by Apostolos Kotsampasis
Romanticism disappeared somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release of the first iPhone, without making any noise. Today, watching Generation Z scrolling apathetically through the digital landscape of relationships leaves you with an icy sense of detachment — as if you were watching an Michelangelo Antonioni film on fast-forward, only without the style.
The Baby Boomers and Generation X grew up addicted to the narcotic of “grand emotion.” There was a dose of self-destructive beauty in A Man and a Woman, that melancholic bossa nova by Claude Lelouch promising that love is a heroic act. There was aesthetic value in loss, patience in seduction. In The Way We Were, Hubbell and Katie did not separate because they stopped wanting each other, but because ideology is harsher than sex. There was risk — a tragedy that demanded time, cigarettes, and meaningful glances beneath the rain.
Generation Z seems to treat love as just another task in its feed, a process of profile optimization. The word “emotion” has been replaced by “vibe check” and “boundaries.” There is no longer any room for the fatal or the fateful, only for compatibility. Their approach is clinical, almost surgical — a constant negotiation of terms designed to avoid “toxicity,” often ending in a sterile loneliness.
They prefer the safety of ghosting to the risk of rejection. Love is no longer a rainy beach in Deauville, but a series of screenshots dissected coldly and exhaustively. Perhaps they are smarter than we were. Perhaps. Or perhaps they are simply hollow inside. Who knows?
The Boomers believed in fate. Gen X believed in irony. Gen Z believes in the screenshot.
Lovers once had the style to be destroyed by a “why.” Today’s lovers disintegrate because of a “seen.” It is a transition from the drama of substance to the drama of the interface, and honestly, I struggle to remember whether I made a reservation at the bar or whether I’m simply staring at a black screen, waiting for a notification that will never come.
