Identity Beyond Commodification and Output

The announcer pronounced my name wrong as I walked across the stage at my college graduation. I concede—I don't have the easiest name to pronounce. But at that moment, it felt like tripping at the finish line of a marathon.

At the end of my four year marathon, I got three pieces of paper, two butchered words, and one degree holder to prove the last four years existed.

The question is, what now?

I'm going to a PhD program after this. I'm grateful to have an answer for the inevitable "What's next?"—and something to dull the sharp finality of graduation. I'm excited about the research, about diving deep into questions that matter to me.

But even academia—the supposed refuge for pure intellectual pursuit—primarily depends on output. Professors pay thousands to publish in journals that should compensate them for their expertise. Universities measure success through grant dollars secured and papers published per quarter. Research gets valued not by its contribution to human knowledge, but by its citation count and impact factor. Even in spaces dedicated to learning, worth gets reduced to metrics.

This is the central problem facing Generation Z: we are growing up in a world where every form of engagement gets quantified and commodified.

Historian Achille Mbembe wrote that colonial systems reduced people to things—to bodies and outputs that could be counted, extracted from, and sold. That same extractive logic now governs our daily lives, just with different tools.

We live in the attention economy now. Engagement is the modern currency. Hashtags track our cultural participation. Productivity scores measure our professional worth. Social media algorithms quantify our social value through likes, shares, and comments.

To exist now is to be measurable. And to be measurable is to be monetizable.

But here's what this system doesn't account for: the human need to simply be.

In my transition period between graduation and graduate school, I'm experiencing this firsthand. For the first time since my sophomore year of high school, I am using my summer to take a break. No internships, jobs, or much of anything, really. In this time, I have made somewhat of an art of rotting – Instagram and its companions have occupied most of my attention – but the moments that I spend without any stimulation make me feel a little queasy.

What do I define myself as when I'm not producing anything? More generally, how do I live with myself when I do not need to occupy a role for anyone else?

This isn't just personal anxiety—it's a documented psychological phenomenon. Generation Z is growing up in a world where one’s actions and day-to-day choices hold just as much stake in their identity as their core values. Our fluency with digital tools means we’re the first generation able to curate every facet of our public selves—images, hashtags, affiliations, even moods—assembled like a personal brand. In effect, we’ve learned to produce ourselves. Our personalities, daily routines, aesthetic choices, even our vulnerabilities become content: refined, packaged, and distributed. Just by being online, we too have become a commodity.

We are facing the consequences of this arrangement as we speak. Generation Z is shown to be the loneliest generation in America, and one of the key drivers of this is our engagement online. Heck, ChatGPT is taking an increasingly prominent role in our society as a therapist. While nuance is to be used in interpreting these results, the message is clear: we are all becoming increasingly commodified, and thereby isolated. 

The stakes of this crisis extend far beyond individual wellbeing. As society becomes more commodified and everything gets assessed by economic value, we're losing the capacity for genuine human connection. We can't build meaningful relationships when every interaction gets filtered through performance metrics. We can't create an authentic community when our worth depends on measurable output.

The solution isn't to reject technology or withdraw from economic participation—that's neither realistic nor necessarily helpful. Instead, we must consciously develop what exists outside the logic of extraction. We need to learn how to be present without needing to produce, how to exist without being measured.

This means creating regular spaces in our lives free from quantification—time spent without documenting it, conversations without social media performance, activities pursued purely for internal satisfaction. It means developing relationships that don't depend on mutual productivity or professional networking. It means sitting with ourselves and discovering what remains when all the metrics fall away.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that learning to "be" isn't selfish—it's essential for genuine contribution to society. People who know themselves independent of external validation make better friends, partners, and community members. They can engage with systems of measurement without being consumed by them.

But this individual work must happen alongside and lead to collective action. As the structures we live in seek to extract value from us, the only real solution we have is to be there for each other. And that requires first figuring out how to "be" without external mandates.

Generation Z still has time to figure out how to exist amidst the chaos of commodification. We can model something different—showing that human worth exists independent of measurable output, that identity can be grounded in presence rather than performance.

The first step is recognizing that we have a choice. Social media offers a Pandora’s box of endless content, designed to keep you engaged for as long as possible—to extract as much value as it can. Every time you pick up your phone, consciously or not, you're choosing to open that box. Just once, make the choice to sit with yourself in silence. This looks different for everyone, but I try not to look at a screen willingly in the morning. 

The second step is making space for what cannot be bought, sold, or measured. Use that silence to figure out what matters to you—not to your feed, your GPA, or your resume, but to you. It might be messy, contradictory, or even painful. That’s okay. Sitting with yourself—really sitting—is hard. But that battle, unlike the ones you perform for others, is yours alone. And it shapes you in ways no algorithm can. Let yourself be bored, then fight out of that boredom without the easy out that engagement farms offer.

The third step is extending that space to others. Talk to someone—no screens, no distractions. Let the awkward silences set in. Notice what fills the gaps between the curated parts. That person, just like you, has value beyond what they can produce or post. Of course, it’s important to stay connected and informed—but every headline is about someone with as much interiority as yourself. The only way to really feel that is to be fully present with someone else.

Our generation's legacy won't be determined by how well we perform within existing systems, but by how successfully we preserve what makes us human—starting with making ourselves seen as more than metrics, and extending that recognition to others.