Youth Is Wasted on Young People

“Youth is wasted on the young.”

When I was younger, I thought that saying was just something old people said because old people apparently enjoyed reminding everybody that they used to be young too.

Now I'm almost 55 and I get it. I really, really get it.

Because there is something about getting older that changes the way you look at your younger years. You start realizing that the things you thought were unlimited actually had expiration dates.

Energy, time, physical ability, and, perhaps most importantly, opportunity. When you're young, you don't realize how valuable that is because you have so much of it.

You Think Your Body Will Always Work Like That

One of the biggest things you don't appreciate when you're young is your physical body. When you're 20, you can stay up all night and go to work the next morning. You can eat a super-sized combo at 2 AM and somehow wake up fine. You can play basketball, football, or run around with your friends and your biggest concern is if you can get in enough games before the sun goes down.

Then you get older and suddenly your body starts sending you customer-service emails.

You sleep wrong and your neck hurts. You sit too long and your back hurts. You bend over to pick something up and have to negotiate with your knees before standing back up. You can injure yourself simply by existing.

Nobody really tells young people that your body is an asset. At least they didn't when I was growing up. And you don't appreciate an asset until it starts depreciating.

That's why taking care of yourself when you're young matters. Exercise. Eat better. Get enough sleep (can't stress that enough).

Don't treat your body like it's a rental car.

Then There's Money

The financial part might be even more important. When you're young, retirement sounds like something that happens to people who are 138 years old. You get your first real paycheck and your brain immediately starts calculating what you can buy.

New car. New clothes. New gadgets. Trips. Restaurants. Entertainment. Whatever makes life more enjoyable right now.

And there's nothing wrong with enjoying your money.

The problem is failing to understand that your money could be working while you're living your life. That's the part I wish more young people understood. That's the part that I wish that I understood sooner than 30 years old. 

If you're 25, you don't necessarily need to make a fortune. You just need to understand time.

Because $10,000 invested at 25 and left alone for decades has an entirely different opportunity to grow than $10,000 invested at 50.

That's the magic of compound growth. You aren't just making money on your original money. Eventually, you're making money on the money your money already made. 

Young People Think They Have Time

That's a whole trap.

• I'll do it later.
• I'll start saving later.
• I'll invest later.
• I'll exercise later.
• I'll travel later.
• I'll spend more time with my family later.
• I'll start that business later.
• I'll pursue that dream later.

"Later" is one of the most expensive words in the English language. Because eventually, later becomes now.

And then you look around and realize that 20 years disappeared. Not 20 days. Not 20 months. Twenty years.

Where did they go? That's the part nobody can adequately explain when you're young. You think you're moving through life one day at a time when you're actually moving through it one year at a time.

And those years don't ask permission before leaving.

The Advantage Young People Have Isn't Money

This is what I want people in their 20s to know: Your biggest advantage isn't your salary. It's time.

You may not have much money yet. That's understandable because you're starting out. But you have something incredibly valuable that somebody approaching 55 can't buy. You have decades!

• You can make mistakes and recover.
• You can change careers.
• You can start investing.
• You can start exercising.
• You can learn another skill.
• You can start a business.
• You can travel.
• You can build relationships.
• You can fail.

And then try again.

Older people don't necessarily have more wisdom because we're just smarter. Sometimes we have wisdom because we've had more opportunities to screw things up and learn from them.

Youth Is Wasted Because Young People Don't Know What They Have.

That's really what the saying means. Young people aren't stupid. They simply don't have the perspective that comes with time.

When you're 20, 55 seems ancient.

When you're 55, 20 doesn't seem that long ago.

That's the strange trick life plays on you.

You spend the first half of your life trying desperately to become an adult. Then you spend the second half wondering where your youth went.

Nobody wins.

Well, Father Time does. He's undefeated.

If I Could Give My Younger Self One Piece of Advice

I wouldn't tell my younger self to stop having fun. I'd actually tell him to have more fun.

