Youth Now
Understanding Youth (Now) Is Complicated
This month on Medium: The kids are not all right
We who have been young and grown older, which is not all of us, know only after the fact what it’s like to live in a culture obsessed with youth. Before we were old enough to understand this fixation, we took it as derision — for good reason. We were scolded and mocked and left out of the conversation. And so we decided out-of-touch older folks were judging our choices, our grievances, our looks, our pleasures. But that’s not what was going on. Not entirely.
Now that we’re older, we can appreciate that there’s something else at play — we know this because we’ve traded spots. This derision, in fact, is admiration mixed with dislocation mixed with a terrible regret. A sense of if-I’d-known-then-what-I-know-now-I-wouldn’t-be-nearly-as-stupid-as-you-are. (But you didn’t, so you were.)
This month, we’re going to look at this tension — about what it’s like to be young today, what it’s like to no longer be young, and what it’s like to be older looking back. We’re also going to spend some time on what scientists and technologists are doing to turn back the clock, through breathtaking science, bold experiments, and on social media.
