Writing · A 12-part series
Youthful Futures: growing up in a changing world.
A 12-part global series on how technology, education, work, gender, belonging and adulthood are changing for people aged roughly 13 to 30.
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01
13 to 30 Is Not a Generation
Before diagnosing Gen Z or Gen Alpha, it may be worth asking whether a generation is even the right unit for understanding young people. -
02
Adult Information, Child Power
Young people can know almost anything adults know long before they have adult control over their own lives. What does that do to growing up? -
03
When Did Childhood Become a Résumé?
When every hobby, competition and project can become evidence for a future application, what happens to the parts of childhood that are allowed to go nowhere? -
04
Personalised Everywhere, Standardised at School
Young people live in systems that constantly adapt to them, until they enter one of the most consequential systems in their lives. -
05
AI Arrived Before Apprenticeship
AI can now perform the junior work through which generations of professionals learned. What happens if we automate the bottom rung of the ladder? -
06
The Broken Handoff
We spend years preparing young people for the future, then hand them responsibility for translating education into work almost overnight. -
07
More Educated, Less Certain
Education still matters enormously. The problem is that the old promise linking qualification, work and security has become less predictable. -
08
Same Age, Different Amounts of Freedom
Age tells us when somebody is supposed to become independent. It tells us much less about the choices they are actually able to make. -
09
Are Boys and Girls Growing Up in Different Worlds?
Young men and women are increasingly reporting very different views of gender and equality. The harder question is how they came to experience the same society so differently. -
10
Where Do Young People Go to Belong?
We have many places where young people are expected to perform. We may have fewer places where they can simply be. -
11
Adulthood Has Lost Its Timetable
Young adults have more possible lives to choose from, while the economic conditions beneath traditional milestones have become less predictable. -
12
Young People Are Not Failing Adulthood. Adulthood Changed.
Many behaviours described as generational flaws make more sense when we look at the systems young people are adapting to.
About the series
What does it mean to grow up when the world around you is changing faster than the institutions meant to prepare you for it?
We talk about young people as if they are a single generation. They are not.
A thirteen-year-old negotiating school, parents and a first phone is living a very different life from a twenty-two-year-old trying to enter work or a twenty-nine-year-old trying to decide what stability, partnership and adulthood should look like. Those differences grow even larger across countries, classes, genders and families.
What they do share is an unusual historical position. Information is abundant. Artificial intelligence can perform tasks before a beginner has learned how to do them. Education has expanded while the route from education to secure work has become less predictable. Young people have more ways to connect, more lives to compare themselves with and, in some places, more freedom to choose what adulthood looks like. At the same time, many of the institutions surrounding them still operate on assumptions built for a different world.
Youthful Futures is a series about those mismatches. It looks at people roughly between 13 and 30, not to diagnose a generation, but to understand the environments in which young people are becoming themselves.
The question running through the series is simple:
What futures are young people being asked to prepare for, and have we built the institutions that make those futures possible?