Looking Forward
Brynne Rebele-Henry
Poet & Author
We’ve been undergoing a Loneliness Epidemic. My generation, Generation Z, and the generation above me, Millennials, are considered the loneliest generations. In the last few years our social interactions have become increasingly digital. More and more of us spend time alone, making us at higher risk for a variety of physical and mental conditions from depression to weakened immunity.
While our abrupt shift to fully remote living was in reaction to the pandemic, it is a shift most of us had already been making.
Because of COVID-19 those with more privileged identities are, in their own limited ways, experiencing something close to the loneliness and fear that marginalized groups of people have always felt. We hear they are afraid to go to the store or for a walk. But, unable to handle isolation, the privileged break stay-at-home orders, and gather in crowds of more than 10. In April, armed protestors demonstrated in Michigan to defend the right to get a haircut and go to stores without masks.
At the start of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s, many victims who died in New York were buried in mass graves on Hart Island with no funerals, processions or ceremonies. Almost forty years later, unclaimed bodies of COVID-19 victims in New York are being buried on Hart Island too.
American advertising and media talk about “when things go back to normal,” but what will that mean? Local businesses have had to close. Corporate and academic jobs are likely to become permanently remote. America is in a recession.
This impacts Generation Z’s ability to enter the work-force. We don’t know what full-time corporate and academic jobs will be remote, or cease to exist completely. My generation has had to adapt to social and technological advances at a speed no other generation has before.
We have also had to anticipate (and are somehow expected to change) the repercussions of environmental and socioecological decisions made by those older than us. This pandemic has finally illuminated the fact that a country built on systemic violence, racism, and financial inequity is not functional or stable. This inequality is something Generation Z has long been aware of and fought to change. Now these issues have become unavoidable to our seniors.
After the AIDS crisis, when much of the LGBT+ community had been lost, activists had to completely reconsider the future. After the COVID-19 crisis, society at large will have to do the same. And, like in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, Generation-Z will have to look not to what society was in the past, but what is possible for our future.
Brynne Rebele-Henry is an award winning writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her debut novel, Orpheus Girl was published by Soho Press in 2019.