Homebody Culture

Interesting Quartz article on millennials preferring to opt-out of social life and chill indoors. Worth reading in its entirety. These lines offer a good insight into the mindset driving this culture

An added benefit of posting about staying in is that it can double as a form of personal branding: A way to assert control over your social anxiety, or a rebuff to the cultural pressures that can make young people feel like duds if their personal lives aren’t full of constant glitz and adventure. It’s also a subtle power move. Cracking a joke on Twitter about waiting for love to come find you in your apartment is a way of letting the world know that you’re self-sufficient and happy with or without social plans, free from pangs of loneliness or rejection.

In times past, it was not so complicated. There were people out there who did not care too much what society thought of them and their lifestyles. So they lived how they chose. There was no much signaling needed because they did not value the opinion of the recipients of such signals. They just did their thing. That type of personality is hardly unique to a generation and they surely exist among millennials too. The difference seems to be that there are wannabes now who want to mimic that "style". If its only projection and not a person's reality it would eventually lead to problems. Seems like technology is enabling such projection quite easily.