But I'd tell him to understand the value of the future while enjoying the present.

Put money away. Invest. Take care of your body. Don't waste years trying to impress people who won't matter 20 years later. Spend time with people you love. Learn something. Take some risks. 

Don't assume you have forever. Because you don't. None of us do.

And that's not meant to be depressing. It's meant to be liberating.

The Real Problem Isn't Being Young

The real problem is being young and believing you'll always be young. That's the mistake.

At 25, you think 55 is far away.

At 35, you think you've still got plenty of time.

At 45, you suddenly start doing math you probably should have started doing 20 years earlier.

Then one day you're standing there thinking: “How did I get here so fast?”

That's when the saying finally makes sense.

Youth really is wasted on the young.

Not because young people don't deserve it. It's because young people haven't lived long enough to understand just how valuable youth actually is.

Gen Alpha Doesn't Hate Reading. We Stopped Teaching Them to Love It.

There was a time when telling a child to go read a book wasn't considered punishment.

It wasn't unusual for a kid to have a favorite book. Maybe a favorite author. Even a library card. 

You could give a child a book and expect them to disappear into it for an afternoon. 

Now?

Give some kids a book and you might as well hand them a rotary phone.

We love to blame Gen Alpha for having short attention spans, being glued to screens, lacking curiosity, or struggling to concentrate.

But here's the uncomfortable part:

Children didn't create the environment they're growing up in. Adults did.

Gen Alpha is being raised in a world where reading has gradually been pushed out of the home, replaced by phones, tablets, YouTube, video games, streaming services and an endless supply of content designed to require as little patience as possible.

Then we send those same children to school and wonder why they don't enjoy reading.

Seriously?

What did we think was going to happen?

Reading Starts at Home

Schools can teach children how to read. But schools can't be expected to single-handedly teach children to love reading. That starts at home. Children learn what matters by watching what the adults around them value.

If Mom and Dad spend their evenings scrolling through Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, while the television runs in the background, what exactly is the child supposed to conclude about books?

If nobody in the house reads, why would a child assume reading is important?

We tell children, "You need to read more."

But children are watching us. And children are excellent at noticing hypocrisy.

A parent who tells a child to put down the phone while spending four hours on their own phone is not teaching discipline. They're teaching that discipline is something adults demand from children but don't necessarily practice themselves.

We Used to Make Reading a Thing

Reading used to be built into childhood.

You went to the library.

You had book reports.

Books were birthday/Christmas presents.

And somewhere along the way, we confused reading proficiency with reading enjoyment.

A child can know how to pronounce every word on a page and still have absolutely no relationship with books. That's a problem. Because reading isn't just about vocabulary. Reading teaches you how to think. 

A Child Who Doesn't Read Has Fewer Places to Go

Books force children to do something modern technology rarely asks them to do. A book doesn't constantly interrupt itself. There isn't another book waiting every 30 seconds like a TikTok video. There isn't an algorithm screaming, "Here's something else!"

A book makes you stay in one spot to imagine, visualize, question, connect one idea to another, and sometimes, it makes you uncomfortable.

That's part of the point.

When children read stories, they encounter people who don't look like them, think like them, live like them or believe what they believe.

They learn empathy without somebody standing in front of them giving a lecture on empathy.

They learn cause and effect, consequences, that people can be complicated, that there can be more than one perspective (super-important).

And eventually, they begin developing something incredibly important: their own thoughts.

That's the Part We Should Be Worried About

A child who doesn't learn how to think independently becomes dependent on everyone else to tell them what to think. And we're already living in a world where that's becoming increasingly dangerous.

Algorithms decide what people see.

Social media decides what's popular.

Influencers decide what's fashionable.

Comment sections decide who's right.

Political parties decide who's angry.

And artificial intelligence can now produce an answer before a person has even finished forming the question.

Convenience is wonderful but convenience can also make people intellectually lazy.

