Picture, picture, smile for the picture Pose with your brother, won't you be a good sister? Everyone thinks that we're perfect Please don't let them look through the curtains. In her debut single "Dollhouse" last year, Generation Z artist and idol Melaine Martinez plays a little girl’s doll who ends...
Sorry Kitty is lead singer of the K-pop band Saccharine.
Her nickname is a blend of Super Junior's 2009 hit Sorry, Sorry and the still popular cartoon Hello Kitty, and influenced by the post-ironic cat-meme era she was born into. She earned it for her allegedly sad expression as a child, but later made it her legal name as a provocative statement of Asian pride. While Korean women in the entertainment industry undergo canthoplasties and other plastic surgeries to look “less Asian”, Sorry embraces her Asian features and is unknowingly signaling a new trend that will unfold after her career takes off in 2030.
Sorry grows up as an only child of a Korean PR professional / Tigermother and a British DJ / sound engineer who moved to Korea to work as an English teacher when the job market dried up in Europe.
"Hey guys. I just wanted to ask - just a random question. Uhmm. Am I - like - ugly or pretty?"
- You don't have to dig deep into online archives to find a whole pageantry of kids as young as 10 years old unloading their most personal angst for complete strangers to comment on. And the more insecure they appear, the more likely they seem to attract trolls whose dubious netiquette allows them to filter through comments of this type: "DONT WANT TO SOUND MEAN BUT URE A F***ING DOG." (censoring added). In other words, the ones who most desperately need reassurance from their faceless peers are the ones who are the most likely get bulldozed by the 'Haters'. And rarely do any respondents care to unmask the more existential questions that simmer immediately underneath the Snow White narrative: “Am I likeable? Am I loveable?”
Millennials are more stressed than other generations. All generations worry more now than in the past when the economy looked more promising, but young adults feel the blues the most. With current unemployment and underemployment rates, soaring student loans and generally bleak opportunities, it is hardly surprising that young adulthood in the 2010s is stressful. The reality today is in stark contrast to MTV’s happiness study from half a decade earlier, which found the corresponding age group to be far more optimistic back then than they appear to be today.
It’s not cool to have your dreams messed up before you even got a shot at them. But from my generation X perspective I am somewhat surprised that millennials are walking off with the "stress award". A fact less known than the oft-cited injustices experienced by millennials these days is that generation X was the hardest hit by the recession and it's aftermath. Think being underemployed and underpaid is hard in your 20s? Try that in your 40s! All while warding off house foreclosures and figuring out how to fund your children's orthodontic treatment and skyrocketing educational expenses.
So while millennials worry about not getting around to live the American Dream, gen-X got to live it for a while - until they lost it all to the bank. But somehow they just trudge along, often too exhausted to notice or say anything. Maybe it's the nihilist in us. The self-loathing cynic. Or maybe there are simply too few of us to get much press.
In my post Online privacy and the cyberbaby-generation I addressed what I think is a distorted narrative when online sharing habits and privacy concerns are discussed. Despite the fastest adoption of social media happening among the older cohorts, a slew of studies and articles seem to limit their focus to young people's internet habits. When grown ups distribute content, often intimate details of (unconsenting?) minors over a vast social media landscape, they are affecting another person's online reputation. Even if most parents share less incriminating content about their kids than kids share about themselves, there is something profoundly different about falling victim to other people's stupidity than to your own when regretful content is made public. If we overlook the "oversharenting" trend among our own parenting generation, we don't only fail to notice the asymmetry between the generations (children don't share content about parents as much as vice-versa, often because they are too young to join in the game), but we implicitly assume young people are less adept at protecting their online reputation.
