoom yourself?

Doomers have swallowed the final pill. No, it’s not the “red pill.” The “red pill” wakes you up, or fills you with incel rage and makes you hate and post and post and hate. Doomers are post-rage, enlightened boys in basements with stubble on their chins and glassy eyes that cry no tears. They have accepted their loneliness. The doomers’ pill is darker and more jagged, a catastrophic black capsule of apathy, denial, nihilism, fatalism, and defeatism. It might even be worse than those fake Xanax bars filled with fentanyl. It might be worse than OD’ing. When you OD it’s over, just like that. When you’re a doomer you’re doomed for it to be over, over and over and over again.

A bloomer is someone who has escaped this cycle. They are rare. They are older young men who saw some light and wanted to become the light. They are annoying and amazing, like a sunburn that turns into a tan. For example, they build stuff and plant stuff and create in the purest sense of creation with dirt and wood and seeds. It’s not art, but what is?

Edgelord

Gideon and Ivan say starting my glossary with the word autism is a total edgelord move. An edgelord is a person who, according to Urban Dictionary, “uses shocking and nihilistic speech and opinions that they themselves may or may not actually believe to gain attention and come across as a more dangerous and unique person.” An edgelord is a lover of both irony and sincerity. We/they live in the tiny space between these terms. Nothing feels real anymore (eerie). It’s edgelords who embrace this. It feels so good to accept the instability of our times. It feels so natural, fun, and comforting to add to this instability. Perhaps this loving embrace is dangerous. When I think of edgelords, I remember that we members of this system will never be able to truly fight it.

When I met Gideon on that rainy spring night, under the blankets in my dorm, on my phone, in my Instagram DMs, I thought he was just a classic edgelord. But he made me laugh. He made me uncomfortable and I love being uncomfortable. When I can pinpoint what is making me uneasy I feel less uneasy. When I am uncomfortable my thoughts race, and I love speed. Speed means my brain is working. A week after our internet encounter, he drove the two hours from him to me. We drank and we laughed and we thought. It was great and then it wasn’t and then it was and now I don’t know what it is.

Now it’s summer and those kids are still in those cages and I care and my one really good friend does not. He reminds me that my caring and his not caring are actually the exact same thing. Neither of us is doing anything to help. He is being sincere. Maybe his edgy statement, this declaration of complexity, this act of edgelording, will drive me to take some sort of action.

I ask my mom to donate my frequent-flier miles to help lawyers get down to that border. I cry hot tears to Ivan and ask him to tell me that Gideon is wrong. He tells me that Gideon crossed the line a long time ago, that he is no longer an edgelord with an internship. Now he’s a fascist with a government grant. Ivan tells me that he doesn’t like Gideon, but that my hot tears are selfish and useless and Gideon is right about this. We are no different from him. Why should I cry about those kids and not the kids starving in Yemen or in refugee comas in Sweden? I tell my friend I care because it’s my country and I paid taxes for the first time this spring. If you care about the kids, stop calling them those kids, he says. That’s exactly the issue with edgelords, if you walk on that thin line you are bound to slip and cross over to one side at some point.

My mom tells me that caring is enough. I know that she’s wrong. Caring is nothing. I sound like an edgelord when I say that, but I’m not trying to get a rise out of anyone. I’m just being honest.

Everyone calls Gideon an edgelord. He has a Fulbright, but he works at a construction site. He sends me a selfie in front of flowers he planted; he’s wearing a T-shirt that says God Bless America. I tell him it’s a stupid T-shirt. He tells me it’s not. I ask him if he’s being ironic when he says that he loves America. He tells me that he is not an ironic person. The refugee children have to be kept somewhere. I tell him that they aren’t allowed to touch each other, and that they are cold. He tells me that he wants proof, but doesn’t care enough to get it himself. I ask him again if he’s joking. He tells me that he’s not. I’m mad, but I’m thankful that he is so honest. He is doomed and undoomed and doomed again, caught in a cycle of bloom and decay, between irony and sincerity. Is irony the enemy? Are edgelords the enemy? (Am I the enemy?)

There is no usefulness in the malicious provocation that people associate with the common definition of the term, but that’s the great thing about our terrible times, everything is always changing, words are unstable, the term is no longer what it once was. It’s something better, a word for complexity creators (cringe). It’s something worse, a word for the wrong people who have crossed over into the dangerous right. To be completely transparent, it’s something that I have been called many times. It’s something people think that I am. In so doing, they have given me the job of actively defining the word in how I live and act and care. It feels good to have an identity. It’s a big responsibility.

