I belong to a Facebook group for full-time nomads and part-time travelers. What makes this group unique is that there is always a meetup happening somewhere in some corner of the world because we make it a point to connect face-to-face. Recently, a woman was passing through my city on her way to a four-month trip across the Asia-Pacific region. She had a highly successful career, was well-traveled, and was just entering part-time retirement. She could not quite let work go completely since she is still young and in her mid-fifties.
She had been married and divorced, and she recounted a date she had with a man she had gone out with a couple of times. As soon as the man said, “I don’t see why it is necessary to have a passport,” she left the restaurant immediately. That was the end of it. I could easily understand the incompatibility in their worldviews.
I have also read a number of dating stories about mid-life women with a lifetime of experience. They enjoy dating, the dinners, the conversations, and the laughs. But after a few dates, no matter how great the guy seems to be, they come to the same realization. They realize they prefer their own company and simply do not want to compromise. Understandably, at mid-life, these women might have adult children and aging parents to take care of. Their worlds are hectic enough, and they have already spent most of their lives compromising. Unless a man can melt into their lives without causing any friction, they would rather just be on their own.
I could not help but think, is this the same as the self-preservation culture we see in Gen Z? I did not know exactly what that culture was all about, aside from hearing the tagline “self-preservation without causing harm to others.” Could it be that self-preservation is not a generational trend at all, but just a human reality?
To understand how this human instinct manifested as a distinct culture for Gen Z, we can look at how the hyper-acceleration of the digital world and short-form content has created an unprecedented focus crisis. Gen Z is the first generation raised on hyper-optimized, short-form algorithms that drop dopamine hits every few seconds. As a result, their developing minds have been physically rewired by this high-stimulation digital era, fundamentally altering their executive function and triggering a rise in actual, clinical ADHD. This environment did not just shorten attention spans; it shaped the very neurology that makes therapy-speak and pop psychology resonate so deeply with them today.
Therapy-speak tells us to safeguard our personal peace, mental health, and individual comfort by cutting away external expectations, social duties, and obligations. It makes me wonder if Gen X’ers are quietly taking a page out of this very book.
Looking deeper beneath the surface, there is a profound difference in how these two generations arrived at the same intersection. Mid-life Gen X women are setting boundaries because they tried to build egalitarian marriages while balancing careers, romance, and families, only to realize the societal infrastructure simply wasn’t there to support them. They ran themselves ragged trying to sustain “the village.”
For them, choosing to opt out of modern dating over fifty is a pragmatic calculation of return on investment. However, choosing peace over a relationship isn’t an attempt to isolate themselves entirely. Instead, they pour that reclaimed energy back into deep, platonic female friendships, their adult children, or community organizations. They are building village 2.0 through interdependence rather than hyper-independence. Ultimately, Gen X is simply retreating from the battlefields after fighting a 20-year war of uneven reciprocity.
Many in Gen Z grew up watching their parents get burned on the corporate ladder, stressed by financial crises and broken social safety nets. They saw adults sacrifice their health for systems that simply did not care about them. As a result, Gen Z decided early on that nothing is worth sacrificing their mental health.
The other segment of Gen Z was raised in a stable household, but their views were shaped by highly protective parents. They grew up with an intense anxiety toward closeness, to the point where intimacy feels like a trap. When the emotional demands of real-world relations or a social obligation begin to feel heavy, they experience a profound panic that their personal autonomy is being swallowed up. They deploy therapy-speak to protect themselves against this perceived threat to their autonomy.
Many in Gen Z have it in their minds that enforcing flawless, unyielding boundaries is the secret formula to a perfect marriage. They believe that by carefully partitioning their time, energy, and emotional labor, they can build a partnership entirely free of friction. But this is a dangerous illusion.
