How to know if you’re a Gen Z-er in the Middle of a Pandemic

The world has taken these last thirty days in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic to adjust their lifestyles along the lines of quarantine. But if you’re a Gen Z-er, not much of your life has changed being that 90 percent of it is spent online anyway (the other 10 percent is typically spent in the South Orange Ville, the Reservation or at Panera Bread “studying”). If anything, life for a Gen Z-er has gotten worse. 

Granted, Gen Zers don’t go outside much unless it’s to play a sport, walk to your car, or a local CVS to buy ingredients for a Tik Tok recipe you found at 3 am. So with this quarantine, it’s very difficult for local Gen Zers to cope with.

A majority of their day is spent on Instagram complaining about how much they hate being stuck in the house, or how excruciatingly bored they are. Everyday their phones remind them that their screen time has “increased by 17 percent” since the week before, and everynight the blue light strains their eyes so much that they don’t sleep until 3 am, sometimes 5 am. 

Highschool couples are in something worse than heartbreak: they are taking it back to times of middle school where one would fall asleep on Facetime and send a screenshot to their social media blushing at the time stamp of the precise 8 hours, 3 minutes and 1 nanosecond that they spent together. They go to sleep to the sounds of the early morning birds chirping and wake up to mid-day radio stations playing from a distant Google Home or Alexa. 

For Gen Zers with older siblings who took eccentric yoga classes at college before they we kicked out, one might be advised to “go outside” or “take in the fresh air”. But a Gen Z-er will only last a few seconds outside before they recall a Tik Tok dance they stayed up until 3 am learning and proceed to dance to the song that they’ve memorized in their head. 

Separation anxiety from their phones make it incredibly hard to get through 7 classes everyday for 45 minutes each. At the end of the day when they’ve finally submitted their assignments, they most likely ended up learning way more from Tiger King on Netflix about the rise to fame and demise of a true “Flordia Man” headliner, Joe Exotic, that came to be with his laughable feud with animal rights activist Carole Baskin than they did in an online gym class learning about the rules of basketball. 

When boredom strikes, a Gen Z-er might look on Instagram and be met with 100 consecutive posts saying “until tomorrow”. One might also see chainmail Instagram stories of student athletes, who’ve been deprived of their sports practices with their teams, challenging others to do 25 push ups straight. In the process, a Gen Z-er might cringe at what Instagram has come down to in the midst of a pandemic. 

If you do any one of these activities during a pandemic, our prayers are with you. At least you haven’t gotten as bad as celebrities singing to “Imagine” by John Lennon or recording a video of themselves clapping for nurses around the nation from the balcony of their multi millionaire home.