Fail

Epic fail. To mess up big time. Fail is to get hurt, to fall, to break, to destroy. Fail is an accident and it is so funny. It is always funny. On the internet, fail is written in impact font and ALL CAPS. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL. The font makes it funnier. It’s the first meme I remember seeing. It’s 2006 and I am in the school library. I’m on Google for the first time. I want to watch those videos of people falling and breaking things and slipping and accidentally punching each other. FAIL Compilations. When things go wrong, it’s funny, that’s what FAIL means. Failure is a universal humor, the simplest kind. It brings us together. We all can laugh because we can see how and why it went wrong. There is a right way and a wrong way. That table is obviously not strong enough for all those people. The water in the pool is obviously frozen. The fence is obviously too high to jump. The mud is obviously slippery. You are obviously going to fall and we are all obviously going to laugh.

The fail meme is a meme of a bygone era, a long-ago time. A time when I could laugh with the crowd, when niche humor wasn’t the only funny thing there was. A time before each of us who grew up on the internet filled our squishy, spongy brains with hyper-specific signifiers. When I try to explain a meme to my mom or dad, I fail. They haven’t been loaded up with the signs and meanings that I have naturally mentally amassed since that day in the library in 2006. Other members of my generation have this same issue. We even make memes about this, our failure to understand anything but memes.

That fat Bugs Bunny is named Big Chungus. Do you even remember him? Should I remind you why he’s funny? No. Does this failure to communicate across time make him funnier? Yes. When I’m saying something and you think I mean something else, is that funny? Sometimes. At the end of every year there is a meme that compiles all the top memes of the year by month. If I asked you to identify the memes in this image, would you fail? Yes. If I was asked to define meme, would it be an epic fail? Yes. Big Chungus, the image, is from 1940, so it’s possible that Hitler saw him—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wikipedia says “An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme (/mi:m/, MEEM), is a cultural item (such as an idea, behavior, or style) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms.” A meme is democratic. Democracy makes it funny.

When democracy fails, is that funny? I don’t know. I know I laughed when Trump was elected. I laughed because I saw it coming, but knew it was wrong, like the slippery mud and the flimsy table and the pool with the frozen water. We should have seen it coming. Some of us deserved it. It was winter! Of course the pool was frozen. When we sat on the table we felt it wobble. The mud of the swamp is always slippery. Democracy didn’t fail, we did, and it sure was epic. EPIC FAIL.

Ghost

A ghost is not a phantom, but a person who up and dropped out of your life, whose memory haunts you.

Gifted

Millennials, whom I don’t identify with even though technically maybe I could, are always going on about how damaging it was to be told that they were all special, different, gifted. They’ll be quick to tell you all about the drama and trauma of the gifted child, the fast pace of the internet’s rise, the fact that they witnessed all that change faster than their little mushy brains could process it. They’ll either tell you that no one is gifted, or that only they are, and that it was so, so hard. They were the first generation to all get trophies at sports games. The losers and the winners, no difference. Everyone was the same. High-five the other team. Eat those orange slices. Take off your cleats. Drink your Gatorade. Put your trophy on the shelf with all the other ones. It is a gift. Grow up. Wear ripped jeans. Try to be different. Try to be quirky. Wear glasses even if you don’t need them. Be indie. That didn’t work either. Everyone was indie, no one was independent. Sit in the basement, filled with doom. Blame the helicopter parents. Blame Urban Outfitters distressed denim. Blame capitalism. Blame the gifted program at your school. Blame the teachers for telling you how special you were. Blame the world for showing you it was not true.

Pausing to think about it, the whole idea of generations just plays into capitalism by encouraging new identities in order to exploit and divide us and sell us stuff.

Gideon and Ivan are both millennials. They both went to public school. They both lived in the type of suburb where there were only a few exceptional children, shining lights. Their second-grade teachers were right. Ivan is spiritually ahead of his generation. My generation was born knowing how special we were. We don’t need to be different. We watch millennials as they try to be individualist, entrepreneurial, politically correct, up on indie music, and hard at work on their personal brands. We treasure our mumble rap. We laugh at some of their jokes, but most of their memes are weak. We Gen Zers are collectivist, nihilistic, and interested in the playfulness of identity. We know that nothing is stable, especially not the self. One minute you can be gifted, shining bright, in the front row, a National Merit Scholar, and the next you can be normal and sad and doomed and getting old, talking to me like your life depends on it. But these adjectives are all marketing. This is all just what they want us to think, to put a gulf between us.

