Our children need «meh Dräck» - and more confidence

It happened during the pandemic, silently and quietly and yet it is impossible to miss: A moment ago, it was the millennials who defined what was hip and trendy under the watchful eye of global marketing experts. Now the millennials have grown up, settled down - and become less interesting. Now it's the turn of Generation Z, also known as Generation Woke.

I can look at this generation from very close quarters, because I have two representatives of it at home, or rather one female representative and one male representative. They are the first to be born into the digitalised world. They are informed and organised like no generation before. The world is at their feet - or can at least be called up at the click of a mobile phone.

The young stare into the anaemic world of smartphones that promises so much. And yet, at the end of the day, leaves us feeling empty and alone.

As a mother and representative of Generation X, the last generation to grow up with analogue technology, I sometimes doubt that this omnipresent digital access to the world really makes it a better place. Or the people who live in it.

But perhaps doubt is the wrong word. Perhaps it's more a melancholy that mourns the analogue world as I experienced it. It is lost, because the digital world that is replacing it is more exciting, more colourful and easier to maintain. But it also lacks something essential, without which people cannot be happy.

During my holidays, I read Ernest Hemingway's «A Moveable Feast», the book about his time in Paris in the 1920s. He has no money, so he sits in a warm café to write, watching the world go by. He watches the light as it changes throughout the day. The people strolling past him, the big horses coming up the boulevard.

When someone watches the light change today, or the people walking the streets instead of on Instagram, they are hardly young anymore. The young stare into the anaemic world of the smartphone, which promises so much. And yet, at the end of the day, leaves us feeling empty and alone.

Nevertheless, I am full of hope, especially when I look at my two Generation Z children.

Veteran rocker Chris von Rohr once called for «meh Dräck» and hit a nerve. Because humans, as analogue beings, need «Dräck», need smells, friction, light, closeness. The fact that we now have to protect ourselves from these things by wearing masks, especially in the digitalised world, doesn't make things any easier.

Nevertheless, I am full of hope, especially when I look at my two Generation Z children. The analogue world as we knew it may increasingly be lost. But they will find themselves and create their own world, just like every other generation before them. And at some point, they will look melancholically at the next generation and mourn the world they conquered as young people.