Marriage is not a corporate merger between two hyper-independent entities; it is an alliance built on compromise and mutual surrender. If two people enter a relationship focused only on protecting their individual moats, they leave no room for the vulnerability required to blend two lives together. Real intimacy requires us to occasionally step outside our comfort zones and carry each other’s burdens when life gets heavy. A marriage built purely on rigid boundaries won’t be perfect. It will simply be a cold, lonely arrangement where two people live side-by-side but never truly become one.
While Gen X sets up boundaries rooted in earned exhaustion, Gen Z sets up boundaries as preemptive self-preservation, protecting an energy that is already drained by a hyper-connected world before they even enter the arena of real-world human connections.
The definition of what is important in life is very different between these two generations. For Gen X, importance is measured by addition: what you build, who you help, and what you commit to. Gen Z, on the other hand, defines importance by subtraction: what you can safely remove from your life to feel less stressed, whether that means jobs, friendships, or social commitments.
The ultimate irony is that the very things Gen Z is desperately searching for, such as happiness, safety, peace, and mental well-being, cannot actually be sustained in isolation. Gen Z was born from a human womb but raised by digital algorithms, like an evil step-parent trying to brainwash them and turn them against humanity. The advice from therapy-speak and pop psychology should be applied to the digital world. It was never meant to be applied to the human world.
Gen Z needs to find their way back to the human world to experience true human connection and community. By this, I don’t mean subscribers, followers, or digital connections. I mean stepping away from superficial, transactional connections, and made-for-Instagram dinner parties, leaving the digital echo chambers, and embracing real life.
It is entirely fair that Gen Z wants to protect themselves. They are entering a world that feels economically precarious and emotionally exhausting, and using the vocabulary of boundaries to build a moat around themselves feels like the only logical way to survive. But survival is not the same thing as thriving.
Thriving requires us to realize that true safety does not come from total isolation, nor does it come from a perfectly fortified moat that keeps other humans out. It comes from the resilience built when navigating real human friction.
If Gen Z spends their entire lives subtracting every person, relationship, or obligation that causes them temporary stress, they accidentally subtract their capacity for deep joy and genuine belonging.
Gen Z is desperately searching for happiness, but because their brains were wired by algorithms, they don’t actually know what it is. Instead, they mistake high-stimulation dopamine hits and the total absence of discomfort for true fulfillment.
The fierce boundaries they use against other humans need to be redirected toward the digital world instead. They need to set boundaries with the digital algorithms that are causing their heavy mental toll.
Pop psychology and therapy-speak frequently encourage people to respond to asymmetric relationships by creating a different kind of asymmetry, often under the guise of “boundaries” or “self-care”. This is compounding the isolation. Instead of erecting walls, true emotional intelligence comes from actively engaging with each other. It requires us to be brave enough to say how we feel, voice our needs, and work through conflicts out loud rather than simply subtracting people from our lives.
Real life is found in the messy, unpredictable spaces that cannot be filtered or blocked with a single tap. When we ask what is truly important in life, the answer isn’t a flawless, stress-free existence found through subtraction. It is the discovery of unconditional safety inside human connection. In the digital world, connections are fragile and can disappear with a single click, forcing everyone to perform perfection just to stay included.
Stepping into true belonging is worth the tax of real-world friction, because a curated life free of conflict is also a life completely empty of genuine love and warmth. True emotional maturity isn’t about remaining completely untouched by life, but about being brave enough to leave those polished digital bubbles, step into the complexities of community, and connect face-to-face. But understand that physical proximity alone is not the same as emotional presence. If we bring the internet’s zero-tolerance policy for discomfort to the table, we remain isolated even in a crowded room.
In a real village, we stop focusing on how our generational traumas and histories make us different, and begin to see what we have in common. This is what true happiness is: the discovery of unconditional safety inside real, unfiltered human connection. It comes from being fully seen, complete with your flaws, mistakes, and intensities, and realizing that people are staying at the table with you anyway. Ultimately, to be truly seen, and having people stay, is to receive unconditional love. Joy is also found in the laughter shared after an awkward misunderstanding, and the deep comfort of knowing you don’t have to navigate life’s heavy lifting alone.