Storyboard18 | Spilling The Tea report: Decoding Gen Z

Gen Z has the infinite luxury yet the infinite curse of choice. (Representational image: Ismael Paramo via Unsplash)

If we were to tell you that 47 percent of today’s youth find comfort in opening up to others about their personal struggles, or that 64 percent of them find the act of expressing their love towards their partner to be challenging, or that a whopping 81 percent GenZ is humanising their parents by looking at them as friends, erasing the generational power chasm, would you believe it?

Well, what makes it all the more interesting is that these insights are true and they’ve been sourced from actual stories shared by the youth of the country.

The feature that sets GenZ apart is the abundance of choice. They swipe through and chat with hundreds of potential eligible partners, while trying to figure out, first of all, if they themselves might be non-monogamous or pansexual or cut out for romance at all; they wander through tall aisles of political identities, pop-culture tastes, personal aesthetics, lifestyles, trying to build themselves a life that feels just right - true to their own needs, but still approvable by their families and social networks, and also responsible and useful to a crumbling world.

When they succeed - and they often do - they come away with a sense of individual fulfilment, self-actualisation and empowerment that their parents and grandparents rarely accessed.

The burden of choices 

There's no doubt that they're lucky - and they know it. But the price of so much choice, and of the burden to perform each choice online, is two-fold: More time spent in the choosing, anxiously weighing options; and lingering anxiety, even after the decisions have been made, that perhaps they chose wrong.

When it comes to jobs, partners, choices of the city, choices of friends, it isn't so easy to just try another option next week and then decide which is best-paths untaken truly are untaken, and the grief of having let perfect options go is more vivid than ever when you continue to be faced with them on Instagram, in other people's lives. This is just one of the multitude of struggles they face every day.

Where Gen Z finds relief 

They come to the world of stories subconsciously in search of this relief. Relief from the difficult, relentless process of building a life correctly. And relief comes in many forms. There is consolation in seeing others' expressions of the same stresses. There's respite in self-help and in motivational accounts which tell us what to do and spare them the weight of choosing, or which validate the choices they've already made.

We began with the belief that stories tell us more about what’s going on in the mind of a person, than they can articulate themselves.

Each year, Kommune hosts the nation’s largest story slam. In the previous edition, we heard 1,605 voices of the youth, channelled through elaborately fleshed out stories of their lives. This lent us a unique glimpse into Gen Z’s deep emotions and showed us what drives their ambitions, the troubles that plague them, the questions that keep them up at night, and the world they wish to build.

Whether it be feeling stifled when they try to express their sexuality or the evolving nature of social interactions online, the themes in these stories often tend to go unexplored. Either that, or they stay confined to stories, poems, and art. In order to break them free of these shackles, the next natural step for us was to create a culture report that maps the pulse of an entire generation. Thus was planted the seed that eventually grew into Spilling the Tea.

Through this exploration, some brilliant insights have come to light. Social media, often written off as a deterrent to authentic relationships, has set young people free to find bonds centred around care and compassion, away from the familial gaze of surveillance IRL. The true assertion of identity doesn’t lie in merely the knowledge that it’s okay to explore one’s sexuality, but in the actual act of doing so.

Such insights educate us on how the next generation perceives the ever-changing world around them, and help people and brands alike make more informed decisions on the basis of these insights.

Gen Z is the generation that teeters on the tectonic plates of potential groundbreaking change, and has the infinite luxury yet the infinite curse of choice.

In culture lie the best moments to market, in the voices of artists lie insights brands have yet to mine. In the experiences we live lie the intersections that brands look for with consumers.