EARTHFETISH: Part 1

A brief introduction to EARTHFETISH - on the Gen Z savior complex broken down into parts.

“I’m sure you meant well.” This is what we say when our actions don’t achieve the intended result. If you find yourself in a college town and you pass an eighteen year old kid on the street with a cool outfit, you might be inclined to compliment them. If you do, you’ll more often than not get a response along the lines of, “Thanks! It was thrifted!” Likewise, if you scroll through a popular Instagram influencer’s likes, who some would categorize as politically “liberal” just because they support queer folks, you’ll stumble across various accounts of young people that have a post of a black square up on their feed, posted June 2, 2020. I’m sure they all meant well. And to give one last example, go ahead and Google an image of a climate change protest. Just by glancing at these photographs you can see that the majority of protesters captured in these photographs are under 25 years old, more often than not in their teens. They probably meant well, too.

I recently had a conversation with a close friend of mine who financially sustains herself through reselling thrifted clothing. She was supposed to be quickly interviewing me for a research paper on sustainable and secondhand fashion but this almost immediately got sidetracked as we went off into our own tangents. “What do you think is behind this sudden trend?” she asked me, and I found myself surprised by my own immediate answer: Gen Z has an evasive, but prominent, savior complex. And although this complex definitely came to the surface in the summer of 2020, it’s been around and in the works for longer than they themselves are aware of.

Looking through your social media feed in summer 2020 felt like a fever dream. Open the app and there’s a gory news photo posted by an influencer or friend attempting to “raise awareness” for their own cause. You scroll. A young person performing the latest TikTok dance they’ve learned. You scroll. A BLM tribute in the form of blackface makeup. An individual doing a new TikTok trend to “This is America” by Childish Gambino. A recipe for whipped coffee. Another gory photo of a protest. You scroll. 

“The path to hell was paved with good intentions,” may be thought of many individuals spanning across generations. We’ve all tried to do things for the better, or at least we’d like to think so. But giving a homeless person food doesn’t matter when you stick a camera in their face. I’m not impressed by David Dobrik gifting Teslas on YouTube. Good deeds are no longer heartwarming when it’s for clout. Good deeds are no longer good when it’s performative.

The line between raising awareness and performativity has been violated a countless amount of times ever since being an activist became “cool”. Having “BLM” and “ACAB” in your Tinder bio is considered attractive. Posting an infographic on your feed is for the aesthetics. Sharing a gory photo is for the sake of “awareness”, regardless of how inconsiderate it may be towards those who may be triggered by witnessing such an event. It’s difficult to see the genuineness in this trend when it has been treated as just that: a trend.  

TikTok influencers have been especially guilty of this, specifically in the 2020 era when BLM began to rise again. White TikTokers took to using trending sounds to lipsync to music and glorify a whitewashed idea of “the revolution”. You can see many examples of this by looking up “This is America” by Childish Gambino on TikTok and scrolling through the videos underneath the sound. These trends were usually taken over by white suburban children with rich parents in an impulsive rebellious phase in their adolescence (usually to piss off aforementioned rich parents). If you find these people now, most of those who swore they’d revolutionize the conservative world have slowly trickled back into their usual sorority/fraternity posts, or have become inactive altogether. 

Gen Z has been one of the most politically active generations in history despite also being one of the more nihilistic generations. Young people will claim to be saving the world in one breath and damn it all in the next. I’ve heard 12 year olds make suicide jokes along with 22 year olds, and share the same social justice posts on their Instagram stories. The irony and hypocrisy held in the hands of kids who barely want to live anymore causes a noticeable contrast, an ever widening gap, to grow between this younger generation and older ones. Gen Z has been simultaneously put on a pedestal and considered by others to be the worst of the worst, all for the same reasons. They themselves don’t know where they stand. 

“I’m sure you meant well.” Sometimes upon hearing this phrase, it makes me question if the perpetrator truly deserves the benefit of the doubt they’re being given. As a child of Gen Z myself, I find myself asking myself this: How well did we mean when we took advantage of marginalized communities for clout? Did we know what we were doing, even on the slightest scale? Did we know that we were doing this for ourselves more than for those we claimed to be helping? I’d like to believe that I had the best of intentions, but I can’t say so for sure. “I’m sure you meant well.” I think I did too. Did you?