In August 2020, President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance — the parent company of TikTok — to sell their American assets. That order would prove to be a death knell for TikTok: Four and a half years later, in January, the Supreme Court upheld a law to ban it. On the app, and among the generation that uses it most, panic ensued.
Regardless of one’s views on the banning of TikTok, the greatly histrionic reaction of young American adults to losing the app reveals a greatly pressing and potentially dangerous truth defining our generation: We are desperately starved of community and a greater sense of comradery, and we are reliant on social media to satiate that hunger.
This desire is completely reasonable when one considers the world that Generation Z has grown up in. The generations before us have all benefited from outlets that promote socialization and community-building. Scrolling on their phones when “spending time” with friends was not an option, so they spent their days shopping at the mall, for example, or going to the movie theater. At school, their classes and clubs were all in-person, and group projects meant actually meeting face-to-face with their group. All of these activities fostered friendships and community.
Our generation grew up in a time where many of those experiences were actively being supplanted by technology. To compound this digitization of social time, the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 caused a large majority of schools to convert to online learning, with some even permanently replacing in-person learning with online classes.
This has all resulted in the stunted emotional development of an age group that has since been labeled “the indoor generation.” It is an unfortunately fitting moniker: Our generation is unprecedentedly lonely and unsocialized.
For young adults, exposure to this antisocial environment when growing up results in a gaping void where identity, interest-based communities and group solidarity would typically exist. For people in marginalized groups, such as the queer community — where local communities (and even friends) may not be tolerant — TikTok has served as a generator of virtual camaraderie and a builder of incorporeal solidarity. It is out of this deficiency that TikTok cemented its role in supplying these community-building resources. From this phenomenon, our generation’s emotional dependency on the app was born.
This emotional connection to TikTok came to a head in mid-January as the reality of the app’s ban was realized by its users. People compared the event to heartbreak and reported feeling uncertain about their futures without the app. The Jed Foundation, a non-profit “that protects emotional health and prevents suicide for our nation’s teens and young adults,” published an article months before the ban titled “Navigating Change: Managing the Emotional Impact of a Potential TikTok Ban.” Both the poignancy of and necessity for such an article further highlight the deep emotional ties between our generation and the app.
We are still 58 days away from the end of Trump’s 75-day extension on the app’s ban. Regardless of which way the decision goes, we should reflect on how and why our reaction to the mere banning of an app was that of mourning. We cannot change the conditions of the world that we grew up in, but we can and should manage the ways that we move forward from that upbringing and adjust to the world around us. We should create and encourage others to join interest-based communities, go out of our way to interact with the people around us and try our hardest to make our environment — whether that be our hometowns, our school or even our dorms — places of kinship, tolerance and solidarity.
Tufts University alone has more than 350 organizations available for students to join, including numerous identity-based communities that allow students to gain the connections that technology has so thoroughly robbed them of. I personally have found an academic community in The Tufts English Society and a philanthropic and like-minded activism-centric community in Action for Sexual Assault Prevention. Most recently, I have nurtured an interest in journalism in the company of supportive friends and executives in the Daily. In short, there is no one way to find a community, and as a generation, it is in our very best interest to start looking for one in the world around us, rather than just on our phones.