Hyper

Hyperactive. Hyperloop. Hyperlink. Hypernormalization. Hyperbole. Hyperstition. Get Ritalin or Adderall or extra attention. Get from LA to San Francisco in a narrow tunnel. Get from here to there to everywhere with a click. Get born into a world shaped by narratives and lies. Get dramatic and make your own lies. Do it all very fast, faster than ever before. Do everything at hyperspeed because that’s the speed your world moves at! Everything changes all the time. Be hyperaware of that. Don’t hyperventilate. Welcome to your world. Everything here is hypercharged. You are hypermobile. You can do anything. So, do it the most! Do it to excess. Do it like you did when you ate refined sugar for the first time. Do it like you did it with frosting on your hands and face at your third birthday party. Do it like your mouth is filled with more Jolly Ranchers than teeth. They say you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But doesn’t everyone? They say you’re making stuff up, being hyperbolic. But isn’t everyone? Everything is so very very. There is so much. It’s so fast. Play Mario Kart. Play Grand Theft Auto. Steal your dad’s Tesla. Accelerate. Match the speed you feel everyone else moving at. Stay with the pack. Read some Nick Land. Hate it. Love it. Take some Vyvanse. Zoom. Doom. Zoom. Doom. Zoom. At hyperspeed we click, click, click, six-second videos, learn, forget, run, binge, purge, do, do, do. We go so fast and do so much because we can see that the end is near. We want to see who can get there first. Are we there yet? Will we be the last? Will we get to see how it all ends? We’re in a hypertunnel. Reality TV. Melting ice caps. Climate refugees. Automatic weapons. Mass extinction. The echoes of a vague shattering sound. We are so restless! We need to run. We run toward the light at the end of the narrow tunnel, even though we know that it’s an oncoming train.

IRL

IRL=In Real Life. Define in. Define real. Define life.

When are we going to meet IRL? I asked this question to Gideon and Ivan, before they were hands and feet and blood, while they still lived behind the black glass of my screens. Before they were in my dorm or in a hotel room or in the flesh, they were already in my world. They were in my real life. They were men made of little pixels, of messages they typed and sent to me, but they were still real. When we met IRL, in person, face-to-face, it was strange. I didn’t know your fingernails were like that. I didn’t know about that freckle, that one right there. At first, those fingernails and freckles felt less real than what was behind the glass. IRL is always something different, always changing, just like everything else. What I am used to is what is real. Lately I am used to nothing.

People want to know if I meet all my friends on the internet. I don’t! But I trust the algorithm just like I trust God. It’s all been written. There’s always a code to it. IRL or on the screen, it’s all intelligent design. If you’re reading this, future me, you’re reading this because of the way those powers that be have programmed the world, with all their trends and policies and imaginings made real. Because of some process or set of rules that someone made and that we all follow. Algorithms are made not just of numbers but of words. There is no outside-of-online. Everything is real.

Joke

Everything is wrong. We just got here and the world is already ending. When things go wrong, we laugh. When things seem pretend, they’re funny. When it turns out that it’s real, it’s even funnier.

Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. You’ve heard this one already. Says life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor . . . I am Pagliacci.” We are Pagliacci. We’ve taken the rainbow honk pill.

A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from an audience who believes it’s a joke.

“Smile, because it confuses people. Smile, because it’s easier than explaining what is killing you inside.” Heath Ledger really got it. He got it before we got it. He told it to us as we sat spilling popcorn on our laps at our first hard PG-13 movie in 2008. We smile. It feels good to smile. Then there’s the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in a movie theater just like the one we sat in.

People die on the screen and off it, sometimes at the same time. The separation between spectacle and real life broke. It stayed broken. Nothing is IRL and everything is IRL. Reality is what we make it. It feels good to smile.

Ketamine

Super acid, special K, kitty valium, the big neigh. Ketamine is an anesthetic, but it feels like a psychedelic and it works like an antidepressant and it’s the only party drug that provokes disassociation, so of course we like it. I heard it was for horses, but I put it up my nose anyways. Ketamine is what you imagined drugs felt like when you first heard about them. Coke is for millennials, for Patrick Bateman, for capitalists. Ketamine is for Gen Z and now it’s legal and I have a prescription. The doctor says, imagine that depression is an infection. You are in pain. SSRIs are Advil. Ketamine is an antibiotic. As we get older, our brains get less mushy and spongy. Things get broken. Ketamine repairs them. Synapses or neurons or gray matter or something like that. It’s the best drug. It’s our drug. I do it off of Kevin’s iPhone and on Maia’s desk and in the bathroom in Berlin and at the clinic in LA. Life is harsh and cruel and smiling makes my cheeks hurt. Doom is contagious, but maybe we’ve found a vaccine. I wonder if it causes autism.

