My future daughter may someday know sixteen-year-old me better than I ever knew sixteen-year-old versions of my parents.
One night, years from now, she might lie awake scrolling through archived pieces of my adolescence: podcast episodes recorded after school, philosophy blog posts, magazine drafts, research papers published before I even became an adult. She may hear my younger voice crack through a microphone on Spotify or read the books I published on Amazon one day, because the internet doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
The present day version of myself will always be trapped in the work I created—always accessible decades later. Yeah, it's a wonderful thing isn’t it? But I'm afraid of how vastly different the perception of ambition and success is going to differ for the kids born to our generation.
The accessibility of the internet has made the rise of multiple student ventures and initiatives possible. I mean the fact that I've spoken to nearly 90 people about their start ups is insane—and most of them are still in high school. I suppose the craze over elite college admissions might have been the cause for the rise of so many that are out there, but hidden amongst those are true and impactful stuff that might end up setting an impossibly high, almost tragic ceiling for the next generation. What happens to the childhood that is no longer the carefree afternoons spent in a playground but a benchmark to conquer? Our future children won’t be competing with their peers; they’ll be competing with the ghost of our teenage selves, flawlessly archived in the cloud.
We have become a generation of hyper-visible overachievers, trapped inside the very legacy we are building. But a life lived entirely as a milestone is a heavy thing to pass down. If we aren't careful, the digital legacy we are creating today won't be viewed as inspiration tomorrow. They will be monuments of an exhausting race that our children never asked to run, leaving them to wonder why we spent our youth preparing for a future, instead of just living in the present.
That is not to discredit the wonder we can achieve at the age we are now, sometimes the product of our youthful eagerness to learn and understand the world can change the world. As long as your hard work is born out of passion and not to impress the stage or breakthrough metrics your good for it does feel like you are living in the moment when the stuff you are trying to achieve isn't considered a burden.