“You remember your pre-internet brain, and you remember doing those things, but you don’t really remember how it felt. You don’t really remember how time felt. There’s that guy who wrote that book, I can’t remember what it’s called, fuckin’ genius guy. But he’s saying that the world has always been informed by people who read books, and not necessarily academically, but the concept of a narrative is very important to people’s lives. Those people grew up with not necessarily a sense of purpose, but a sense that your life is leading somewhere. That’s the way I relate to my music, because I see The 1975 as this story. But as we go into the future, the world is gonna start being informed by people who didn’t grow up with that narrative — who grew up with more of a sense of immediacy. And we start to feel more like a unit amongst other units, and everything becomes a lot more compartmentalized. So when we talk about Twitter, we know that we were happy before, but we can’t remember how it felt, so we won’t take the risk to leave it. The generation after us now, they don’t have that weird nostalgia or sense that something’s wrong: ‘I didn’t used to do this. I didn’t used to need this.” BrainInternetDigital AgeOnline CommunicationGen ZInternet AddictionGeneration ZChronically Online Author:Matty Healy
“When I was 17, all the cultural ideas that I was sold were about the future. Being 17 now must be terrifying. You must look at the state of the economy and the world and you don’t know if there’s going to be a future. If I was 17 now and I was having to deal with the things that young people are expected to deal with — you need to be informed on racial issues, how economies work, all this stuff … When I was 17, I was getting stoned, and there was no one shouting at me on the internet that I wasn’t doing my part. It felt like the apocalypse anyway, because of some girl or a lack of weed or something like that. It wasn’t like trying to understand these huge ideas and being expected to have this pre-signed-off opinion on anything.” Mental HealthSocial MediaDigital AgeIndependent ThinkingLiberal EducationMillenialsGen Z Author:Matty Healy