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“You and your friends can go live on a tropical island for 5 years but it's just you guys.”
75% answered ‘I’d go’, 25% answered ‘I’d stay at home’.
2024 is an incredible and complicated time to be alive, we have access to more information than ever before in human history, advanced medical care, and communication on a global scale. Yet with this comes the stresses of daily life, jobs, mortgages, and student loans. With all this in mind, for 75% of us, the prospect of ‘digital detoxing’ to return to a simpler way of life is uniquely appealing. This begs the question: were we made for something far simpler than the society we are currently living in?
The overwhelming response to this poll suggests a very natural instinct to return to our roots. Perhaps the 75% of respondents who answered yes would prefer to foster deeper connections with a few close friends instead of keeping themselves open to new relationships when given the choice. For most of human history, we have naturally lived in very close communities with very little knowledge of what exists beyond ourselves. Now, in 2024 we often find ourselves inundated with information from every corner of the world - there is very little you can’t find out these days without a poll or a Google search. This poll resonates with an innate human desire for simplicity and the comforts of familiarity.
This goes to show how we, as a culture, romanticize the concept of isolation. It’s a common trope in popular TV and discourse that in disconnecting from the rest of the world we ‘find ourselves’. Whilst you’ve more than likely heard the mocking stereotype of the ‘gap year girl’, an 18-year-old who finds spirituality in Bali and will talk about nothing else forevermore, there is truth to this idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5kVx9yacFI
This is the same reason we love survival shows and shipwreck narratives. At the time when lost premiered it was averaging at 16 million viewers per episode, and is referenced in the office, community and the good place, among other hit shows. The lasting power of these survival shows just goes to show how deeply this fantasy resonates with us.
This common fantasy could lead us to ignore the practical challenges this question presents - lack of food, drinking water, healthcare, etc. But on a deeper level, it goes to show how profoundly we crave simplicity in such a complicated time.
The TLDR is Gen-Z crave simplicity. Keep that in mind when communicating with them.
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