If a child never develops the habit comparing sources or how to sit quietly with a complicated idea, how are they supposed to navigate adulthood?

"But My Child Doesn't Like Reading."

Maybe they don't. But that doesn't mean they can't. Children don't automatically hate reading.

Sometimes they hate reading what the parent or teacher wants them to read. There's a difference.

Find the right genre and stop worrying so much about whether they're reading the "right" book and start worrying about whether they're reading anything at all.

Parents Have to Stop Outsourcing Everything to Schools

This is where adults need to take some responsibility (translation: I'm about to step on some toes).

Teachers matter. But parents matter too.

We can't hand a child an iPad at age three, give them unlimited access to YouTube at five, let algorithms raise their interests at eight, and then blame the school at twelve because they don't want to read a novel.

That's not how this works.

Education doesn't begin when the school bell rings. Education begins at home.

And No, This Isn't an Attack on Technology

Technology isn't the enemy. A child can love video games and love books. I'm an example of that myself. A child can watch YouTube and read. A child can use AI and still learn how to think.

The problem is balance.

Technology gives children an unprecedented amount of information. Reading teaches them what to do with information.

Those aren't the same thing.

A child can consume 500 pieces of content in a day and still not understand a single complicated idea or tell you what half of it even was. More information doesn't automatically create more intelligence. Sometimes it just creates more noise.

We Need to Bring Back the Boredom

Here's another uncomfortable truth: Children need time when nothing is happening.

No phone. No television. No video game. Nothing.

Because boredom gives the brain somewhere to go. That's when imagination shows up. That's when curiosity shows up. That's when a child might pick up a book because there's nothing else competing for their attention.

We have become so terrified of our children being bored that we've eliminated one of the conditions that helps children become curious. Every quiet moment gets filled.

And then we wonder why they can't concentrate.

Reading Is Bigger Than Reading

Let me wrap this up because I'm beating a dead horse. And a bunch of you probably stopped reading 30 seconds ago because this post is longer than a TikTok video. 

This isn't really about books. It's about raising people who can think. People who can sit with an idea without immediately needing somebody else to validate it. People who can understand another person's perspective. People who can change their minds when presented with better information.

That's what reading can help develop.

And those skills aren't optional anymore. They're survival skills.

Because Gen Alpha is growing up in an information environment unlike anything previous generations experienced.

They will have access to more information than any generation in history.

Eventually, childhood ends. Parents can't follow their children everywhere. Teachers can't follow them into adulthood. And nobody can protect them from every bad idea they're going to encounter.

Eventually, they're going to have to make decisions for themselves.

And when that day comes, we better hope we raised children who know how to think.

Not just children who know how to scroll.

Because the world doesn't need another generation that can consume information at lightning speed.

It needs a generation capable of stopping long enough to ask whether the information they're consuming is actually true.

That starts with curiosity. It grows through reading. And it becomes wisdom when a child learns to think for themselves.

So maybe the question isn't: "Why don't kids read anymore?"

Maybe the question is: "What have we done to make reading less important to them?"

Is Originality Dead, or Did the Algorithm Just Make Us All the Same?

There was a time when you could tell where somebody was from just by listening to them talk.

Not because they announced their hometown. You could hear it.

People from different regions had different accents, different slang, different expressions, and different ways of saying the same thing. Somebody from New York didn't necessarily sound like somebody from Memphis. Somebody from Chicago didn't necessarily sound like somebody from Atlanta. The way people spoke was shaped by where they lived, who raised them, who they grew up around, and the culture that surrounded them.

Then came social media.

And apparently, the entire country decided we needed to sound like the same 14 people on TikTok.

Now somebody can live in Mississippi, spend six hours scrolling through Instagram, and wake up the next morning talking like an influencer from Los Angeles.

"Girl, I literally cannot."

You could literally. You just did.

And it's not just the way we talk.

• It's the way we dress.
• The way we pose.
• The way we decorate our houses.
• The restaurants we photograph.
• The vacations we take.
• The phrases we use.
• The coffee orders.

