Influencer Avery Katherine Wood is just nineteen years old. When she and her boyfriend of four years, Carson Cope, ended their relationship, she took to TikTok to share the update. She faced the camera, eyes red with tears, and poured out her heart about why they split up. The post has over eight million views and two million likes.
While many have correctly noted that Gen Z is emotionally, physically, and spiritually falling apart due to social media, I want to take a step further and ask: why are they flocking online? Russ Greene has captured part of this with his "Total Boomer Luxury Communism"—the shifting of material wealth from younger generations to older generations. As America becomes a retirement community, Gen Z is seeking and finding wealth in other places. In other words, as material wealth becomes less and less attainable, young people are thrusting themselves more and more online in the hopes that they will achieve status. Like the robber barons of the gilded age, the modern social Gen Z elite swallows up digital followers through outrageous behavior and views.
I became more aware of this recently through figures like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and more obscure influencers like Clavicular—a champion of "self-mutilation" through bonesmashing and a user of crystal meth as a weight-loss product. Clav, as he's known to his friends, was recently interviewed by Michael Knowles and shows one of the more extreme cases of this pursuit of status. Behind their inflammatory rhetoric lies the age-old quest for recognition. This recognition comes through provocation—the online world has opened up the chase for status to whoever can say the most provocative thing or do the most provocative stunt.
I was recently spending time with a Gen Z college student. I asked him how many of his friends listen to Nick Fuentes. He responded, "Quite a few." I asked what he thought Fuentes's appeal was. My friend was frank: "They like him because he says things that go against what people typically hear." According to Gen Z, Fuentes has status because he is the perfect influencer—he's the streaker in the middle of the field who shocks Boomers in the stands while the young people cheer. Fuentes goes against the norm – his status is the anti-status of his statements and claims.
Lest we think this is only about secular figures, we should note this isn't purely a secular phenomenon. The church, especially evangelical churches in America, has been acutely impacted. The rise of megachurches and celebrity pastors is just another symptom of this new status quest. Pastors preach not purely for their own congregations but for a digital audience. Clips of provocative statements are circulated in the hope of getting likes and views. More status.
I recently saw a piece about Brett Cooper, formerly of Daily Wire. Cooper made a name for herself with her traditional views, and youthful demeanor. She pushed against the narrative that young women were progressive – and she embraced it. The piece is called “What’s Going on with the Tradcons?” and it explores Cooper’s recent drama with the infamous looskmaxxer, Clavicular. Apparently in an interview, Clavicular told Cooper some inappropriate things. However, after an event, Cooper (married) waited around for Clav in order to meet him. She smiled at him, shook his hand, and acted like someone meeting a star. We don’t have all the facts, but one thing is for certain, Cooper knows that Clavicular has “status” among young men, and she wants it too.
This of course, isn't a new phenomenon, though it's more pronounced now. Throughout history, humans have been on a quest for status and recognition. Adam and Eve sought to be like God. Israel sought to be like the other nations. Even Jesus's disciples sought position, asking to sit at his left and right hand in the kingdom, and arguing about who among them was "the greatest." So I am not diagnosing something that is new. Nor am I diagnosing something I don’t feel myself, even while writing public pieces and keeping up a growing Substack. There’s a temptation to desire the approval and applause of others over what’s good, beautiful, and true.
Often underlying this hunger for recognition is what the Greek philosophers called pleonexia—the insatiable desire to have more than one's fair share. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle finds pleonexia behind all human vices. We desire more followers. Desire more money. Desire to have the next break through article or post. Or to have the next viral post.
Today, that vice manifests itself most visibly in the digital world. Fortune explored Gen Z status in a 2024 piece titled "Gen Z's most notable status symbols, and the motivations behind them." What stood out to me was the subhead: "If it's not on TikTok it didn't happen." Status is a hunt for attention. And this hunt for attention, according to new research from The Argument, is making Gen Z lonelier than all other generations, especially women.
For a moment let’s look at status in American society and how the unafforability of life is driving young people more and more online. And how online life, coupled with social movements, are making young people unhappy and lonely, despite how much influencers like Cooper and Clavicular smile on camera.