Lost

“You are all a lost generation,” wrote Gertrude Stein, quoted by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph for The Sun Also Rises. I’m in Paris by the river and I can’t help but agree, although they weren’t talking to us. The Lost Generation came of age during World War I. A lot of them were lost in the trenches. The rest were lost, as in “disoriented, wandering, directionless,” in the streets and their lives. The older generations are worried about us, about 4chan and our smiling and our running with the pack. It’s better to be lost, “disoriented, wandering, directionless,” alone. There’s a big problem when the whole pack is lost. They watched us grow up. They babysat and bullied us. Now we date them. They wonder if we are going to be the most conservative generation. They are worried about all this honking and rejecting the self. What do they know? They’re doomed or bloomed. So what if we’re a little lost and in this desperation to be found we’ve found each other and in each other found something horrible and delicious. Some of us voted for Hillary. Some of us voted for Trump. Some of us voted for Harambe, the dead gorilla. Do the trolls even know what they’re doing or are they as lost as everyone else? Everyone is lost except for the bots. I don’t know if I believe in horseshoe theory, but I do know that I believe in that tiny, but infinitely deep, space between irony and sincerity. Ironic voting is still voting and ironic hate is still hate. Within that deep, dark, tiny space is a huge void, where separate realities drift past each other like children’s bubbles. Cheerful nihilism thrives. Come to think of it, I’m lost in that space. We all are. Gideon and I stand outside, sucking nicotine out of our little USB sticks. We can be lost forever, an abandoned satellite, Madeleine McCann, the Roanoke Colony, our baby teeth (yours and mine). No one knows where we are or where we are going. We are on the left and on the right, but we are all accelerating at the same rate. The faster it ends, the faster it can get better. Maybe we will reach a singularity. Full automation could be fun. Maybe we will see it end. Maybe we will see it start. Maybe we could have a war. A war with drones! A war just like the video games our older brothers play after school.

Me

Me! Me! Me! Me! A word impossible to define. A word that is fun to chant, but just like any chanted word the more you say it the less it means. A toy boat of a word. A word that demands distortion. Me. Me. Meme. That’s a meme. An idea shared. Something transmitted, something that belongs to everyone. A meme is mine and yours. A fat Bugs Bunny, universal enough to make us all laugh. All the “me’s” of our generation laughing at one thing. The self is so over. Let us all laugh together as one. Me. My first word. Not mama or papa. Me. Maybe it was just a baby sound, a test of the vocal cords, total nonsense, but I’m from LA.

Nerf

Nerf is a word that leaked off of a toy and into the video game world and back out into our Gen Z vocabs. I like it when words leak like that. We can squeeze and shape language and wash ourselves clean with it.

Nerf is an acronym, “non-expanding recreational foam.” Neon toy guns. Automatics. Soft bullets. Lots of them. Blasters, not guns. Still automatic. The packages never say guns. You wouldn’t buy your son a gun. Or would you? Who am I to assume? Running around with our socks on, jumping over the banister, hiding from the barrage of older brothers’ gentle bullets. War in the playroom. That’s what nerf is, but not what it means.

Older brothers and bigger boys took the word and used it in Call of Duty. Nerf is a verb now. I’m gonna nerf all you faggots, give me that grenade. It means to weaken or make less dangerous, usually in the context of weakening something in order to balance out a game, and is most commonly heard through headsets. Anyone can be nerfed, hit with those soft bullets, if someone decides they are a threat to the balance of our fragile game. When we nerf people IRL, we don’t use foam bullets or digital bullets, sometimes we use real bullets, but mostly we use words.

A prevailing theory is that if we want to play fair, we should nerf rich white men. I guess that’s sort of what #METOO is. A collective barrage of soft bullets against the wrinkled skin of the patriarchy, but I have my doubts. I don’t know who should be weakened. I don’t know how to restore balance to a game that has always been unfair. We’re all implicated. To exist is to be a soldier in this war. Birth is conscription. We have all been training. What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t fight? What if the big boys don’t tell me what team I’m on? What if my socks slide on the hardwood floor? What if they find me hiding in the playroom? What if they laugh at me? What if an orange foam bullet hits me in the eye, what then? Will I cry? Did I deserve it? Don’t we all?

Oppressed

Being depressed is not the same thing as being oppressed. I am depressed, so I know what that word means. I have never been oppressed, so I struggle to define it. Depressed, I am down, in the ground, in the moist earth, in a hole I dug myself. Nobody put me here. I clawed at the earth with my own hands, like I was digging to China or a tunnel out of some death camp. I don’t know why I wanted out or where I was trying to go. I don’t know how long I spent digging, but I have been lying here cold and alone for quite some time.

