Is Gen Z OK?

Teenagers doing things that, on their face, are just barely recognizable to us as adolescent behavior. Maybe in some far-off high school in another county, but never ours. “There was that one girl who had sex in a bathroom senior year,” we think, but nothing like this. We watch Euphoria, and we ask ourselves, as parents or as people over 25 or sometimes as Zoomers ourselves, “Is this what things are really like now?”

Of course, the answer to this question is almost always no. The average Zoomer does not walk the halls of Sam Levinson’s high school, just as millennials never knew Ryan Murphy’s vision of adolescence (or Elsley’s and Brittain’s, the minds behind Skins, for that matter). There is no Rue, portrayed by the affectless, androgynous Zendaya, nor is there a Jules, nor a Kat, nor a McKay. There is certainly no Cal.

There is less glitz, less money, fewer secrets, a less dramatic display of what it means to be drug-addled. And while there is, tragically, a very good chance your child might encounter tainted dope or coke, the odds are much slimmer that she’ll ever be forced to lick liquid Fentanyl off a knife.

Euphoria’s not just hard to watch because of the gravity of the content, either. Sometimes, the difficulty comes with just how dramatic the characters’ interior worlds are as they face these hardships. We can handle the eating disorder, the rape, the drug relapse — it’s the monologues that pushed us over the edge. Those perfectly calibrated displays of angst.

Is it the kind of angst that can only be spoken by a teenager written by an adult trying to channel a teenager? Or have we, as adults, just forgotten how serious everything seems when you’re that age? After all, adolescents are notorious for the kind of myopia that, at worst, will tell you it’s rational to end your life over something like a nasty rumor or the end of a friendship or revenge porn. Painful experiences, to be sure, but as adults, ones that are much more possible to build resilience against. And maybe that’s the thing about Euphoria or Skins or Degrassi or, for that matter, Glee. Their melodramatic theatricality speaks to something about how it really feels to be a teenager, even if very few of us experienced anything worthy of national television. Maybe the drama is the vessel our teen angst always needed — maybe we are all longing to give our adolescent pain more dignity than sulking in our rooms, scrolling TikTok, or spewing our feelings out onto Tumblr.

We don’t personally know the backdrop world of Euphoria, but we do know the precarity of teenage sex, whether it’s with a partner that’s a few years too old for us or a classmate we thought we could trust but couldn’t. Or, the other side of that coin, what it’s like to be too fat or too ugly to be truly seen as a viable sexual partner. The feeling of one action — maybe it’s the first time you try that drug — leading to a series of actions that feel beyond our control. That feeling of being outside yourself, a person you yourself no longer know. The moment of recognition that you’re no longer your parents’ child. You’re an adult, and whatever is happening is real life now. We may not have experienced the precise betrayals that unravel, but we know the hopelessness.

Euphoria gives them the causes we never got to experience. I can’t help but wonder if this is part of what Euphoria is all about: an attempt to make sense of our pain. It does our teenage angst, long buried or suppressed, a sort of justice. The truth is that the boy we liked just never thought we were very pretty or interesting, but these teen shows give us the catharsis of a world where the pain was less cerebral, less hinged on the hormonal ups and downs of being young. We aren’t languishing. Our struggle is rooted in something outside ourselves.

In the pilot episode, we meet Rue, who tells us there is no fundamental reason she is so broken. She was just born that way. There was no trauma; there was no big event. As a child, she counted the ceiling tiles until her parents, well-meaning but incapable of understanding her, took her to a psychiatrist. She’s given a laundry list of diagnoses: OCD, depression, anxiety. She finds drugs, which free her. But as the show unfolds, we can’t possibly blame Rue for everything that happens to her or her friends and classmates. It’s not their fault. They’re just children, children to whom bad things happen.

Teenagers, of course, will search for catharsis outside of television dramas, too. At best, they write fan fiction. They tell tall tales. At worst, they become mired in a never-ending web of self-diagnoses. They look for explanatory labels wherever they can find them. They construct narratives about themselves: parents who, until their children turned 13, hung the moon and the stars, suddenly become malignant narcissists. All conflict becomes abuse. Children log into TikTok or Discord or once-upon-a-time Tumblr and Xanga and warn one another about how this disciplinary action or that might be strong enough cause to go “no contact” with a parent. And there’s always a cadre of adults there to take them literally. It used to be that adults would see this happen and say, “They’ll grow out of it,” and the teenagers would turn to marijuana or sex or music or, yes, shows like Degrassi or Skins. They would grow out of it because they’d be allowed to. The internet has made it all a bit more permanent and public, which is making the teen melodrama less a phase and more a consuming feature of our culture, which is why, as Euphoria’s second season rolls out, this absurdly over-the-top picture of the children these days remains a cultural phenomenon despite feeling simultaneously so unreal and, as the children themselves say, too real. Teen dramas end, traditionally, with some catharsis, and perhaps that’s what we need in today’s climate.

Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcast After the Orgy. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter @default_friend.