To a Gen Xer like me, Abril Rios, 26, looks like she has it all: she’s been a model since childhood; she was privately educated; she has a good college degree; and nearly 170,000 followers on Instagram.
But, in our interview, Abril explains that like most of her Gen Z peers, until this year she was wallowing in loneliness and apathy. Each time she posted something to her mass audience, she felt even more isolated. The unreality of her online “friends” hit her afresh. She also felt that no matter how much she tried - and she really tried - she couldn’t launch a career or get a decent job. And, not unrelatedly, she felt she wasn’t respected by people who were older. People who were Gen X like me and her parents.
Enter - on her social media page - Zohran Mamdani. She’d never heard of him but there was the New York mayoral candidate rushing into the waves on a beach, and riding the subway. It spoke to her.
She joined his “Hot Girl” group of supporters - she says the term is gender neutral, deliberately ironic and provocative - and suddenly she found purpose and friends. She took part in his scavenger hunts; the on-line group, arranged to meet off-line. She made friends; she felt seen; she felt heard; she felt respected.
She was so enervated she became the chair of Hot Girls for New Jersey and campaigned for four local candidates.
And now, she says, buoyed up by their success on Tuesday, Zohran’s “Hot Girls” are planning to expand and go national.
They are already gearing up for the mid-terms. She’s so busy, that she doesn’t want to date. Many of her friends feel similarly. Politics is more than a passion. It’s an identity.
When she thinks back to her life a year ago, it feel like she’s thinking about someone different.
“I was going in such a dead end like path. And now I see such a beautiful future ahead of me. So I’m so grateful, honestly….It saved my life.”
You can read Abril’s substack here.
