You are not a person, you are a concept. You are the perfect prototype of the transitional millennial/Gen Z, straight out of the bourgeois factory of conformity with the quality stamp. Thereâs a standardization in your gestures, your thoughts, even in the way you get outraged or movedâitâs almost scientific. You think you have a multi-faceted personality, but the truth is youâre as one-dimensional as a sheet of tissue paper: if youâre held up to the light, thereâs no depth behind you, just the backlit screen of a smartphone.
Your tastes are downright depressing. A parade of banalities paraded as âcutting-edge research.â You buy the same shoes everyone else has, listen to the âIndie Italiaâ playlist or whatever trapper is trending, convinced you have a refined ear, read the book everyoneâs talking about on Instagram stories, only to post a picture of the page with a coffee cup on the side, heaven forbid a pseudo-cultural moment goes unmonetized for views. Everything you consume is ephemeral, prepackaged, predigested by someone else and chewed by you with the pride of someone convinced theyâve made a revolutionary discovery. You are embarrassingly predictable: if a computer had to calculate your next move, it would take three milliseconds.
And now letâs talk about this pathological ostentation, this show-off syndrome 2.0. But do you even know there's a life beyond social media, or do you pass out if you see the world without a Lightroom preset? You have to document everything. Every weekend away turns into an anthropological report. Three days in Lisbon and you feel like Vasco da Gama: pinned stories, carousels with captions in English (fair enough, it sounds more international), melancholic reflections on the âmeaning of travelâ and the beauty of getting lost in little alleyways. Get lost where, exactly? You kept Google Maps open even to go to the bathroom! You canât enjoy a sunset unless youâre sure the focus is perfect for your followers. You live in delay, playing the part of yourself having fun, just to show a handful of people that your life is âamazingâ and âfull of stimulation.â
But you really hit peak pathetic when you put on the mask of the seasoned pedagogue. This life coach narrative, the enlightened teacher descending among the desks to save young souls, honestly gives me goosebumps, itâs so fake. You do videos or posts with that tired but proud look, the martyr gaze of public education, and you dispense pills of alternative teaching, talking about relational dynamics, inclusion, and classroom group management as if you had forty years of experience in the roughest schools in the world. And the hilarious part is that you talk with that tone of a worldly woman, a matron whoâs seen it all, suffered, learned how the world works and now, from the heights of your immense wisdom, explains to everyone how to live.
Who exactly are you trying to fool? Just look at your- velina: imbarazzante: