There’s a theme running through the cultural hits of recent years, those stories we went particularly mad for. Fleabag, Cat Person, Girls, Russian Doll, Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends are all stories about women, true, but the other theme is emotional honesty. They are about admitting the shameful, painful truth.

Written 10 years ago, these women might have been glamorously defensive and closed off – “strong female characters”. On the other hand, those characters whose embarrassing truths float near the surface – David Brent and his ilk – were villains or the butt of the joke. Now if you want your story to go viral, you need to make them the sympathetic ones.

If excruciating honesty is the new zeitgeist, it should not surprise us. It is the distinguishing characteristic of the next generation. This is generation Z (born between the mid 90s and the early 2000s) and younger millennials – I’d say the cut-off is around 28. Among their distinguishing features, this generation are far more open in the way they talk about themselves.

If this sounds odd to you – we are, after all, speaking of social media’s children, people who learned to take the perfect selfie at the age that the rest of us mastered colouring inside the lines – you are missing a key difference in the way we older people use the internet and the way they do. For those of us who left home before the advent of Facebook and the reliable broadband connection, there is a hint of shame in using social media, akin to the way we might once have felt about online dating. It seems too obvious, too needy. It makes your motives far too clear. It invites you to paint an aspirational picture of yourself, the kind of life you want others to think you are living. What appears on the page – we are all too aware – is a precision point-portrait of all your deepest insecurities and ambitions.

We can’t resist using it, but we use it dishonestly, trying to hide what we are actually there for. The older you are, the more fiercely you will hold on to the reasoning that you post flattering pictures of yourself and your life to “keep in touch with friends and family”. You are on Facebook and Instagram not because you are drawn into the “social validation feedback loop”, as Facebook co-founder Sean Parker once put it, but because there might be a party you’d like to go to. You “don’t get” social media, you “find it exhausting”, you would “definitely close your account if it weren’t for couple of people on there you use it to stay in touch with”. This is why many of our online personas tend to reek of denial and inner conflict. Ours are the accounts of needy amateurs – all posed pictures and captions that may be summarised as “what, me?” There is very little room for stories of failure or unhappiness (it is easy to talk about your wedding, hard to talk about your divorce; you can talk about being promoted, but not about being passed over). Put this dynamic in 3D and it’s The Stepford Wives.

But generation Z are more honest about what people do when they go online, and are happy to admit it. Yes, they are there for praise. Yes, they are addicted. Yes, they would be lonely without it. You sense this new attitude is almost a matter of survival. For older people, social media is a place where you arrange to see your friends. For generation Z, it is seeing your friends. It is where they live. They have had to make it fit for humans.

So while they post curated selfies, they’ll also talk about why they feel pressured to. “I didn’t pay for the dress, took countless selfies trying to look hot for Instagram”, one 18-year-old social media influencer captioned a carefully posed shot. And here is Instagram model Essena O’Neill, on one of her popular pictures: “For this post, I pictured myself ‘spontaneously leaping’,” she wrote. “What you don’t see is me getting increasingly irate with my patient boyfriend for ‘not taking it seriously’.”

In fact, social media influencers fall over themselves to reveal how unhappy and unnatural their lives are. This is Emily Lavinia, a 28-year-old blogger in an interview with the Observer in March: “I actually have ‘imposter syndrome’ and don’t feel that proud. I try to air this idea that I’m incredibly confident – it helps me get to where I am and makes other people believe in you. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors.” And this is Jordan Bunker, a model: “People assume I have a great life and everything is handed to me. I live with my parents and I work from a desk in my room.”

Then there is the way they talk about the problems in their lives, particularly on Twitter. They ask each other for advice on contraception or dealing with period pain. They share difficulties in their relationships, and where they have messed up, or been rejected. Most of all, they talk about their mental health – they admit they are suffering from depression and anxiety and find others who share their experiences. If social media has led to more mental health problems, generation Z are working hard to destigmatise them.

The next generation are learning to live in the age of the internet. We tend to call them narcissists. They might respond: “Aren’t we all?”

Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent