The elephant in this holiday party—the identity gap between Gen-Z and Millennials, and literally everyone else.

Gen-Z and Millennials are history's first generations to grow up with the awareness that we are both constantly watching and being watched. Commentary fixates on the consequences of such a phenomenon but overlooks the intimacy of this awareness. There's a grief in carrying this collective identity, from both having it and not, in experiencing what those closest to us never have. At every table, the gap between us and other generations is distinctly unprecedented, manifesting in our self-awareness, culture, relationships, and worldview.

This underlying, chronic, skin-flushing sense of constant observation was palpably present during COVID. We grew more reliant than ever on the rush of connection—facilitated by watching others' lives, providing a survival mechanism that maintained the illusion of closeness. We recharged by watching each other perform the mundane online: adopting patterns we liked, banking traits for when we would inevitably be watched in real time once this was all over, documenting our lifestyle changes for our closest friends to witness.

It was the allure of constant half-intimacies during COVID that catalysed our identity formation—cementing into our cultural consciousness this balance of being one of many watchers whilst also being watched ourselves. We started to believe that the online sphere could be both aspirational escapism and instant gratification. This daily habit strengthened a sense of distant community, which fostered a new, distant sense of self. I look back at COVID with, oddly, a sense of fondness. I undertook an identity bootcamp, acquiring tastes for things I'd kept putting off investigating before lockdown. I developed a trial-and-error process for searching out cultural guidance to steer my path into adulthood, finding new aspirational references in film, celebrity icons, and political events—all happening thousands of kilometres away. Yet these references felt most true to what I was experiencing in my triangular studio apartment.

Whilst luxurious, the practice of constantly consuming such high-quality work left me with the feeling that my sense of self was growing reliant on cultural items that really had no relationship to me other than a one-way admiration, or that said admiration was tainted by what I wanted to aspire to. This feeling is often true when forming one's future, when an understanding of observation is an adaptive fixture in the subconscious. The sense of self is fractured beyond what one knows to be true of themselves. It has grown, accompanied by so many others; the followers, the recruiter doing their routine scan, the far removed family member, the influencer that follows you, the art curator or editor that you feel like you could've been in another life because you’ve been following others documenting their lives now for over 5 months. What would they think of me liking this? Would I lose their potential admiration?

Growing up in the online space means having this additional, intangible source of identity that is bigger than one's individual circle, like a third space: my body, my mind, and now, the perception of me. The identity of Gen-Z and millennial generations exists in the context of this sort of social panopticon that any other generation can’t ever, for better or for worse, completely understand. While each generation has, of course, had points of difference during their formative periods, of which plays out in historical points such as music, trends and political movements, the generational gap between Gen-Z and Millennials with any generation that has come before them is so cognitively significant that there is a collective identity difference that feels as concrete as something of a linguistic difference. Understanding each other through shared human experiences is becoming increasingly complex every year, as so many community-based generational traditions that shaped the generations before were upended. Attempts by the latter to understand the former will, as a sort of modern-day folklore, always come up short. And vice versa. To put it bluntly, we have lived in different realities.

It's most prominent in the little moments—the human intimacy of heritage traditions now rendered irrelevant. This creates a self-consciousness in Gen-Z and Millennials: you're at a certain distance from older generations, unable to access the intimate relatability that previous generations enjoyed so freely. Like getting familial advice for an in-person job interview, now handled by AI agents and screening processes. Or makeup advice from your mum for wedding pictures, when her experience is essentially irrelevant because they'll be taken with a hyper-realistic iPhone camera. Even phoning a company—what was once a casual inquiry for a potential job opportunity (as my parents kept assuring me would be a slam-dunk technique for landing a job after I graduated)—is now met with an automated answering system: 'Press one to leave a message, press two if you would like to book an appointment with our consultants.'

From the most hunter-gatherer utilitarian perspective, the phone is a tool. In its most existential meaning-making role, it is a reconfiguration of the human experience. Creating a reality gap running so deep between the Gen-Z and Millennial generations and those who came before us, that we now often look at each other in social situations with smiles that really say, “Oh, bless you, you wouldn't understand. You wouldn’t understand what it’s like to grow up with our world leaders generating political propaganda from Sora and posting it on ‘Truth Social’ with no regard for decorum. We couldn't understand what it’s like to use a phone book or feel comfortable sending a handwritten letter to anyone in my immediate circle.”

Difficulty in connecting with other generations through lived experiences is also true of the generation that must live with the possibility that their generation was the last to have (insert inter-generational human memory). We share a deep anticipatory grief for the next generation—mourning the connections they'll never know. Some express this through cultural conservatism, others through empathetic cultural adaptation. This collective loss is too amorphous to confront directly, yet it lingers in every room, at every family holiday.