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From job applications to dating apps, rejection has become a defining experience of modern young adulthood – but is it shaping resilience, or just burning us out?
Whether it’s delivered by a cold recruiter email, a reluctant date in a dimly lit bar, or the ‘seen’ label beneath an unanswered text message, rejection has always been one of the tougher inevitabilities of the human experience.
But for many members of Gen Z, the concept of ‘no’ feels more like a relentless pummelling than an occasional bruise. At least, that’s what was ascertained from David Brooks’ viral opinion piece for The New York Times.
Brooks used the rise in university applications as the crux of his wide-ranging piece, citing sobering statistics like the 54,000 students who applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028 (of which only 1,950 were accepted).
‘Now you meet students who feel they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them,’ Brooks writes. ‘In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while that number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up.’
And it’s not just exclusive higher education applications that Gen Z are facing. Today’s twenty-somethings are also navigating competitive student clubs, unpaid internships, and a job market where 400 applications might yield not even a single interview.
This sense of rejection also veers off of the career path and into everyday life. As Juno Kelly recently discussed for Dazed, ‘apps like Tinder and Hinge have expanded our dating pools and simultaneously opened us up to rejection from people we will never even meet.’
The instant gratification of social media has also turned out to be far from gratifying, in the sense that it opens us up to a limitless pool of people with whom we feel the need to stay in touch and keep up with. This makes for a hamster wheel of social admin that inevitably leads to feelings and fear of rejection.
‘Perceived rejection sends our minds into chaos. Thanks to our survival instincts, we’re biologically averse to it, while studies have found that it activates the same regions in the brain as physical pain,’ writes Kelly.
On Reddit, one user captured this pain succinctly: ‘I internalized a lot of apathy from this pattern of rejection. Why waste my time applying for a job or swiping through Tinder if the chance for rejection is 99%?’ It’s a sentiment that reflects the grinding psychological toll of the modern rejection economy.
But it’s also important to note that while Gen Z might favour themselves as rejection connoisseurs, they’re not the only ones feeling its sting. As Sarabeth Bickerton argues, ‘we are all [gen X, millennials, etc] part of the Rejection Generation now.’