If I was oppressed, there would be a shovel and someone holding the shovel and I would not be able to get out on my own. There would be others like me in holes near mine and others holding shovels keeping them down. The shovel holders would be benefiting from their actions. They would have some words to justify why they dug. Maybe it would be fun for them. Maybe they were convinced of some danger. Maybe they would just be following orders. Maybe it would be the way it was always done. That’s the most terrifying possibility. The shovel holders might not even see the shovels in their hands. They might not even see the people they kept in the holes. They might go to school and work and vacation to the beach and eat spaghetti and have babies and struggles of their own, all while holding the shovels and keeping watch at the holes. Because that’s the way it’s always been done. Always is bad. Change is scary. Doom is not inevitable. Every now and again we should all check our hands for shovels. Chances are our hands are full and we have been digging for a long time. When you are at the beach or the Italian restaurant, look around and see who is not there. Even if you didn’t dig the hole, there is a good chance you’ve walked by the empty lot where the holes are located. There’s a good chance you didn’t see them and didn’t want to see them, even if you’ve spent years with your hands in the dirt digging your own hole, even if you’ve settled into that hole and feel comfortable there among the roots and worms.

To rise up and fight oppressive forces always takes a movement, a collective, a unified group. It should never be the job of the buried people to claw their way out alone. They have dirt in their mouths and eyes and still they have tried to get out. They spent years carving little tunnels between their adjacent holes and strategizing and rising and getting pushed right back down. They say you need a support system when you are depressed. That no one beats this disease, as they call it, alone, but depression is not oppression. It can be a by-product, but it is not the same thing. I put myself here and I will get myself out and I will try to help others. We cannot create a hierarchy of pain, but we have a hierarchy of needs at our disposal.

Like fireworks or electric scooters or huffing glue, irony can be fun, but also dangerous. If a joke isn’t going to make someone pause and think and act and look at their hands for their shovel then maybe the joke isn’t very funny? Even if it feels good and makes you feel smart and singular, like you get it. Most good jokes are ironic. All good things are dangerous.

I was born with a shovel in my hands, and I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if any of us do. Ivan and Gideon don’t, but they are not women. When I hear a baby cry I hear it like it’s my own child. I don’t rush to help it, but I feel like I should. That’s my lizard brain working. Back in the caves, when survival was even harder, we took better care of children we did not birth. That communal care is why we survived the ice ages and the saber-toothed tigers and the Crusades. Maybe once the ozone melts it will come in handy again. I tried to make Ivan and Gideon listen to the recording of the kids detained at the border crying for their parents, but they didn’t want to hear it. I know that even if they had heard it, it wouldn’t have meant much to them. Gideon says he wants to have a baby. Maybe once he does he will feel differently about the cries of children whose faces he’s never seen. Maybe then he could put his face he gave his child onto one of those screams. Maybe then we would do something. Ivan says the recording wouldn’t mean much to him because he knows there are children crying, touch-starved, cold everywhere in the world and they have always been crying and they always will be. I know that he wouldn’t say this, that he doesn’t identify with the label on his immigration papers, but the kids on the recording are like him. He was once one of the children, hungry and scared, but he was in his mother’s arms and that made all the difference. His shovel is not as strong as mine. He is less complicit, but I don’t think there’s a point in making some hierarchy of complicity. It’s a spectrum, but there is no point in breaking it down with words, demicomplicit, transcomplicit, bicomplicit. We all live in the same cave. There is a danger. Children are crying and most of us don’t care, or do care but don’t act. We should all feel complicit. We should all care. I don’t know why caring comes so naturally, yet I have never taken any action.

Do I not care enough? Do I care because caring feels good and I want to feel good? Do I care because the tears I cry make me virtuous? Do I want people to see my tears? Are my tears my only action? Is this inability to act doom? Yes. I think it is. They were right, doom is contagious. My doom has spread down to the border and keeps those children cold in their metallic blankets. I cry. What other action is there to take? What does it mean to drop your shovel? I don’t know much, but I do know that no one should be trapped in a hole alone. No one should be buried in an unmarked grave. No one should have their children taken from them. No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance? Maybe all I have written, this flowery extended metaphor about holes and dirt, is a mere exercise of my privilege, a little fancy dig of my shovel. Writing about other people’s oppression is an exercise that ultimately may have removed some weight from my own shoulders, some dirt from my chest. It has nothing for anyone who needs it. Gideon would say if you have time to write down a glossary, you do not need help digging yourself out and just want to feel better. Gideon wants to feel better, but he would never profit directly from other people’s struggle. That is reprehensible. I may as well have written this with the tip of my shovel on newly packed earth.

