4 min readJul 24, 2026 04:52 PM IST
First published on: Jul 24, 2026 at 04:52 PM IST
As a Gen Z parent, I have spent more woman hours than I care to count yelling at my daughter about being ghusso-ed in her phone all the time. We all know why we do that, and I doubt that that bit requires regurgitation. Not least of the reasons is because we feel excluded from a private universe of reels, jokes, slang, and references, reminding us that we are no longer cool, not by a long shot. The ankle socks that I wear to the gym are uncool, but my bare short nails are now cool. Don’t ask me why; I can’t follow, and I don’t care. Having said that, behind all this seeming nonsense sat a real parental anxiety: That something serious was being lost.
I now find myself thinking something else. The kids are all right.
Parents have been fretting about how teens and young adults spend their time since forever, about being shut out by them just when, in our opinion, they need the most direction. But becoming your own person has always required space to discover oneself, away from the eyes of those who made you who you were before. To become intelligible to their peers, before they do to their parents. Previous generations have found it in their rooms after they slam the door shut, in school corridors, in sports fields, speaking on the phone with their friends, in notes passed around classrooms, and so on.
This generation has found it online. The impulse is old, the space is new, and it has connected Gen Z in a way never seen before. Their space to grow together is larger than ever seen in human history, and has caused them to develop a distinct humor, a distinct language, and a distinct hierarchy of what is important. Maybe the very fact that this world was protected from their supervising adults was what made it so fertile.
This space, whether you look at it as a feature or a bug, has produced some traits that are in equal measure maddening (to us parents) and genuinely admirable. Their irreverence, for one, which oldies can read as rudeness, and sometimes it is. But it can also be viewed as healthy resistance to the old, tired idea that respect is owed to outdated opinions just because they come vintage wrapped. Their distinct creativity, a mix of seriousness and levity — honouring humour as resistance is an age-old idea.
If, like me, you have spent more hours a day recently than you should have chuckling at their laugh-out-loud reels and memes, which have captured a whole social atmosphere much more accurately than any column can, you will agree with me. Wuthering Heights made sense when it was written; this does now.
Here is where we misread them. We saw speed, and assumed shallowness, when we were witnessing a generation was developing its own instincts, its own emotional codes, its own way of seeing one another and the world, developing a language that may be indecipherable to the supposed grown ups in the room, but is no less real for that. Young people, or any human for that matter, can’t always strike the correct note about everything, and shouldn’t be expected to. Making mistakes is, in my opinion, a good thing, because it means that we are doing something. The young have never reached adulthood without the benefit of hindsight that those mistakes gives them. The difference is that the mistakes made by me and my peers are buried in occasional reminisces with old friends, protected as it was with only flip phones at our disposal, and those of the current generation are amplified for all to see.
The generation we worried was being swallowed up by those devices seems to instead be assembling itself there. And now that we can hear them, a lot of what sounded to us like noise was, in fact, the sound of a generation becoming itself.
Sibal is the author of Equations (2021)
Their space to grow together is larger than ever seen in human history, and has caused them to develop a distinct humor, a distinct language, and a distinct hierarchy of what is important. 
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