A complicated relationship with rejection
Social media and a bubble-wrapped youth
I’ve been thinking a lot about my generation’s relationship with rejection: Gen Z is both the most used to rejection and, at the same time, the most afraid of it.
As the first generation to grow up with social media, our brains have been conditioned to crave the dopamine hit of digital affirmation. On the other side of the coin, we’re constantly prepared for the rejection that comes with it.
Offline, a culture of rejection permeates across the college admissions process, the workforce, dating, and even social scenes. Meanwhile, our virtual reality makes it easy to hide hardship and allows us the ability to curate our public image. But it’s also left us more vulnerable to criticism and rejection.
The constant threat of being rejected has ironically created a generation with little rejection resilience. This is true of both Gen Z 1. 0 and 2.0, but our rejection tolerance is a bit different – and I’d argue, worse for Gen Z 1.0, the older half of this generation, and the true guinea pigs for social media.
But it’s not just social media. From the get-go, even before iPhones were a thing, the odds were stacked against our ability to tolerate rejection. We were raised on participation trophies and over-protected by parents and teachers who, with good intentions, bubble wrapped us from a world that was changing quickly. This is well documented in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book ‘The Coddling of the American Mind.’
The over inclusive culture of those elementary school years was just the pretext. Maybe if our parents had known we’d be overexposed to rejection just years later, they wouldn’t have done that (although I’m not so sure).
In elite circles, the stats on rejection are stark. As David Brooks wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Gen Z’s experience with rejection last May, “roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted.” Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, he writes, “has 2,700 internship positions and receives roughly 315,000 applicants, which means that about 312,300 get rejected.”
Beyond rejection lobbed by administrators and executives, Brooks also touches on something I’ve personally witnessed myself: an exclusive club culture on college or even high school campuses, where students reject their peers from extracurriculars. Applying for the school newspaper, auditioning for the school play, or trying out for a club sports team has always been common practice – and so has being rejected from them. But these days, there are formal applications even for activities like community service (the anecdotes shared with Brooks are inconceivable).
While these examples are intense, it’s not just prep schools, the Ivy League, or Wall Street that’s hyper selective and therefore ripe with rejection. Collectively, modern culture is obsessed with selectivity and seems to get pride out of being part of something that has rejected others. Think about New York City’s social club scene, or the premise of swiping on dating apps altogether. These breed rejection. And yet, 56% of Gen Z daters say fear of rejection has held them back, according to Hinge’s 2024 Gen Z D.A.T.E. report.
These dynamics led Delia Cai to dub Gen Z “the most rejected generation in human history” in a piece for Business Insider last spring. If that’s true, why are we also the most afraid of it? Her analysis compares rejection across generations, and examines our generation’s lack of tolerance for it.
For years, our culture has been rooted in an ethos of external validation. That may be starting to change, with our current emphasis on authenticity – a key theme for Gen Z 2.0 especially. The value placed on raw, unfiltered authenticity today, the vibe that goes viral on TikTok and has characterized our messy red flag summer, is entirely a counteraction to an obsession with perfection and fear of rejection. This, in a way, is Gen Z 2.0’s way of pushing back against their older siblings or cousins.
Once you start paying attention, it’s easy to see our generation’s obsession (and insecurity) with rejection, and those who have lived it are quick to pick up on the factors contributing to our communal need for external validation as well as the reasons we love to exclude others.
Eager to probe a bit more, I asked my Instagram followers yesterday what they thought about our generation’s ironic relationship with rejection in the age of social media. Here’s some of what they shared.
Rejection never happened for us IRL
“We grew up never having to confront our rejection (i.e. social media, school, job applications) because we lived behind screens. I agree in theory it should’ve made us more comfortable with it but because rejection never happened for us IRL we could either act like it didn’t happen (like I can delete a mean insta comment or a job rejection or a bad grade delivered over my school app) or deal with it privately.”
Rejection by the mass vs a person
“I feel like cancel culture falls into some of this though! Like huge difference between behind rejected by one person in dating app for example vs being rejected by your entire generation, school, etc. So I feel like the rejection isn’t the same thing to our generation as it is to others bc to us it’s being rejection by the mass vs a person.”
Instant gratification
“I think because we are so used to instant gratification we don’t seek challenges as much / are more sensitive to rejection and not getting what we want.”
Seeking external validation
“I recently listened to a podcast where the hosts explained that rejection triggers the same part of the brain as physical pain! Rejection also threatens our safety as it relates to our social bonds. In that sense we’re hard wired to fear it - it’s a core/root fear that comes up a lot in therapy. As you mentioned social media def increases this fear as it depends on seeking external validation.”
Risk takers vs. the risk averse
“Our generation has two sides to it. Firstly, the risk takers who reject the way society operates and instead opts to make their own future. These are the people who I believe are the portion of Gen Z that reject the 9-5 culture and ‘the matrix.’ I imagine these people that are resilient to rejection [are] the youth entrepreneurs that are anti-corporate America culture. Secondly, are those that are satisfied with the status quo not because they are [comfortable] with it, but because of their fatigue. Instead, these people are just focused on getting by and these are the people who I believe are afraid of rejection. The youth who simply go about their day to day lives without taking risks.”
So why are we the most rejection-averse? A unique cocktail of overexposure to rejection, coupled with our parents and teachers’ early inclination to shield us from it, led to the rejection intolerance I’ve described. I do see where they were coming from, when it seemed like – with new technologies, global terrorism, and more – cushioning kids from the horrors of the outside world was all they could control. The problem is that just years later, we were inundated. Not only with rejection and exclusivity, but with everything they had tried to protect us from.
I’m not solely blaming our parents, or social media. But that didn’t mesh well. Having basically been taught that everyone must feel validated and included at all times, the social media landscape - and the increasing selectivity of higher education, job market, and dating apps - were a real shock to the system. And instead of building up a resistance to it, we came to be hyper-cautious of rejection at all costs, sometimes, avoiding risk taking as a result.
And what comes next? At first, it wasn’t necessarily our generation’s fault that we have an outsized relationship with rejection. But as we’ve aged, the responsibility to experiment (even if cautiously) and experience rejection falls on us. Gen Z 2.0 seems to get this, pushing back against the overly cautious standards set by Gen Z 1.0.
But I worry about what happens to the risk averse crowd that a member of The Up and Up community described. It’s incumbent upon the most ambitious among us, and anyone mentoring or working with this generation, to encourage risk taking, especially in the age of AI, where the way we think and the initiative we are willing to take will separate the achievers from the rest.
Moral of the story, we better figure this fear of rejection thing out before we have kids of our own. Though given the sexsession, declining birth rates, and gender gap, we might have other things to sort out first.
Noteworthy reads
Goodbye $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle., Natasha Singer for The New York Times
Gen Z Is Hot To Trot For RTO, Amanda Hoover for Business Insider
Tanning Is Back, But The Obsession Goes Beyond Y2K Nostalgia, Taryn Brooke for Cosmopolitan