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Gen-Z: How to survive the Digital Bright Age

We need islands of patience and forethought, of connection with friends and family, outside of the constant barrage

Maybe it’s my current journey with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or just being more tasteful, more specific, with the media content I take in, but I can’t help but feel there is still far too much information to choose from. The Dark Ages were a time when information was lost in one part of the world, even as another, many others, flourished in an enlightened time.

But more than the return of taste and being exacting with how we spend our time, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I am to make it through this time of drastic geopolitical change, I must establish moments of quiet and calm in my routine. I need islands of patience and forethought, of connection with friends and family, outside of the constant barrage. There is much darkness in the world, but there can be light in some places.

I feel these times are important as well, and all the more reason to do my best in such times, when my industry, journalism, is under threat in my home and native land from political radicals and foreign interests alike. In doing my best, I can hope to make it through the pain, suffering, and loss I feel as an Arab, and process how I can use my chosen vocation to exact that change in the world.

Growing up in Al Ain as a third culture kid, I was raised with a wider perspective on the world, and politics seemed almost pervasive in my life at times. We had conservative religious English teachers and progressive political math teachers, physics teachers who gave us fantasy novels and history teachers who pushed us into the sciences.

I don’t know if that experience is unique to the UAE or if it was just my experience, but when you have that sort of diversity in the classroom, that sort of exchange of ideas distils into students values of consensus building and technocracy. One way was a series of environmentalist campaigns the school had us run when I was amid my GCSEs; ‘think globally, act locally.’

And maybe it was just my graduating class, but given the wealth of graduate degrees, engineers, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and finance professionals in that field, I’m inclined to believe that forcing students — nay, young people — to always be thinking and growing and changing helped give us the tools to make that change in our own lives, so it might spread.

Speaking now of Gen-Z, social media started us on the path to have that globalist mindset, tempered with the knowledge that we can only control our own lives.

Now, I’m not a proponent of individualism, but far from it. We need to build community, and some of those islands of peace should be your friends and family. ‘It takes a village’ is a phrase of the times, and you can’t expect to make it through such overwhelming times, information ever flowing into you wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, on your own.

So, if we’re in a digital bright age, ever swirling towards a critical mass of too much information, increasingly questioning what’s real and what’s fake, we owe it to ourselves to, at times, do more than disconnect; we owe it to ourselves to disengage.

Disengaging doesn’t mean giving up or stopping, but it does mean refuelling. More than 45 minutes with your therapist or an hour at lunch each day, but have consistent, intimate connection on a variety of levels, so you can continue connecting with people and finding individual lights to nurture and rely on among the overwhelming bright.

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