Dear Young Me, I am sending this letter back in time. I hope you get it. Tell everyone I said hello. Brush your teeth.
The main reason I’m writing is because the world is going to go nuts someday. And I mean totally, flipping nuts. I can’t even describe the level of nuttiness you’re about to experience.
But believe me, someday you will wake up and the current state of the world, and all its wacky human inhabitants will suddenly seem so screwed-up, you will feel like a giraffe.
This will be especially evident in the young generations that follow yours.
Certainly, young people have always differed from their elders, but with the current techno boom we are undergoing, young people will become a different species.
In generations past, the highest form of technology was the walkie-talkie radio in the handle-bar basket of your Schwinn. You bought this radio at the five-and-dime using a wad of crumpled cash from your piggy bank.
But
in the future, there won’t BE piggy banks. There won’t be five-and-dimes. And there definitely won’t be many Schwinns.
Likewise, at one time, the highest aspiration of kidhood was merely to build a really cool fort. But there aren’t many forts being built today.
There was a recent study done. Researchers found that Americans of previous generations played outside often. In fact, a staggering 90 percent of American kids used to play outside. Today, the percentage falls somewhere around 20 percent.
Yesterday, for example, I was on a walk when I passed a group of kids, sitting on their porch. Each kid held his or her respective iPad, playing some kind of game; each kid was simultaneously texting on a secondary mobile device; each child wore massive, noise-cancelling, reality-blocking, soul-crushing headphones clamped tightly on his or her head.
And this is normal.
Young Me, they were…