At fourteen, I had big plans for my adulthood. 

Great, wide, world-dominating plans. For being from a tiny village an hour away from anything resembling a city, I wasn’t hindered by my relative isolation. 2024 seemed a million years away from 2014, but again, it didn’t concern me. Ten big fat years to achieve everything I wanted to. Namely: graduate from university with a First Class Degree at twenty-one, immediately get my dream job, move somewhere big and nauseatingly cosmopolitan like London or New York (with the boyfriend/fiancé/husband I’d inevitably and easily picked up my first year while studying) and bask in my hard-earned life while I climbed the career ladder and returned home each night on a not-too-long, not-too-short tube journey to my compact but personable apartment. (Of course, the career was only to pay the bills; in my fourteen-year-old mind, I’d be a highly successful author well before this).

It wasn’t arrogance; it was blind faith. Why wouldn’t these things happen? Why wouldn’t they happen within my chosen time-frame? None of this why me nonsense; only of course, me! It was logical in my mind. What could possibly stand in my way?

Hint: global pandemic. Magical development and acceleration of bizarre mental health issues at seventeen. A sudden inability to speak to people my own age. Not living in halls, leaving me at least fifteen steps behind everyone else. All which turned into a resistance of actually going to my lectures and tutorials, and allowed me to walk up to the front door of the pub hosting the literary society, but didn’t quite allow me to go in. In dark, cobblestone streets, I’d turn, and walk home.  

Two years of university were traded for two years of studying between the same four walls I slept within. I worked a dead-end retail job (not that retail is inherently dead-ended, only that this job in particular certainly was). I graduated from the comfort of my sofa, with my parents at either side, watching the Youtube livestream where they read out your name in a rush to get through the colossal list within a decent amount of time before people started buggering off to put the kettle on.

Know this: people had it a lot, lot tougher. Not having to wander across a stage in a rented gown and in ill-fitting heels was hardly the end of the world. Except, at the time, it did feel a little bit like the end of the world. My name was read out over the livestream, then they were onto the next student, and my dad, unceremoniously, said, ‘That’s it?’

A lot of things have contributed to twenty-four looking a little more disappointing than fourteen-year-old me ever could’ve comprehended. But there’s only so much retrospection you can do before you’ve inevitably been through the filing cabinet too many times, and you’ve nothing left to lament over. The past can only be blamed for so much before you’ve consolidated it as your life.

In 2024, I’m a firm believer that we are hideously, and disappointingly, disconnected. Older generations banged on about young folks spending too much time on their phones, too much time online, too much time living in worlds that weren’t their own. I was dismissive of this as a teenager; what did it matter? I made friends online, I had friends in real life. I still remember the golden age of social media, where celebrities posted constantly, their captions flooded with pointless hashtags, their pictures almost always spur-of-the-moment, unedited, and typically fried beyond recognition with the handful of filters the OG Instagram offered. (Does anyone else remember that iconic picture of Kendall Jenner lying on the floor with her hair arranged in little hearts around her head? Teenage me was blown away). Twitter was a glorious breeding group for fandom, and TikTok was barely a thought in someone’s mind; her void was instead filled by a wonderful creation called Vine. Six second videos; easy to make, tricky to make genuinely funny. 

This wasn’t an issue. Social media was funny and silly and a bit of a laugh - until it wasn’t. The moment Instagram got a little too curated, I knew something was up. Every picture looked professional; every person I followed became an influencer. Twitter was bought over (by someone I refuse to mention by name) under the guise of ‘regulation of true, free speech’, and instead started showing me right-wing propaganda and utter garbage that only a few years earlier, I wouldn’t have seen if I’d spent all day scrolling. I refused TikTok for the longest time, but my collapse into it was inevitable; I was a social media kid. I loved anything that gave me that dopamine hit. This was the time when the app didn’t show you the time in the top left corner, so I could spend hours watching video-after-video, and doing nothing else with my life. Given I was supposed to be living halfway across the world by then, any distraction was welcome.

Any semblance of community has either been evaporated, or replaced by something that’s too on-purpose to be genuine. Running clubs. What in God’s name is a running club? I take no issue with either concept; not the running or the club. On paper, it's a great idea. But when it's being peddaled to you constantly, and as the only alternative to being in your room, it seems forced. 

Social media replaced community, but without the heart. Twitter is angry and full of tweets from people you don’t follow. TikTok might as well be QVC for Gen Z, getting random people to sell legitimate junk for minimal prices. Instagram lost its chronological order in one of the most bizarre moves I’ve ever seen by a social media company, and is now populated by brand deals for stuff no one in their right mind would want, and influencers posing ‘candidly’ on their seventh trip of the year. I stare at the blue, blue ocean behind them. I’ve never been in an ocean that blue. I’ve never even seen water that colour in real life.

At its core, I think people are lonely. We’ve been isolated, either by a lack of opportunity, lack of money, lack of courage, lack of knowledge - we’re living independently as communal animals. I wander into London to mooch about, but I can’t even do that well. Where do I go? What do I? I have the same feeling in my mid-twenties I did when I moved schools at eight; that everyone else knows intrinsically what to fill their days with, and I’m left on the outskirts, trying to decode a language I’ve never learned. 

Clubs and communities and societies are too far away, and their fees are too much, and I don’t know anyone, and I live too far away to get home unless I leave ridiculously early - it’s an isolationary life. I know exactly how I envisioned spending my days in adulthood, but it’s as if something stands between me and them. Not having the right job. Not knowing the right people. Not being outgoing enough. Letting life pass me by. It’s nauseatingly easy, and gutturally demoralising. 

I want to know people. People want to know people. It might not seem like it these days, but I believe we’re so successfully being divided and conquered because we’ve lost the art of co-existing. And it’s not entirely our fault; who wants to hang out in a bar in central where drinks are £10 a pop, and you don’t get paid for another two weeks, and you can’t get a seat, and the late-trains have been cancelled, or worse - replaced by railbuses. Community is inaccessible. Particularly if you’ve moved far from home. I left my whole life to try and find a new one, and all I’ve found so far are job rejections and a wealth of ineligible men on dating apps. How are you meant to start your life when everything feels like a brick wall? People don’t want friends, or partners, they want associates. They want to pick you up and put you down when it benefits them. 

Of course, this is all very dismal and disheartening, and half of me doesn’t really feel this way. Life is what you put into it, but it’s difficult when you feel as if you’re putting in so much, and everything stays rigidly stagnant. British weather doesn’t help. Technology addiction doesn’t help. Dead-end jobs don’t help, and being skint doesn’t help, and neither does a sudden realisation that working from home has resulted in the inexplicable development of borderline agoraphobia. Years lost to Covid, followed by years lost to the paralysis that resulted from it.

Trying to make lasting relationships feels like secular prayer. Giving your all, wishing into an abyss, and spending the rest of your days with your ear tilted to the silence, begging to be heard.

As we approach the midpoint of the 2020s, I realise something that would've decimated my teenage self; I long to return to the days of flip-phones and clubs playing music people want to dance to. I long for the abandonment of the hollow state of so-called 'online communities'. I want for friendship and kindness and youth.