“As a 12-year-old boy, I’ve spent a lot of my life in front of screens, at school and at home, which can definitely be fun. But I also struggle with depression and sometimes feel like I haven’t done enough ‘kid’ stuff. When I grow up, will I feel like I wasted my childhood?
—future me
Dear future,
The ability to project into the times to come, to think of the present as a phase of a much longer life, is a rare sign of maturity, though this prudence often comes with its own burdens. It sounds like you’re looking for a way to “live deliberately.” That phrase, as you may already know, comes from the first line of Henry David Thoreau. Walden, a literary experiment that was similarly driven by suspicion of modern technologies and fear of future regrets. While you’re trying to anticipate the disappointments of your adult self, Thoreau was looking even further into the future. He went to the forest because he feared that, when he died, he would find that he “had not lived.”
It seems to me that you are burdened by common misconceptions about the purpose of childhood. On the one hand, the youth of the 21st century is often seen as a means to an end: a time to cultivate the skills and personal qualities that will allow you to excel as an adult, which requires putting off your immediate desires for the good of some. ideal future—school success, contractability, financial stability. On the other hand, childhood is often said to be a unique period (as I’m sure many adults in your life remind you of) of freedom, perhaps the only years in which you can enjoy fun, creativity, and joy. personal enjoyment without the environment. concerns and responsibilities that adulthood brings. While this second idea seems to grant license for aimless exploration, I can sense that you find it just as stressful as the mandate to prepare for the future. I don’t think you are alone in this. In a way, the mandates against wasting childhood belong to the same forward-looking logic that sees the formative years as an investment. Doing “kid things” becomes, in other words, another checklist to tackle, a way to ensure that you become the kind of well-rounded adult who has happy memories of the past and is immune to regrets.
Adding to the stress and confusion of childhood is the fact that digital technologies have insidiously blurred the distinctions between work and play. when you spend your free time gamingReading and posting on the same devices you use to complete tasks, it’s easy to get confused about whether you’re having fun or just doing your homework. And when you realize that all the adults in your life spend much of their work and free time in front of screens, it’s tempting to conclude that your own adulthood will be a slightly improved continuation of your current existence: picture quality it will be sharper, the processing speed will be faster, but the basic structure of your days will remain the same.
It is that projecting into the future is always a treacherous move. Our assumptions about what life will be like 10 or 20 years from now are inevitably limited by present conditions. If you’ve ever watched science fiction movies from several decades ago, you’ve probably noticed that the imaginations of even the most visionary directors contain anachronisms or two. Stanley Kubrick, in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), he envisioned a bold future of commercial space travel and intelligent robots, but apparently couldn’t fathom the possibility of a world without payphones (his space stations are full of them). The citizens of 2015, as envisioned in Return to the future (1989), have access to flying hoverboards and high-definition video walls, but still use fax machines to transmit highly confidential information.
Given the pace of technological development, it is quite possible that your adult life will be radically different from your current life. Perhaps the screens will be replaced by retinal implants and you spend your days immersed in a metaverse, one that makes your childhood memories of clicking and scrolling seem quaint by comparison. Or perhaps the AI will have automated most occupations and created enormous wealth, so that you can spend your unlimited spare time gardening, traveling, and attending philosophy lectures.
I’m not saying this, Future, to cause more anxiety about which way to go. Quite the opposite. In my opinion, the uncertainty about what adult life will be like gives you an unusual measure of freedom. If childhood can’t be seen as the furnace of future ambitions (or a time to frantically pick rosebuds for the sake of fond memories), then it could be seen, somewhat radically, as an end in itself. Instead of trying to tick off the kinds of things your future self wishes you had done as a kid, maybe you should pay attention to how you feel about those things now. When you think of the activities that usually fall under the rubric of “kid stuff” (going to the zoo, catching fireflies, creating your own graphic novels, to name just a few possibilities), do any of them excite you? When you think of the times when you were the happiest and most content, or felt life had special meaning, do they have anything in common? More importantly, when you spend all day in front of screens, how do you feel afterwards? If you suspect that your depression is related to the technologies you use, that’s reason enough to think about how you might rearrange your life.
Spending more time outdoors can be something to experiment with, but moderating your use of technology doesn’t have to lead to a crush on nature. The tendency to associate childhood activities with activities in nature (climbing trees, building forts, swimming) comes from the romantic tradition, which idealized both nature and youth as places of innocence and spontaneity. And it is precisely during times of technological change that we most yearn to see nature as a realm of unchanging purity.
Thoreau’s time in the desert taught him the opposite. The natural world is full of change: the seasons come and go, birds migrate from north to south and vice versa. Although these conditions do not preclude the possibility of planning for the future, they also reveal how futile it is to live in the service of oneself in the future. Thoreau wrote in his diary in 1859 that in a world of constant change, we must “let the season rule us.” The life of intention can only be lived in the present, giving energy to the things that have value in the here and now. Since he put it better than I did, I leave you with his words: “You must live in the present, ride every wave, find your eternity in every moment… Do what you love… let nothing come between you and you.” the light.”
Faithfully,
Cloud