Who is all this for?
A few weeks ago I wrote an essay and sent it to two friends whose opinions I value. The first loved it. She told me she wished more people would say these things out loud. The second responded with a question that has followed me around ever since.
“So what?”
She wasn’t being dismissive. She wasn’t disagreeing. She simply wanted to know what I hoped the essay would accomplish.
At the time, I wasn’t sure how to answer.
The essay was a long catalog of frustrations. Artificial intelligence. Social media. Billionaires. Politicians. Influencers. Consultants. The growing feeling that much of modern life is being redesigned by people who understand how to capture attention, extract value, and optimize systems but seem remarkably uninterested in whether the result leaves human beings happier, healthier, wiser, or more connected.
Everything in the essay was true, or at least true enough to me. Yet her question lingered because it exposed something I hadn’t recognized while writing it. The essay described what I was angry about, but not what I was grieving.
It took me several weeks to understand the difference.
Like everyone else, I have spent the past few years surrounded by predictions about artificial intelligence. Depending on which expert is speaking, it will save us, destroy us, liberate us, impoverish us, enlighten us, replace us, or somehow accomplish all six before lunch.
The predictions themselves don’t bother me nearly as much as the enthusiasm with which they are delivered. Entire professions are discussed as though they were obsolete appliances waiting to be hauled to the curb. Careers that once took decades to build are reduced to inefficiencies in need of technological correction. Human beings become variables in a spreadsheet.
What finally struck me was that these conversations are not taking place in a vacuum.
Somewhere a high school or college student is trying to decide what to study. Somewhere a recent graduate is refreshing job listings for the twentieth time that day, searching for experience nobody seems willing to give. Somewhere a young couple is holding a newborn child and wondering what kind of world awaits them. And while they are trying to imagine a future, the rest of us seem strangely eager to explain why that future may not have much use for them.
Imagine being eighteen years old and hearing that every day.
The profession that interests you may disappear.
The skills you are learning will become irrelevant.
The work you hope to do will soon be done by machines.
The opportunities available to your parents will never exist for you.
Then imagine hearing all of this delivered with a shrug.
What surprises me is not that so many young people feel anxious. What surprises me is that we seem surprised by it.
When I was younger, the future was uncertain too. There were recessions, layoffs, failures, and disappointments. But beneath all of it was an assumption that there would be a place for us somewhere. We worried about finding it, not whether it existed.
Increasingly, that invitation feels absent.
We tell young people they are the future, but much of our behavior suggests otherwise. We remove entry-level positions and call it efficiency. We reduce mentorship and call it productivity. We celebrate technologies that eliminate opportunities for newcomers before they have the chance to become experienced enough to matter. Then we wonder why so many feel adrift.
Work has never been solely about earning a living. A first job is one of the ways a society welcomes someone into adulthood. It is where competence becomes confidence and where contribution becomes identity. It is where an older generation quietly communicates an important message: We need you. Come learn. Come help build what comes next.
Every healthy society extends that invitation.
Every healthy society creates room for the people who follow it.
Lately, I worry that we are becoming more interested in optimization than obligation. We speak endlessly about innovation but far less about inheritance. We celebrate what technology can do while spending remarkably little time discussing what young people are supposed to become.
Perhaps that is why my original essay never felt complete. I thought I was writing about artificial intelligence, but I wasn’t. I thought I was writing about politics, social media, and modern culture, but I wasn’t. Those were only symptoms.
What I was really writing about was the growing sense that we are asking young people to inherit a world that no longer seems particularly interested in making room for them.
That strikes me as both unfair and dangerous.
A society can survive technological disruption. It can survive economic change. It can survive political turmoil. What it cannot survive indefinitely is convincing the next generation that they are unnecessary.
People have asked whether my several months of silence means that I am sick, the answer is yes.
Not physically.
Not of artificial intelligence.
Not of change.
Not even of progress.
I am sick of hearing adults discuss the future without remembering who will live in it.