This topic came up the other day between my coworkers and I as we were having a department lunch. One of my coworkers mentioned that it seems like the younger generation seems to lack the same drive or ambition that they used to have when they were their age (high school – college). The four of us seemed to all be in agreement.

I offered the following explanation: I think it has to do, in part, with social media. Kids these days see other teens/young adults “going viral” and making money by doing something on TikTok, Youtube, Twitch, etc. And while content creation is hard work and takes a lot of time, it’s not a traditional career path. Face it, many of us no longer follow a traditional career path. I myself began following a traditional career path of wanting to be a veterinarian and changed directions after I got my bachelor degree in Animal Science. After graduating, I took 3 years, working a mediocre office job to pay my bills, while contemplating What do I want to do – actually?

While social media is great for keeping in touch with friends, it’s a double-edged sword. Social media does tend to focus on individuality and “being your own boss,” and it tends to push the idea of community to the back of the mind. And I’m not talking about the sense of community when it comes to advocating for a social justice cause. I mean just the local, immediate community in which you live.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to see the importance of making connections and maintaining relationships with the people in my life. As I have been off social media completely (except Lapse but that’s more of a live photo journal for myself) for 6 months now, I’ve learned to appreciate the relationships I have offline. Before, it used to be so easy to lose hours doom-scrolling on social media – replying to stories and thinking that I’m maintaining my connections and making new ones when, in reality, a majority of those relationships don’t exist offline. And when you form those meaningful bonds, you get the growing sense of wanting to give back and wanting to help one another. That’s the type of community I’m talking about.

While today’s media emphasizes individuality, we forget what it actually takes to be your best self – the help and support of others. And I can see how that could be reflected in the young adults that lack motivation.

COVID made a huge impact on everyone and especially the more malleable, younger people in society, especially in terms of motivation. COVID blanketed a lot of us in depression and anxiety, and it continues to have lasting effects on our minds and bodies. But I think most importantly, through quarantine, we lost our sense of community. It was no longer one neighbor helping another or even offering a smile in the mornings on your way out; we all had to protect ourselves and our loved ones by avoiding social contact. Quarantine broke our sense of community and exacerbated the “everyone for themselves” mentality. Remember when people were literally brawling over and hoarding toilet paper? When it came to resource scarcity, we lost all sense of community. Rather than our usual empathy for one another, we were fighting against each other.

Humans are social creatures and in order to fight to protect our health and loved ones, we had to suddenly restrict our movements, our communications, our connections. And all that was left when it came to interacting with others was social media or other virtual means. And then it just becomes so easy to lose yourself and, ironically, your sense of identity when you linger a little too long on social media. You’re constantly getting fed information (too much information we are supposed to be processing in our entire lifetimes by the way) and being shown things you should buy, things you should want, things your friends have, things strangers you will never meet in your lifetime have. And I think that’s also when capitalism just became so much worse. Because instead of sharing experiences and connections and good times with friends, all we had were our material items. For those of us who were lucky enough to keep our jobs and continue making money, we weren’t spending it on outings anymore. I was fortunate during quarantine to transition to a higher-paying job, which allowed me to have spending money for the first time in my adult life. I spent it on sneakers, car accessories, cat accessories, random things around the house. A handful of my coworkers were able to afford new cars, move to better places, etc. At that time, I wasn’t active on social media, but I can’t imagine if I were. If even I were spending money frivolously, I can’t imagine what everyone else was buying and subsequently displaying on social media.

While I would attribute COVID more to the lack of ambition/motivation in our younger generation now due to the lack of society/community as well as the mental health effects, I think social media helped prolong it. Every period of change has a longer period of adjustment so while we are allowed to socialize, and have been for a few years now, a lot of us turned inward, developed social anxiety, depression, or germaphobia, we still don’t have our sense of community.

In a community, you need each person playing an important role to keep the community thriving. You need the farmer, the supplier, the manufacturer, the banker, the cook, the doctor, the builder, the lawyer, the teacher, etc. You need all of those pieces to create a community, and I think that we’ve forgotten that. We’ve forgotten that we all need to help one another and each play a role in society. We can’t all be the cook, or the farmer, or the teacher, because then who would help us build our houses? Teach our children?

