What our parents liked to call envy or someone “looking too hard,” Gen Z now calls monitoring spirits. The term didn’t come from any single thinker or viral origin story so much as the internet’s collective brain quietly naming a shared experience. Like most Gen Z language, it emerged organically on TikTok and X as a half-joke, half-diagnosis, a way to describe people who watch your life closely without participating in it, supporting it, or even acknowledging it. It sounds unserious at first, until you realize how accurately it captures what social media platforms like Instagram have turned everyday visibility into. You post your fresh nails, your soft launch, your new job, or the one outfit you actually felt good in that week, and suddenly there’s a silent audience of people who do not like, do not comment, but absolutely clock every detail like it’s their unpaid side hustle. It’s not that they’re actively wishing you harm in a cartoonish, villain-energy way, it’s that their attention feels heavy, extractive, and uncomfortably intimate for people who wouldn’t text you happy birthday or check in if things went left.
If you talk to any creative or content creator right now, you will hear the same exhausted refrain about how they are lucky if they crack one hundred likes on a post, even though their insights show thousands of eyeballs passing through. The math never mathes, and the energy feels even worse, because people are watching everything while interacting with nothing, which creates a strange purgatory where visibility feels more like surveillance than connection.
A few years ago, Instagram was the place you went when you wanted your content to blow up, and it was the birthplace of an entire generation of influencers who built entire careers off likes and comments. Today, even the influencers who once gloriously ruled over the platform are struggling to connect, tapping through their own posts like everyone else while wondering where the audience went and why the entire app suddenly feels spiritually allergic to interaction.
The great migration to other social media platforms like TikTok didn’t happen because creators got bored, it happened because the environment felt suffocating. On TikTok, people actually interact with you, support you, and treat content like a conversation rather than a museum exhibit. On Instagram, meanwhile, it feels like there has been an entire psychological shift where people consume silently because they don’t want to “give energy,” “boost your ego,” or accidentally help you grow. The new social etiquette is passive observation, which sounds harmless until you realize how much of it mirrors the language of the evil eye, the belief that someone’s gaze can affect your fortunes simply because it lands on you without warmth, care, or good intention.
The evil eye, historically, was very much believed to be real and powerful, rooted in ancient Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian cosmologies where envy, admiration, and malice were thought to materially affect the body, health, fertility, and fortune. But beneath the spiritual explanations, the belief also functioned as a social logic, one that warned against unchecked visibility, excessive display, and being too exposed to the gaze of others without protection. In that sense, Instagram didn’t contradict the evil eye, it amplified its conditions to an almost absurd degree. The internet supercharged visibility, speeding up how fast people can see you and expanding how far your image can travel in seconds. What used to be a village-level fear of being overexposed has now been scaled to a global stage, where one single post can invite thousands of eyes— supportive, neutral, resentful, or quietly analyzing— all at once.
Gen Z grew up watching story viewer lists refresh in real time, learning exactly who’s keeping tabs, who’s lurking from the sidelines, and who knows everything about your life without actually knowing you at all. The experience is kind of surreal because why is your ex, your former manager, and a random girl you met at the club bathroom once five-years-ago spiritually present at every milestone? When something goes wrong after you post, whether it’s chipped nails, a situationship imploding, or a flight getting mysteriously delayed, the explanation practically writes itself, and suddenly superstition feels more emotionally honest than pretending the platform doesn’t mess with your nervous system.
What’s especially telling is that the generation born between 1997 and 2012 doesn’t believe in the evil eye less than their parents, but arguably more, just in a broader, more eclectic way. Raised in a world shaped by economic instability, climate anxiety, political collapse, and algorithmic chaos, Gen Z has leaned harder into spirituality, astrology, manifestation, and protection rituals to make sense of a reality that often feels ungovernable. A recent Forbes Health report found that nearly 7 in 10 Gen Zers (69%) engage in manifestation practices, while other surveys suggest around 80% of Gen Z and younger millennials believe in astrology, and rely on it for guidance in areas like relationships, work, and personal life. In this context, the evil eye fits neatly into that ecosystem, because it explains why things feel fragile even when you do everything “right.”
Instagram promises that visibility is good for you, that being seen is currency, but lived experience suggests that being seen too much, too fast, or by the wrong people comes with consequences that feel personal even when they’re not. Saying “mashallah” or dropping a nazar emoji is simply more efficient than unpacking how algorithms, comparison, and constant spectatorship make joy feel temporary and exposed. It’s the same instinct behind soft-launching relationships, hiding good news until it’s secured, or posting vacations only once you’re already home and emotionally safe.
At some point, it stops feeling like superstition and starts feeling like self-preservation. When the audience refuses to participate, the only logical response is to stop performing.
