Just Like a Tangled Necklace

By Matilde D’afflitto, Year 12

Speechless. “How would you describe your generation in one word?”, my grandma had asked me. I know it may seem like a rather simple answer, but is it really? You have to think about the two billion and five hundred and sixty million people that belong to Generation Z and find one word to describe them all, including me. A 14-year-old girl who likes to read books and prefers to spend time with her grandma rather than with friends. How can you fit so many people under one word, when 99.8% of them are strangers to you? It was a question I had never been asked before, and one I was not exactly sure how to approach.

Tangled. Tangled was the word that I blurted out impulsively. “That is a rather odd observation. Tangled. How so?”, my grandma had responded. She was right. It was an odd observation. Who knows how that came to mind, but shortly after, it began to make more sense to me, and I began to develop my thoughts on her.

As I keep growing up, I have witnessed, and keep witnessing, relatively big changes: from new technologies to new infrastructures, ideas and concepts being developed. Perhaps they were not even big changes compared to the ones in previous generations. Perhaps they were just big to me as I am not a typical kid who enjoys socializing, but instead, prefers to focus more on what is happening around me. But how is one meant to adapt to all these changes? Is one meant to keep living life prior to these changes? Is there one right way to react and act? To be honest with you, to this day, I am still not sure how to answer these questions despite thinking about them repeatedly. But the one thing that I have realized and noticed, is that we all adapt to change differently, and therefore we all see things differently.

Different opinions are great, but taking into account all the opinions of one generation tends to drive us apart, I had tried to explain to my Grandma. Gen Z as a whole has experienced so many changes, or so I thought, but no one seems to agree on whether they were good or bad.

For example, the 1997 kids were living their teenage years whilst using their brand-new Motorola 1996 Flip phone to receive simple text messages and calls, spending their time outside, playing football and drawing with chalk on the neighbourhood park floor. A few years later came the middle years of Gen Z, which were already moving towards smartphones, making loom band bracelets, and downloading games and music on their iPod touch. And finally came the youngest years of Gen Z, who read more on electrical devices than on paper, and who will spend their typical after-school afternoon playing a match of FIFA, speaking to their friends through devices that wrap around their ears and seem to bring them into another dimension.

I could go on and on about other examples, but the key takeaway is that over time, what was seen as normal one day, changed the next. Our habits changed. Our ideas of fun changed. Were some years more fun than others? Were these changes even beneficial to us? Were they done in our best interest? Some say yes, some say no, and some say I do not know, so it ends up being a challenging conundrum. No one ever seems to agree.

So, to me, it resembles a tangled necklace. It was tangled for so long, that some knots are just so hard to untangle, like the many opinions that oppose each other in this generation. However, a tangled knot in a necklace does not take away its beauty, but gives it something special and unique, just like the different opinions in Gen Z.