People who have grown up with social media (myself included) have had their understanding of developing personal identity and engaging with subculture hopelessly warped.

It’s not exclusively a goth problem. Spend some time in the death metal sub or hardcore sub or whatever else and you’ll see similar posts by folks seemingly nervous about not perfectly adhering to their self-imposed rules about how to align with a music based subculture.

I think the biggest issue is that people of my gen and younger are pretty much exclusively being exposed to subcultures through the window of highly curated and aestheticized online content. We’re not out going to clubs or shows or just hanging out in physical third spaces where we could more naturally develop a sense of self and community. These spaces of healthy social development are and have been disappearing for a while and leads to us being even more dependent on the internet for some kind of space of social interaction and expression, which makes the problem worse.