Pill

Red pill. Blue pill. One pill. Two pill. Mad pill. Sad pill. Pills are ideas that change our body chemistry, the way our brains work, everything about us. We take them when we are in pain. They make us feel better in their absoluteness. They make us feel worse in the long run. On the internet, in a world-class example of semantic shift, there is a new type of pill. They are idea pills and just as dangerous as real pills.

Here’s what they say. Red pill makes you uncontrollably angry and entitled. Green pill fills you with conspiracy theories. Black pill dooms you. Honk pill makes you laugh at it all. A choice in Morpheus’s hands. Wake up and see how far the rabbit hole goes, or go back to how it was. Wake up. Be woke. Once a pill works there is no going back. That is that. Your body and brain are chemically changed. We are always already bluepilled, per the incels. Blue pill is what we get in our vaccines, and vaccines are mandatory. Red pill is a choice and a hard one, again per the incels: the choice to see the world how it really is, a place where women play you and Jews control you and you should be in control. The promise of being awake is alluring. Lots of young men take it. When they take it they awake in a new world, but that new world is a construction, even more of a construction than the old one. It’s a new world with a single and totalizing narrative. It’s the world we must make sure this one does not become.

This winter, I was honestly afraid I was getting redpilled. I began to hate phrases like safe space and the idea of identity politics and infantilization. It felt like I was being infected by some awful disease, so I took a bunch of (blue) Adderall and read a bunch of books as fast as I possibly could. Reading is not like a pill. Ideas on each page can be snacked upon and digested, at whatever speed your body works. It’s healthier that way. Most things are healthier if they are done slowly. A pill is one fast thing, one color, a totalizing idea. Books are the opposite, full of so much, rainbowy.

I go to the ketamine clinic because I like to feel. I want to feel, but I don’t want to feel like I’m:

I want to know that there are others like me. I want to meet them IRL. I’m anti-pill. I’m straight edge. I’d rather cut myself than do Xanax. No, I’d rather cut myself then do Xanax. I want to calm myself through feeling and unfeeling. I want a pill for that.

I wonder what would have happened if Neo grabbed both of the pills in Morpheus’s open hands and stuffed them both down his throat. Would he have ended up like me? Stuck in the middle and loving it and hating it and loving it?

Quirk

We all have quirks, those little things that make us endearing, those tiny trivial differences that make us matter. Gideon and I could be exactly alike. The world probably doesn’t need us both, but maybe someone in this world needs to see the way he sucks off all the meat of a peach pit and keeps it in his mouth so gently and for so long like a precious stone that needs smuggling or a robin egg that needs incubating. We are all eccentrics. It’s 2018 and there is no other way to be. Being weird isn’t weird anymore. Quirky is cool is quirky is cool. Until it is not, and you have a tattoo of a mustache on your finger and the bangs you cut weirdly short will not grow out right.

Key and historic quirks, -cores, aesthetics:

Quirky reached its peak when I was in seventh grade. Everything I thought was cool could be found at the same store, and if it wasn’t there this week it would be the next. Manufacturing speeds accelerated and matched the growth and emergence of trends. But millennials fought back. Individuality felt like their God-given consolation prize, their post-soccer-game orange slice time, a part of life that could not be erased, but it was. There was New Girl and Moonrise Kingdom and pop-punk. Trends went viral. Nothing belonged to anyone. Individuality was stripped of its rite of passage status. The only forms of revolt were a complete rejection of quirk, normcore—“an anti-aspirational attitude, a capitalization of the possibility of misinterpretation”—or an embrace of trends, signifiers, and clothing that were too controversial or aesthetically unappealing to be mass-produced. Eventually these forms of revolt became quirks themselves and the quirks ended up at Urban Outfitters, near the Ramones T-shirts and the ripped sweaters.

If ugly can become beautiful and the 90s have been cool since the 90s and girls born in the year 2000 dress just like the pop stars who topped the charts on the day they popped out, then nothing will ever be able to go anywhere. If we exist within boundaries, we cannot push them. That is why certain members of Gen Z have embraced them on Musical.ly. They all lip-synch to whatever song is trending and perform identical little rituals and dances to go along, to not be alone. This is why other members spend hours in chat rooms looking for the group that best matches their niche ideology: feminist libertarians, monarchists, queer ecosocialists, young Hegelians, transfascists. As Gen Z comes of age, we find the packs within the packs. An embrace of the pack, a drive to follow and fit in, to let go of our fetishization of quirk is new. We have come so far that the act of fitting in becomes the most rebellious thing one can do. I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now.

Rage

Rage seems to be the most important emotion of our times. Everyone is angry. If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention! It doesn’t matter whom you are angry at, you should be angry at someone. Rage is an energy, like wind in a turbine or sun on a panel or water in a wheel. If we can harness it, then maybe we can save ourselves.

