The Gen-Z Urge to Keep Moving (And Why that’s A Good Thing!)

Gen-Z has grown up every day seeing the impossible being outdone and slowly decay into irrelevance. We live everyday life based on an ‘Adapt’ rather than a ‘nurture’ philosophy. Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of being the most diverse generation is that we don’t fashion being defined by hard boiled ideals. We are also more amicably resolute and more susceptible to experiences. That’s what makes us aloof, and a little bit cool.

We are also not bound by socially driven goals; we set our own timelines and sometimes when things crash and burn, we have the humility to start over again. So what drives us? More importantly, what adds meaning to our lives? What helps us keep moving? The answer – A gazillion things! We are always in a frenzy and we are all over the place. We like to take care of our bodies but not to miss out on all the fun. We like to consume, express, engage and sometimes even heal. We crave to understand ourselves just a little bit better by the turn of each day. The irony is that even the eldest of us are just turning 25! To us it feels like we’ve been through a lot. To the other generations, it seems like we feel a lot. Both are probably right in their own comic sense.

You can’t be the most informatively stimulated generation without having a dying urge to overthink almost every little detail of your life. We think about a problem before it actually is one and somehow end up contributing to it becoming one. Hence you can understand our beef with stillness. It’s like if we had a time machine, we would go back in time and fuck up our memories.

We like to keep moving. We like to keep dancing till the rhythm of our feet make our own music. Maybe we do it because we don’t like to dwell. Maybe we do it because we are scared that we might end up enjoying gloating. Maybe we don’t deal well with heartbreak or maybe forever is not our kind of thing. We are the persuasion of our drives and not our identities and sometimes being on the road reminds us of that. We might not always have a person to call or a place to call our own but there is some poetic justice in our anger to not settle. We take care of our own selves, we are more empathetic to strangers, we believe in change and we know where to start. We trust the road before we start walking and we almost always get there.

Don’t get us wrong, we don’t have anything against settling down. Truth be told, our lives have always had a fleeting sense of reality, which is why we’ve always struggled with the idea of permanency. We don’t want ‘happy ever afters’ as much as we want ‘happy in the moment’. Call it our coping mechanism, our happy place or our guilty pleasure; we don’t believe life to be of a peaking concept. The pursuit of our happiness for us will always be on an infinite loop.

The bright side is that change comes naturally to us. We are probably more accepting than outraged. Even though we want to vomit every time we hear the word ‘sustainability’ being overused, we try to do good by the next generation. (In a very meta way obviously)

When our time comes, we might not have gotten all the answers right but at least we would have lived our lives in an unapologetic manner that would make us proud. Wish our parents could say the same.