We Are the Slop -- An Interesting, Albeit Depressing, Look At Gens Y/Z and Social Media

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We Are the Slop

They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But it’s worse than that: We’re not just consuming slop—we’re turning our own lives into it.

By Freya India
10.27.25

“Why look good without getting a selfie; why go out without uploading an Instagram Story?”

They say my generation is wasting our lives watching mindless entertainment. But I think things are worse than that. We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.

We have been posting about our lives for a long time. But now I notice something else, something more than a compulsion to capture and share moments. I see people turning into TV characters, their memories into episodes, themselves into entertainment.

We have become the meaningless content, swiped past and scrolled through. Experiences, relationships, even our own children, are cheapened, packaged, churned out for others to consume. For some of us, growing older has become a series of episodes to release: first the proposal, then the wedding, followed by house tours, pregnancy reveals, every milestone and update, on and on, forever. We exist to entertain each other.

For influencers, of course, this is their career. They turn their lives into TV series. We have trailers and teasers. We have cliffhangers, season finales, and reminders to “tune in next week!” We have stock characters and cameos. Cult followings and conventions. Running gags and cold opens. Theme songs and end credits. Christmas specials and crossover episodes. Press tours and plot twists. Spin-off shows and sneak peeks; bloopers and “behind-the-scenes.”
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Every day I am becoming more convinced that this is the furthest thing from sentimental, this marketing of memories. That the couples who barely remember their engagement, when it was, what they said, have something far more human than those who orchestrated the whole thing, rehearsed it, recorded it, set up a background, put on a soulless display for strangers.

And that we should want the opposite. I want “I love you” said when we are the only two people in the world to witness it, the words intruded on by nothing and nobody, so clumsy they can’t be captioned or subtitled. I want the pregnancy revealed in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed in the bathroom, holding hands instead of iPhones, looking into each other’s eyes instead of a lens. I want the gender reveal whispered without cannons and confetti and cameras; to give birth without thumbnails thought up from hospital beds, or retakes and rehearsals in delivery rooms. And when I have children, I want them to listen to my memories, to hear my stories, as I use my own words to tell them what it was like, where we were, how I felt—not hand them a phone so they can scroll through my Instagram.

We look back with horror at previous generations, that they didn’t celebrate enough, couldn’t capture the moment, have no memories to scroll through. But I will reserve my horror for what we are doing now. Partners are being chosen, boyfriends are getting down on one knee, and babies are being born, not out of love or devotion or human instinct, but because views are down. Ratings are dropping. Storylines are needed. The audience is getting impatient.

We know how this show ends, though. The same as every other. Someday this generation, these influencers, will discover with dread what every celebrity and contestant and cast member has realized before them. That after offering everything up, every inch of their lives, every finite moment on this earth, it does not matter how much they stage, how much they rehearse, how much they trade, how long they leave the cameras rolling. We will always wonder, eventually, what else is on?

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