Aren’t you angry? we get asked. We left you a dying earth. Shouldn’t you be doing something about it? Shouldn’t you at least be mad? I don’t think that I’ve ever felt rage.

Once, Gideon punched a wall until his knuckles bled. He laughed when I told him he was just angry because he didn’t get what he wanted. He laughed and asked me if there was any other reason to be angry at all. Rage stems from entitlement, and entitlement is not always something to be ashamed of. We are all entitled to safety and justice (whatever that means?) and probably a lot more. When these needs are not met, when they are stolen or withheld, rage seems like a very proper response. Rage seems like a means of survival. Punching a wall seems like a fine enough use of rage. It won’t save you, but it helps. Maybe one day we can get all the angry young men together who feel like something that should be theirs, always was theirs, is being taken from them. We could set them up in a field with a huge wall and they could punch it all day long and we could harvest the strength of their punches and power a town for a night or two. It wouldn’t have to be a small town. I’m sure we would have many wall-punching men driving in from across the state, to be a part of something that mattered, to use their anger for something real. If I could send them all to fight with the enemy for a year I would. I think it would be good for their rage. Their natural and primal male rage, not a symptom of toxic masculinity, just a symptom of being a man with thousands of years of knowledge on how to conquer, protect, kill, define, destroy, avenge, maim, make, smash, fix, pillage, and build buried deep at the back of their skulls. Sometimes I feel a twinge of rage, a surge of denied entitlement when I remember that I do not possess this same ancient knowledge, even though it is something I feel I deserve. The idea that I feel like I deserve something gives me another tiny twinge of what might be the first symptoms of rage.

Safe

A safe place used to be a place where you were not going to get hurt. Now a safe place is a place where you are not going to feel hurt. Feelings became facts at some point between 2016 and now. When boys are gentle I am always surprised. When the members of a space decide to call it safe they should be thanked. Everyone should be kept safe; most of us already are. The people who came before us left a dying planet, but they have decided to provide us with some safe spaces. Thank God. In these spaces I will not feel hurt. When the fires come, I know where I will be, right by the self-care station with the mandalas and the chai.

Tender

To be tender, to be vulnerable, to be understanding, to be good. Jenny Holzer put letters up on a movie marquee: “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” Gen Z girls and gays take these words and make them the words underneath their names on Twitter and Instagram. Everyone wants to be tender. Smol beans, soft bois, tender queers, delicate flowers, a/sexual aesthetic, shy, dressed in pastel primary colors, murmuring “henlo nice 2 meet u.” Why? Tender things must be protected. We all are afraid. The world is scary. Health insurance is expiring. Maybe if we are tender, someone will protect us.

Did Jenny Holzer mean that we ourselves should be soft or that we should be gentle with others or that these things go hand in hand and those hands are called tenderness? Those are hands we should all hold. We all deserve safe spaces, places to go and be held and color in mandalas if that helps. We all must create these safe spaces in our own lives for others. We don’t need meditative coloring books. All we need is tenderness. How hard can that be? Probably very soft.

Troll

UwU

This isn’t a word. It’s an emoticon. It’s a feeling. It’s the face you type when “omg” or “awwwww” is not enough to convey how cute, how warm, how soft, how tender, how pure, how wholesome something is. U is an eye. W is a mouth. U is another eye. UwU is you. UwU is a string of letters that means something, the same thing to everyone who has seen it before. Doesn’t that mean it’s a word? How is it pronounced? If it is a word, what language is it in? Is it part of a language in a fetal stage, WuwWuwism? Something being built right before our eyes? Can we add new words to this language? Or is that just dumb as fuck?

It’s a new word, from an unborn language, but it already has a history and a connotation other than its original meaning. It’s unfortunately seen as creepy or cringe. The word men use when trying to appeal to teenage girls. There are entire blogs dedicated to documenting “UwU Culture,” as they call it. Every year since 2015, it has been collectively redefined. Cute. Creepy. Cringe. Cringe (furry). Always in flux, just the way language has always been, but now with hyperlinks.

Virtue

Virtue, the word, has had a rough go of it lately. It sets off sensors in the center of the deepest and oldest parts of the brain. Virtue. We have said it too much, like when we were little and we said “toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toyboat, toyboat, toyboat, toboayt, tobayat, toabyat.” Virtue is nothing but a tongue twister, a game, a competition. Who has the most? Who can show it off the best? Who is watching my virtue? Whose virtue am I watching?

