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I just spent a week in Italy with my dad, stepmom, and two Gen Z half-sisters. Read on for photos and thoughts ๐
I am 27, and the oldest of four siblings โ a full brother, Tyler (25), and two half-sisters, born to my father and my stepmother, Kaia (15) and Siena (14). When I found out Tyler couldnโt make our familyโs Italy trip due to work obligations back in Los Angeles, I realized this would be the first time I spent an extended amount of time sibling bonding on a family vacation with only my sisters.
I moved to New York when my sisters were still tiny children โ just 5 and 6, respectively. Itโs always interesting to see the ways in which they grow and mature on trips back to LA, but usually, our time there is splintered. Kaia, a sophomore in high school, has AP classes to study for; Siena, a social butterfly, has friends to see. Furthermore, these days, Iโm usually staying at Tylerโs Koreatown apartment when I visit, rather than my mother or fatherโs houses.
Perhaps because of the minimal amount of TikTok videos Iโve seen (I know Iโm getting old because that app gives me a headache and I derive absolutely no pleasure from it) and news Iโve heard about Euphoria (I donโt watch that show because I didnโt like the overlaid narration in the series premiere, but perhaps at some point Iโll give it another chance), I thought my sisters would be teenagers from a totally different world, with an entirely different set of problems.
But, maybe due to the lack of unlimited cellular data, or more likely just to the sheer endurance of societal norms, I was surprised to find that โ based on my totally representative, all-encompassing, unbiased sample size of two teens Iโm related to โ teenagers now actually arenโt so different than my friends and I were in our own teenage years, about a decade ago.
The same issues that we were once faced with present themselves in equal measure to Gen Z โscreenagersโ (a term Iโd never heard prior to when Siena leveraged it against our dad during this vacation, while he was looking down and texting photos of the Italian landscape to his own sisters; โDad, youโre being such a screenager right now!โ).
Early heartbreak, body dysmorphia, and depression still exist, and while Gen Z-ers may use new social media sites to cope with those sentiments, the underlying feelings remain largely the same.
Shockingly, never once did I hear my sisters describe technology as the root of an emotional problem (i.e., โShe has more followers than me and that makes me feel insecureโ). For them, platforms like TikTok seem mostly to be a new way to give voice to those same teenage maladies that have persisted throughout time, to visually represent the chaos of a world moving ever-faster while the degree of attention that complex adolescent emotions require remains the same.
And who are we, as millennials, to say that spending hours perfectly editing a TikTok video is any less conducive to a teenagerโs emotional growth than sitting down with a pen and paper and journaling? Both activities require time and attention. Maybe different times do, in fact, call for different measures.
Equally as surprising a discovery for me: itโs not all ennui! There is still a goofy teenage optimism and joie de vivre that contemporary media would have us think disappeared entirely. One of my favorite moments of the trip was, during our last dinner all together in Lucca, when Siena looked at Kaia, over a plate of delicious spinach and ricotta ravioli in walnut sauce, and asked simply, โWhatโs your favorite movie?โ It made me resoundingly happy to know teenagers still have the attention span to watch full movies. Maybe the Cannes Film Festival x TikTok partnership isnโt such a bad sign for the future of independent cinema after all.
Overall, I feel incredibly lucky and blessed to have such direct insight into the Gen Z mind. Itโs a unique experience to be 13 years older than your youngest sibling, but itโs one I certainly wouldnโt trade for anything.
