My first scroll through TikTok was in March 2020, when I think quite a few other “elder millennials” joined the social media platform. It launched in September 2016 and became the most downloaded app in the U.S. by October 2018, so I wasn’t ahead of the game by any means (to me it fell in the same category as Snapchat, an app for “the kids”). And then quarantine happened, and social media became the largest window to the outside world. I still recall trends from that time: “bored in the house, and I’m in the house bored;” “Renegade” dance routines; Nestle crunch; endless sourdough bread ASMR; makeup tutorials — the list goes on.
Those hours of scrolling may have helped pass time during a pandemic, but what have they done for a different (ongoing) epidemic? A 2021 Harvard study titled “Loneliness in America: How the Pandemic Has Deepened an Epidemic of Loneliness and What We Can Do About It” found that “43% of young adults reported increases in loneliness since the outbreak of the pandemic. About half of lonely young adults in our survey reported that no one in the past few weeks had ‘taken more than just a few minutes’ to ask how they are doing in a way that made them feel like the person ‘genuinely cared.’”
I was living alone for much of the pandemic, and I can attest to the yawning loneliness of those times. While I often found social media good for a laugh or learning something new (trend, hairstyle, stain remover, ) during many lonely times over the last few years, it never compares to a deep conversation with a friend or a project that impacts others. In fact, I cofounded a print literary magazine in 2021 specifically to create the offline community so many of us were (are) craving. Social media is not meant to replace a community, but to complement and unite.
A more timely example of this is the Buffalo Bills social media presence — I’m not even a football (sportball) fan, per se, but I enjoy the camaraderie created by the team’s hype squad online and off. Would I rather experience watching a game then share a recap reel on Instagram? Absolutely.
In the same vein, we still print CITY because analog matters. Because picking up a copy of the magazine at your favorite local shop or leaving it on your coffee table throughout the month matters. Knowing you can find it in the red boxes around town matters. Our sources, writers and photographers know having their names in print matters.
In CITY’s first-ever wellness issue, our team looked at it as a concept and went beyond the buzzy stereotype — telling stories about not only physical, but spiritual, financial and cultural wellness. It’s one of our newsier issues in a while, and we’re looking forward to your thoughts.
Leah Stacy is the editor of CITY. She can be reached at leah@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