We’ve forgotten what it means to help one another, and I think that sense of community and connection is a major factor in why we lack motivation to be anything or do anything today. For a long time, COVID forced us to learn to do a lot of things ourselves. Some people learned how to bake bread, make their own pasta, grow their own vegetables – so much so that we forgot what it’s like to share that responsibility with others and help each other. We lost inspiration from one another through quarantine. We lost the ability to bounce ideas off one another during that time. It was just us and our thoughts and let’s face it – we are our own worst critic. And as a result, we lost motivation.

A lot of us choose our career paths because we want to give back to our community, to help others, make a difference in someone’s life. But what happens when you don’t know who to help, how to help, who needs help? Quarantine took away those answers to what society needed and pared us down to the bare necessities.

In a normal day, you would see with your own eyes who needed help, what needed to be done to help, and you could identify the problems that you could potentially offer solutions for. You’d see long waits at the doctor, long wait times for food due to lack of service staff or cooks, you’d see stray and starving animals, children, unhoused individuals – but because we were locked up for so long and only ourselves to worry about, we lost that insight.

There is a disconnection between seeing it in person and reading about it on the internet or watching news coverage on it. Wouldn’t it be more meaningful to you if your best friend became unhoused? Wouldn’t you have more of a desire to help a neighbor than a stranger? We forget the needs of everyday people and how we can help them. Because, for example, if you’re really good at cooking and your neighbor isn’t and struggles with their diet, wouldn’t it be fulfilling and meaningful to you to help your neighbor and teach them how to cook and eat healthy? To see the results with your own eyes? We forget how rewarding it is to help others, especially when it’s something that comes so easy to us, and then we lose interest. After a while, things get boring when you know you’re good at something, but it doesn’t fulfill you and it doesn’t make you happy. But what if you could make yourself happy by helping others? And even better when it’s something you’re already good at?

But during COVID, a lot of us lost our passions and interests, and we need to find our way back to what really makes us happy. I’ve always felt most happy and fulfilled when people would tell me how well I write or that what I wrote was really inspiring to them. It’s not because I’m being complimented about my writing, it’s the subsequent effect it had on them that makes me happy. This is why I write so much about my experiences, what I’m trying for my mental health, how I’m getting through my traumas. It is not to talk about myself, but it is to help others.

And helping others has been my only motivation to keep going, so far. Even during college, when I was really in the hells of my mind, my morning motivation was solely my cat, Oreo. I was an animal science major; I knew that I would be able to take care of him best. Therefore, I couldn’t commit suicide, I couldn’t go away. I had to stay alive – for him.

Every morning, without fail, he would roll around in his crate at 7 AM and yell (meow) so I could let him out and feed him.

I crate-trained him to my sleep schedule when I first got him because I shared a house with friends and I didn't want him bothering my housemates or getting into trouble when I couldn't supervise him.

And when I did attempt suicide in August 2021, I kept him away and out of the room. I knew that he would stop me and I didn’t want to keep living. 9 years later, he is still my heart and soul and I could love no one more than I love him.

Except now, I’ve created many more meaningful bonds with others and I’ve found more ways to help others. While I have slacked in my mental health advocacy and writing lately, I do always want to write. It just turns out that everything I write extends into a minimum 2-hour thinkfest and I lose track of time, and being an adult sucks because I have other responsibilities. Like feeding Oreo. And if it were just writing, then this would be it. But because I tend to be a perfectionist, I spend another 2 hours editing. I am resisting the urge so hard to go back and edit anything in this post. I go back to the first paragraph and I can see that it wouldn’t reasonably conclude to this last paragraph. But if I edit this post, I’m not going to eat dinner or spend quality time with Oreo and his new baby sister, Biscotti (also a stray I rescued). It’ll inevitably turn into midnight and I’ll be too tired to eat, shower, or do anything else.

So if you’ve made it this far through my bumbling thoughts, I appreciate you and I hope I helped you – in some way or form – or made you happier or feel more understood.