At the turn of the twentieth century, material wealth was the primary status symbol. Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, notes that "The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction." In the postwar era, status meant owning a house, holding a stable job, saving for retirement, owning a car—preferably a Ford—and taking a yearly vacation. The leisure class was in full force. Young men who were born during the Great Depression, then went to the beaches of Normandy and the sands of the South Pacific, came back ready to make a name for themselves. They infiltrated the corporate and blue-collar world.
Then came the 1960s and with it the rise of social capital. Social upheaval and anti-capitalist rhetoric cast suspicion on the accumulation of material wealth. Underlying this shift was a massive intellectual movement pushing against the "capitalist empire." Herbert Marcuse, in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, captured this sentiment when he wrote that "people recognize themselves in their commodities." Yet even as this intellectual animosity grew, monetary wealth kept right on growing as well, setting up a collision course.
An easy example of the growing wealth is the television. As it became more affordable, more Americans purchased them. Status that once was only for the upper class became something the middle class could achieve as well. Material wealth grew across society. Yet with the TV came commercials flooding into living rooms, advertising the latest trends and transforming latent satisfaction into a manifesting desire to acquire. Viewers were no longer satisfied with merely having a TV, but with what the TV conveyed would bring them happiness.
Simultaneously, the '60s saw a shift to social status. Television brought more commercials into the home, but it also brought raw footage of the Vietnam War, presidential debates, and global politics as well. The world was on fire, and many felt it. Young people sought to upend the world order. Vietnam was just the start. With these social movements came a “status.” Protests, whether the cause was just or not, were places of affinity. As time passed, these social markers grew in popularity, especially as monetary success grew harder and harder to get.
It is a bit ironic that the 2008 market crash happened the year after the iPhone was released. With the crash, as many of us remember well, came uncertainty. Housing prices were once a staple of security. But in an instance, they evaporated. The iPhone became a status symbol. Young people could connect with one another, and with culture, at the touch of their finger. And as social media grew, so did the drive of millennials to find connection and fame online.
Fast forward to today, and identity has become the primary currency of social capital. Even entertainment reflects this: Stranger Things, a Gen Z favorite, integrated a coming-out storyline into its narrative arc that felt forced to many viewers. But if one understands how social capital became tied to identity politics, it's not hard to see why creators would find such storylines appealing—and necessary for status.
These trends have forced younger Americans to find new forms of status, forms less dependent upon material wealth and thus more accessible to the average person. Today, inflation is up roughly 1,250 percent from 1950. But beyond inflation's burden, the digital age has continued to transform how we understand status in ways begun decades ago. In his 2022 book Status and Culture, David Marx notes that "social media enables us to quantify our status like never before" through likes, retweets, comments, and followers. As monetary status grew steadily more unattainable, young people turned to a new space—one profoundly untouched by the conquering older generations.
Gen Z and Millennials feel this generational whiplash acutely. But they have adapted. Instead of sitting dormant, they've adjusted to this new age with new accolades of status. Instagram has become one of the primary conduits. The age of the influencer has become the norm. Carefully curated photos project an image of togetherness, success, polish—meanwhile, young people can't purchase homes or secure the careers Boomers took for granted. So they grasp for the status that is attainable: social media influence.
So, what does this mean for orthodox Christians around the world? In Luke 22, Jesus rebukes his disciples who are disputing amongst themselves about who would be regarded as the greatest. Jesus tells them that while the kings of the Gentiles lord over their people, the greatest according to God's kingdom—now a present reality—are those who serve and become as the youngest.
The church, when faced with the Roman Empire, stood firm. Now faced with the digital empire, the church must stand firm again. We must call younger generations to seek status—not earthly status that can fade or offer fleeting pleasure, but to pursue the eternal status as children of God. To cultivate virtue by the help of the Spirit.
The world's nouveau riche will be here one minute and gone the next. The nouveau riche of the kingdom of God will be eternal. This is the message Gen Z needs most right now.