Dear Writer Director Letter #45
Last week, I made friends with a Gen Z stranger I met on the Halsted Bus.
Photo by Zach Ochinko
Dear Writer Director,
Last week, I made friends with a Gen Z stranger I met on the Halsted Bus. She didn’t have her headphones in. Neither did I, and we were waiting at the same stop. We just started talking, and then we made plans to have coffee a week later at my favorite coffee shop. I have been thinking about our conversation ever since, especially one detail in particular. She confessed to me that before she watches a film for the first time, she reads all the reviews about what everybody is saying. She told me she follows this ritual because she likes to know what others think about a thing before experiencing it herself. This launched us into a conversation about a Gen Z wide observation she had. She thinks her generation is collectively terrified of having their own opinion for fear that it will be deemed ‘problematic’ and then they will be ‘cancelled’ for it. It’s one thing to hear myself, a Millennial, think that quietly in the back of my brain after all these years of teaching Gen Z. It’s another thing to hear a precocious 24-year-old who started her own nonprofit when she was 15 put it so bluntly.
I thought about the recent phenomenon of Letter Boxed, and how all of my students at DePaul seem to be using it as their favorite social network. For those of you unfamiliar, Letter Boxed allows you to publicly review any film you’d like. It also allows you to post your current watch list and see your friends’ watch lists. You are then able to see any reviews any of your friends wrote about any movie you’d like. It’s basically an app built specifically to encourage the phenomenon my new young friend is talking about.
For most of my life, I have been highly weary of friend groups and group chats. I have been a part of several myself, and they have always proven to be the most toxic environments I have ever experienced. Why? When people identify as a group, they then cultivate a fear of being ostracized for behaving in anyway outside of the norm. It’s also a breeding ground for individuals to share their lived experience in real time as it’s happening thus opening them up to what their friends really think about their every move. As much as I loved some of my friends from college individually, when we came together for parties or activities, the most heinous of human behavior always showed its face. One group in particular coined the phrase, “Shirtless O’Clock.” It could be called at any time, and in response, everybody and anybody present HAD to remove their shirt and bra. I’m glad associating with groups like that are behind me for the foreseeable future. That said, I see these friend groups and assimilationist behavior everywhere I go in Chicago. And now that I have put two and two together about how this dynamic has compounded over time and resulted in this cultural norm of being afraid to say how you really think or feel, it’s all the more chilling.
Last week, I made friends with a Gen Z stranger I met on the Halsted Bus. After our coffee a week later, she texted me right away and said, “it was lovely to talk to a sane person for once”. Strangely, I was thinking the exact same thing. Being a Content Creator now who is loud and proud about allowing people to witness the ebbs and flows and alchemical transformations of my personal growth has removed me from living a normal life and connecting to people based on the typical American rituals of existence. Now, whenever I venture out, most people I can’t access but those that I really connect with, I connect with on a much deeper level. It feels like the human race is currently in the process of building alternatives to what has been. We aren’t “burning it all down”, but I am slowly witnessing as elements of real-life structures and systems fade to dust and human beings rise out of what remains to co-create something else together. It feels like the way I have always thought and operated is starting to become, dare I say, mainstream? It feels a lot more intuitive to me: navigating the world around me in the year of our Lord 2024. It’s like I was a square peg in a round hole, and now I’m a square peg in a square hole, and most everybody else in my immediate vicinity is just completely at a loss. I didn’t realize how truly bad I was at navigating Pluto In Capricorn.
Dear Writer/Director, take your headphones out, and look around you at the bus stop or waiting for the train. You might make eye contact. You might start up a conversation, and you might find you’ve met a kindred spirit. Don’t just stick with what you know because it’s comfortable. Everything is about to get really uncomfortable for those who had the luxury of previously cozying themselves in their little bubble. It’s officially time to set the phone down and stop fact checking your every thought. Those people on the Internet commenting don’t really care about you. I don’t know why any of us gives any of them credit.
Last week, I made friends with a Gen Z stranger I met on the Halsted Bus. And as a result, I’ll never look at real live human people the same way again.
Love,
O