Even the way we announce that we're having a good time has become strangely standardized.

Social media has created something we've never really had before: billions of people being exposed to the exact same cultural references at almost exactly the same time.

And we're surprised that we're starting to look alike.

Think about the vacation pictures.

How many times have you seen the same photo of a woman reclined on a transparent surfboard in crystal-clear waters as a drone captures the photo from above?

She's usually wearing the same general type of swimsuit, striking the same general pose, in the same general kind of tropical location.

And somewhere in the caption is something about "living my best life."

I'm not saying she shouldn't do it.

If chilling on a clear surfboard in the middle of the ocean makes you happy, please relax on that thing until the battery in the drone dies.

The question isn't whether people should enjoy popular things.

The question is: How many identical pictures do we need before we start asking ourselves whether we're actually creating memories or simply reproducing someone else's?

Because there's a difference between inspiration and imitation. We see something we like, so we try it.

That's normal.

Society have always borrowed from one another. Fashion, music, language, art, food, hairstyles and traditions have always traveled from one community to another.

But social media has industrialized imitation. The algorithm doesn't necessarily reward originality. It rewards familiarity.

If a particular video works, people make another version. If that version works, thousands make their version.

Then everybody is doing the same dance, using the same sound, making the same facial expression and pointing at the same words appearing on the screen.

Eventually, something that was once creative becomes a template. And the template becomes a trend. And the trend becomes something everybody does. Then we move on to the next thing.

We're living in an era where people have more opportunities to express themselves than any generation in history, yet somehow we're increasingly expressing ourselves in remarkably similar ways.

That's the irony.

We have more individuality available to us while simultaneously becoming more culturally synchronized.

And maybe that's because we're no longer just consuming culture. We're constantly being shown what we're supposed to consume.

Before social media, you might have known what was popular among the people around you. Now you can see what's popular among millions of strangers before you've even brushed your teeth.

And when you see something enough times, it starts feeling normal.

Then desirable.

Then necessary.

That's how influence works.

You don't necessarily have to be told what to think. Sometimes you just have to be given the same thing repeatedly until you stop questioning why you want it. Why do you think some songs become "hits" although most people you know can't stand it? 

This doesn't mean originality is dead. I don't think it is. But I do think originality has gotten harder.

Not because people have become less creative, but because we're surrounded by so much other people's creativity that it's difficult to hear our own ideas.

Before social media, you had to come up with something on your own. Now you can simply open your phone and find 10,000 people who already came up with something. And there's nothing wrong with borrowing an idea. The problem starts when you stop asking yourself whether you actually like the idea.

Are you wearing that because you like it? Or because everybody you follow is wearing it?

Are you taking that vacation picture because it's beautiful? Or because you've seen it 47 times and decided that's what a vacation is supposed to look like?

Are you doing something because you want to? Or because you've been trained by an algorithm to want it?

That's the part worth thinking about.

Because maybe the real threat isn't that social media is making everybody the same. Maybe it's that we're becoming so accustomed to being influenced that we've forgotten how to make decisions without influence.

There used to be a lot more room for people to simply be themselves. Somebody could be strange without immediately discovering that 2.7 million other people were also being strange in exactly the same way.

And maybe that's what we're missing. Individuality.

The freedom to do something because you like it. To wear something nobody on your timeline is wearing. To take a vacation picture that doesn't look like everybody else's vacation picture. To say something in your own voice. To have an opinion that didn't arrive prepackaged by a podcast, influencer, celebrity or algorithm.

Because being yourself has never required being completely different from everybody else.

It simply requires knowing the difference between "I like this" and "I'm supposed to like this."

That's a pretty important distinction.

Especially when everybody has the same phone in their hand telling them what to like next.

Maybe originality isn't dead.

Maybe it's just buried underneath everybody else's influence.

And perhaps the most original thing you can do these days...

is stop scrolling long enough to figure out what you actually think.