In her debut book, Gen Z author Freya India tells the story of how girls her age were transformed by the modern world into “Girls®” — products for consumption shaped by social media, beauty filters, and Big Tech.
“Young women in particular are starting to see themselves as something more and more like products rather than people,” India, 26, claimed to The Post.
“They’ve grown up seeing themselves as basically nothing but an object in a marketplace, and the goal of their life is to optimize themselves for the market, to package up their experiences, and then to be rated and reviewed by people online.”
India’s book, published May 5, explores “all these different areas of girls’ lives: how they look, how they feel, their relationships, how they feel about the future.”
She said, “I found that there was so much in modern life that was magnifying those normal anxieties and, more than that, exploiting them for profit.”
India points a finger at Big Tech for throwing unhelpful solutions at girls who are going through otherwise normal struggles.
When they feel insecure, she writes, girls “have to handle that in a world of Facetune, AI filters, and feeds of edited Instagram influencers, recommended by algorithms to precisely target their insecurities.”
If they feel emotional, “they have to sort through the noise of TikTok therapists, YouTubers pushing BetterHelp discount codes, and ads for medication delivered straight to their door.”
When they’re struggling in love, “they must manage that in a world of Tinder and Pornhub, where romance feels dead, where the only guidance they get comes from dating influencers profiting from their fear and confusion, where they are made to feel frigid or needy for wanting more.”
According to India, her generation has “no sense of shared values or purpose binding them with others —all that is left is scrolling, working, consuming, and optimizing, alone.”
She blames Big Tech for supplying young girls with quick hit replacements to the traditional pillars of a healthy life.
“The foundations that previous generations had relied on have started to fall apart,” she said, citing a decline in religion, family breakdown, the dissolution of community, and the decline of relationships.
Instead, social media offered community in the form of Instagram, friendly advice in the form of Reddit threads, and peer mentorship via influencers.
“That’s why, in the 2010s, when these social media platforms emerged, they were so damaging,” she explained. “What they were selling was essentially substitutes and simulations for the thing that we’d lost, and I think Gen Z struggles because we don’t even know what we’re simulating in the first place.”
She first came up with the idea for the book in 2021, when she was working in a café and observing young female customers’ habits and interactions.
” I would just be watching girls that would come in… and wonder if they felt the same as me,” she said. “And I started to notice that other women were feeling it as well… I just thought, there’s something going on here, which is not normal, about [modern] girlhood.”
India’s book took its form as an investigation into the themes and sources of her own anxieties growing up. Each chapter investigates another way that young women’s lives have been picked apart by our modern world: filtered, diagnosed, documented, disconnected, detached.
Many of the themes in India’s book impact young men and young women alike, even though she says that the social media age has been particularly difficult for girls, who are naturally more insecure and concerned with looks.
The process of writing her book gave her more empathy for her own age group — and a better understanding of herself. “I think the biggest misconception is that we’re all just snowflakes, and I actually used to think that,” she admitted.
She also wanted to write about her own experiences: “At first I wanted to write a book about Gen Z as a whole, why we are miserable and suffering [but] I thought, you know, the only thing I can really speak with authority on is the experience of being a young girl, a young woman growing up.”
The book is written for young women, as well as for the mothers, fathers, parents, educators, and community members concerned about them.
“I started writing the book with the assumption that we’re all just not very resilient… [but] I got the full context to understand why we might be more risk averse, or socially anxious, or insecure,” she said. “It was quite personally reassuring for me because I thought, well, no wonder I was anxious at 13 or 14.”
Her advice for girls growing up today: “Try and notice when you’re treating yourself like a product” and “stop punishing yourself when you feel human, for having a human reaction to things.”
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