The Freshman

Actor Donny Pangilinan represents everything we like about Generation Z: steadfast ambition, a conscientious approach to life, and an effortless sense of normalcy that we millennials just don’t get.

- Lex Celera

If Donny and I, by some stroke of time travel magic, had been classmates in high school, we probably wouldn’t have been friends. He was everything I wasn’t: a well-dressed, popular kid with good posture who was also part of the basketball varsity team (worldwide, the basketball varsity team is arguably the most popular varsity team. Don’t fight me on this). He can also dance well. Obviously.

While I hovered between social circles, trying out for the table tennis and badminton varsity team and joining the book club in an attempt to gather any—what do the kids call it? clout?—I would imagine people gravitated towards him without any effort on his part. He’s pretty much void of any problems at a moment’s glance, save for what I imagine would be the minor school misunderstandings or semi-secret relationship mishaps normal in high school kids.

And I know this because although he’s already in college, taking up multimedia arts in UP, and it’s been approximately eight years since I was in high school, I can see the difference between us. It’s the difference between millennials (I’m 23) and Generation Z (he’s 20). And the biggest difference was that Donny isn’t a humble person.

Let me explain: humility and confidence are two different, mutually exclusive things. Both are valued in our society. Juxtapose the two in social settings and you would see that humility is valued above confidence. Humility makes confident people more likeable. But it also makes them disingenuous. When we want to be humble, we abase ourselves and distance ourselves from our own self-respect to hopefully gain the respect of others. A confident person who isn’t humble can be seen as arrogant. Arrogant: probably the most reductive word uttered to the youth of today.