There are a couple of reasons why Gen Z might seem worse at relationships than previous generations. By now, we've all realized that social media has created new forms of intimacy that have reshaped how we think about relationships.
We can know what someone ate, who they're with, and what they like in real time. This can create the illusion of closeness while they're not sharing that exclusively with us, and they might not even know we're watching. The thing is, our bodies don't know the difference between a real friend we see all the time and someone we're seeing all the time, only virtually.
Social media becomes particularly interesting from this perspective because it doesn't merely allow us to communicate with one another; it changes what intimacy looks like, and what kind of relationships become possible.
Right now, there are more types of relationships than there used to be, for sure. What would be the equivalent of somebody you only interact with via likes before? It didn't exist. It also wasn't normal for us humans to have so much proximity without reciprocity as we do now with influencers or people we watch online (let's hope it's not our exes).
So social media is a machine that produces new forms of intimacy that we might be too old to understand, and we have to accept that. I'd like to encourage us to think about the possibility that new generations aren't bad at friendship; they have just created new, completely different types of it.
Think about it like this: a cellphone is a technological tool that we interact with and use to communicate and share things with other people. This creates new ways of communicating that never existed before, and those new ways of communicating create new types of feelings and relationships that didn't exist before, simply because relationships weren't affected by this new technology.
Also, the technology, the feelings, and the relationships aren't independent levels; they continually affect one another. Our feelings influence how we use the technology, then the technology influences what we do with those feelings, and finally, our actions influence what the technology shows us. All of that creates an infinite loop that produces new forms of intimacy along with new types of media and, why not, some brainrot to go along.
However, we have to point out that younger generations might be a little too influenced by a culture of disposability that has been constantly marketed to us on every medium possible over the last few years. That might affect how willing they are to work on a relationship after it produces any kind of challenge.