Students do not care anymore.
This is because caring is turning into something that isn’t cool. The word nonchalant was coined via social media trends to describe people who don’t care about anything and don’t let anything affect them. This seems good on paper, but the line between not letting small things affect a person and not having an individual identity is so blurry.
More personally, Harper Embry, ‘28, said, “emotion is a powerful thing.” It is what makes us human, and without emotion and compassion we might as well just be robots at this point. Josie Mann, ‘27, argues that this culture of hidden emotion is an issue because, “we need people to care so that we can create change and move to a better future.”
The question arises, then, of why everyone is trying to be nonchalant these days. The answer is isolation. Even though COVID-19 ended four years ago, it is still having a lasting impact on our younger students. Mann emphasized that it feels like everybody’s hiding behind Instagram or TikTok and posting fake, nonchalant versions of themselves online, even though that’s not showing any kind of true perspective on who they actually are. The entire goal of this is just to look as cool or nonchalant as possible, yet when these same people are put into real life social situations, they have had a “much harder time disconnecting from their screen and getting back to normal […] conversations,” explained Mann. She further talked about how the lack of real conversation with each other is what leads to kids getting a lot worse at “maintaining those deep connections that we should be having with people in school and outside of school.”
Even if these kids think they have all of these friends that also don’t care and don’t have any emotions about anything, this is just the fast track into feeling “more and more alone in our modern society,”
It makes sense, then, that younger kids are having social struggles, especially with the added pressure of being in a new school and trying to figure out who you are after COVID-19. So many younger students, in trying to figure out who they are, end up feeling so much of the “pressure to be like [their] friends and to be cool like [their] friends,” said Embry. If these kids are never given the freedom to feel and the courage to care about the things they like, then everyone ends up the same. Even if these kids think they have all of these friends that also don’t care and don’t have any emotions about anything, this is just the fast track into feeling “more and more alone in our modern society,” said Embry.
There is no way that everyone likes the same things. This leads to kids hiding the parts of themselves that make them unique. The act of being nonchalant has done nothing but take the individuality away from the kids of our generation. To combat this by expressing ourselves and showing that we care should be the norm, not the exception.
