By Sophia Angeline G. Delantero, UC student
You do not have your own thoughts, and most probably, you have built your personality based on what you saw on TikTok yesterday.
As hard and as difficult as it is to admit, the digital world consumes the soul of every individual, regardless of generation. The media has contributed to who they are today, or maybe it is the media that created them in the first place.
I remember a friend of mine who told me about the hazards of media, that when you are not paying for it, you are not the customer but rather the one being consumed; you are, in fact, the product. Thus, I constantly thought about it and about how people think these past few years. I am, in all seriousness, scared of how we have become so curated, so aware, so knowledgeable, and so quick to cope with current issues and come up with immediate opinions.
People nowadays are merely mosaics of other people’s thoughts and insights, making references to comments from political Facebook posts, trying to nitpick the main points of the video essays they have watched, or making sense of the books they just saw on Goodreads.
Generation Z has a word for this: performative. Individuals are now conforming to their favorite influencers, thinking that every word they utter perfectly fits the societal standards. We are continuously being consumed. We are continuously being sold. We are continuously being framed.
Now that you think of it, we, the moving mortals, can no longer think entirely for ourselves as we now rely on others to think for us. They use critical thinking while we just paraphrase their understanding. We mistake borrowed wisdom for genuine insight, recycled opinions for personal convictions, and curated identities for authentic personalities.
For I am scared that we become so conforming that we forget to build our own personalities, forgetting that individuality is not found in the trends we follow but in the thoughts we dare to call our own. We become so occupied with sounding intelligent that we no longer take the time to understand. We become so desperate to belong that we forget the discomfort of questioning, doubting, and discovering.
We have become so distorted, that we no longer recognize which beliefs were born from our own experiences and which were carefully planted by the endless stream of content we consume every single day.
With that, we are indeed the product.**