Virtue signaling, as we know it in our digital and academic Gen Z circles, is the practice of showing you care, but without putting in any other work. I care, and I want you to know that I care, because maybe that will make you care about me. After every school shooting a post, #NEVERAGAIN. All black is worn to award shows. #NEVERAGAIN. Long paragraphs denounce rapists we’ve never met. A callout. Special filters on profile photos, flags of the country attacked. Loud sparkly signs. #NEVERAGAIN. As a whole, us zoomers hold such signaling in disdain, but within each is a kernel of hope. A sincere little piece of hope. A hope that it never happens again, but then of course there is an again and another again and another. A hope that somehow, something you post matters. A hope that someone cares about you. I hope that you matter.

In a few isolated churches across our nation, mostly Pentecostals, Charismatics, and other evangelicals, there still exists a tradition of snake handling. This ritual consists of holding venomous snakes and not being bitten, in order to show the other churchgoers your piety. A gentle snake is a signal of your virtue. Hundreds have died.

I wonder if we’d have as much virtue signaling as we do if posts could bite. Is the reward worth the risk? Are you pure? Do you matter? Is anyone ready to really hold the snake?

Woke

If you took the red pill you have woken up, but that’s a very different type of woke. The red pill is for the right and woke is for the left or maybe it’s the same type of awake, the type of alertness that hurts. Maybe everything has always been the same, just circles and spirals and mirrors. Sometimes being awake is painful and all you want to do is curl up in some safe space with someone’s or no one’s arms around you. When we wake up and see the world differently, start to recognize power structures, see the algorithms set up, realize our own part in it all, how do we know that we are all waking up in the same reality anymore? I live in clown world. I’ve touched both of Morpheus’s hands. I feel safe all the time. Maybe you wake up somewhere else. When I first heard the word woke, I was fifteen and on social justice Twitter. Now I hear antisemitic New World Order conspiracy theorists using it, but it means the same thing.

I shouldn’t try to speak for my generation; this is just a preliminary glossary, some words of interest, some words that have defined us and some words we have defined.

X

Every word here was once written somewhere else for the very first time, cross-bred or loaned or imagined from nothing. Right now I’m probably living before some word you can’t imagine your life without. I’d like to shout out John Milton, the English language’s most prolific neologizer and creator of more than six hundred words (including the hits lovelorn, pandemonium, and irresponsible), and to quickly note the nine most common ways words are created:

Young

There’s a meme that goes, would you rather go crazy or go stupid? I don’t know why it always makes me laugh. Maybe I laugh just because I don’t know why. The mystery of it gets me. Being young is having a million questions while loving a mystery that will never be solved. Being young is feeling like the end is near. We have climate change. They had nuclear war. Everyone had something. For as long as we stretch forward there will always be something. Being young is going crazy and going stupid all at once. Being young is about extremes and Gen Z is so young and so extreme. Desperate times call for desperate measures. All times are desperate. Desperation is part of being human. I’m desperate to define myself and redefine myself because that is what it means to be young. Remembering that you won’t be young forever is hard when you have been young forever.

Zoomer

We are called Generation Z. Z is the last letter of the alphabet, but we will not be the last generation. It feels like that sometimes, but feelings are not always facts and some of us Gen Zers have babies of our own. They don’t have a name yet, but we will probably call them Generation Alpha. They are not the beginning. They are a beginning, just like we were. We are zoomers. We are speeding toward something. The earth spins so fast. Sometimes it goes so fast that I want to get off, but most of the time I am thankful for the speed.

I am a zoomer and we were, after all, built for this. I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going. I wonder how much will change before it’s all over. We are zooming into the future where everything matters, where we matter, where what we do together matters. Being young is so cool. We are crazy and stupid and full of ideas. Everyone who has been young knows this. I’m sure you remember being filled with this brief and powerful and perfect feeling. The feeling that you and your friends and everyone your age are the most important people in the world. I am so spoiled and lucky and safe, and every wish I’ve ever made has come true at least a tiny bit, well maybe not the pony, not world peace, not now that I’ve said them out loud.

We are the future of the planet, held together by the same meme signifiers and memories of school shootings, united by how spongy our brains were when those big things happened. I don’t think the hyperpolarized members of my generation will magically come together and collectively accelerate us into some full automation utopia. I don’t know what we will destroy together, the national parks we will pillage, the deserts we will invade, the animals that will die out under our care, what will happen when those resources run out, whose children we will put in cages.

We are what we have been called and diagnosed with and what we write in our bios. Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but still you can’t leave. The floors are made of that IKEA wood; we cannot use a spoon to escape. Feelings are not facts unless we decide that they are. We can escape by creating. Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now. We are not doomed as long as we keep going. We are algorithmically and tenderly filled with life and vaccines and nicotine vapor. We are the products of our time and soon our time will be a product of us. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that wonderful? I can imagine a world where the same word means both. We already have our own language.