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Some time in the future, after my fiancé and I get married, we are considering having children, and I sometimes have that fear that I will not have the mental, emotional, or physical wherewithal to handle the childhood years.
But I had not taken time out of my day yet to imagine what raising a young adult or teen might be like, especially in a future even I haven’t thought about actively since the present compels me to worry without restraint as it stands.
So, while not feeling well yesterday afternoon and laying in bed for an eternity, I decided to take a little mental exercise to try and extrapolate what raising a teen might be like in a tech-addled future.
Dear readers, it was a fruitful, yet not calming exercise.
What’s the tech-addled present like?
For the most part, the technological present of the 2020s has with it a different set of parameters than 20-or-so-odd years ago, when I was a teen. Whereas I had Friendster and MySpace, or Facebook and Twitter, the teens of today have a lot of shareable short-form video formats to choose from, such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or SnapChat.
For most of them, giving up social media or using their phones might be very difficult, as it will have been all they’ve ever known. Pew Research Center, in a survey conducted online by Ipsos from April 14 to May 4, 2022 and outlined in a 2023 report, wrote that 54% of US teens (of 1,316 US teens aged 13 to 17 surveyed at the time, alongside a parent from each teen’s household). said it would be difficult for them to give up social media.
Meanwhile, a 2023 World Economic Forum report citing the findings of the “What Young People Want” survey — which was conducted by the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH) among some 700,000 respondents — noted how the majority of the respondents to the survey said getting the education, skills and competencies that would allow them to get and build good careers was their priority.
My take on it is that the tech-addled present makes it difficult to stay in the actual present, since teens will have a tendency to think about the things they currently don’t have or won’t have. They’re likely anxious in the present in comparing themselves to others, and worried about the future, by seeing that those in power who came before them may not have laid out a plan to keep the world maintained, equitable, or meaningful to live in in the future.
My mental exercise made me hate the future that’s coming
The future that’s coming is something that’s very difficult to imagine but easy enough to extrapolate from a technological point of view because it can get in your face insidiously without meaning to.
In the future, I imagine artificial intelligence will play a big part in making current and future developments for what’s tenable for workers obsolete. While the tech sector will be focused on accelerating profits through AI, I have to imagine a future in which my child may not have the proper skills to think critically without resorting a shortcut like AI to think for him.
I imagine it’s similar to the whole “Googling an answer” in the early 21st century, where knowing keywords and the best way to find something aided in speeding up reading through lengthy digitized texts.
With AI, however, you never really know if you can trust the results — unless my future child really knows his stuff and can reason out how to check the work done by AI beforehand.
I imagine learning and owning a trade might be worthwhile as well, as while learning to code may be one thing getting obsolete through generative coding, I don’t quite know if a computer (or any other technological advancement like modern plumbing and electrical wiring) can repair itself yet in the future.
I think out of all the considerations I have for the infinitely scary future in my mind is this one nagging concern: Can I teach my child kindness at a time in the future when Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man and arguably most techbro person who’s perpetually on the internet, has operationalized empathy as a weakness to be avoided?
Said Musk to Joe Rogan in a three-hour interview on February 28, 2025, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.”
Teaching my future child kindness, among other things
This last portion of today’s Tech Thoughts is more a reminder to myself than anything else: a record of what I intend to do when the time comes and my kid needs to learn certain things.
First, I will teach my future child the joy and presence of reading and absorbing media. I will remember to be present as much as humanly possible, and I’ll stay with them reading stories, even if it’s comic books or graphic novels or an audiobook, and we’ll dissect and discuss what they think about the media they’re consuming, whether it’s on a physical book, or a tablet, or a video on a phone.
Second, I want my future child to be comfortable sharing with me the things they see, and to express their worries to me without reservation. I will also be honest with them about my fears and worries for them, so they can understand that being afraid about the future is normal, and having feelings is human and that I won’t judge them for their fears and worries.
Third, I will let them experience technology — even as I dislike artificial intelligence — but teach them how to think about things and live life without it, should the need arise. I will tell them of the days when power outages were rampant, the Internet did not exist, and my family played Scrabble in the middle of battery-powered lights.
Lastly, at least for now, I will teach my future child a quote from author Dean Koontz, which has guided me for the longest time to try and be kind when I can.
In the book From the Corner of His Eye, one of Dean Koontz’s characters writes a sermon, wherein he says, “In every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness — even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile —reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away.”
“Likewise,” Koontz’s pastor character writes, “each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will.”
“All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined… that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands,” that quote ends, and I hope I can remind my future child, technology be damned, that there’s no better salve for the ills of society than kindness reverberating across time and distance. – Rappler.com
