Where have childhood, youth and innocence gone? Young vloggers tackle the meaning of life in Daydreaming on the Porch

Is this the Pinnacle of life. No seriously. I mean look, what is your highest ambition? Is it this? No, no it’s not. You know this. It might be the highest ambition of your chemical mind, your brain your body. It’s the desires of the flesh. It’s the entertainment. It’s the pleasure. It’s the dopamine. It’s the serotonin, but that’s not you. You are different. You are not your body. You are not your flesh. You are not the chemicals in your brain. You have a soul and your soul wants something. You want more. You want something bigger. You want something fulfilling, something that’s going to make you happy, something that makes life worth living, that gives it meaning, purpose — gives it anything that isn’t just this empty dead pleasure…

…I mean, look, you have one path. The true path, the path to life, the meaningful path, the fulfilling path — and it goes like this, right, and it might be bumpy. It might be filled with obstacles and hardship and pain. But it is the only real path. [So] then you have this main path, and you will have so many paths going off that are distracting, and they’re paved perfectly and you just have to walk and it’s really nice. It’s easy. There’s no resistance, but these paths off to the side of the main road are dead ends.

…We are adults now. We’re not children anymore. We’re not kids and our our childhoods are basically over. There’s no more of this “everlasting youth.” It’s done.

If you spend as much time watching all manner of videos on YouTube, as I do, you might have noticed a growing number of questioning, disaffected and depressed young people, often highly intelligent, producing vlogs, or video blogs, in which they seem to be crying out for answers to why they/we are here, the meaning of life, and solutions and answers to all this. Why do we suffer? Why do people hurt us? What is a meaningful job? Who are your friends? They are today’s GenAlpha and GenZ, YouTube “content creators” who aren’t necessarily out to make a fortune unless they stumble upon immense popularly and huge payouts from YouTube, which many do, and quit school and try to make a career as a content creator. For most, naturally, it’s a chimera, a mirage. They burn out quickly, and realize they have to get a job and career in “the real world,” like most of us do, generation after generation. These serious and ernest vloggers are a breed apart from the TikTok hordes of producers of silly content, sometimes funny and entertaining for a few brief moments, but forgettable and vacuous. Dopamine buttons for young people, like mostly mindless video games.

However, the serious ones want to talk to any of us to whom the algorithms show their vlogs, about “life,” writ large, through their homemade “content.” It’s really quite remarkable, and many of these youthful YouTubers have a level of maturity and insight unimaginable to us Baby Boomers who came along in the 1960s and 70s, pre-Internet, computers, and smart phones.

In the case of the young man quoted above from a transcript of his first vlog, he is guilelessly ernest and forthright, candid and articulate, and displays a level of early-acquired knowledge and wisdom that I can’t explain, other than that these “old souls” are in reincarnated bodies? Maybe they are trapped in our present-day civilization, and on a once-beautiful, but now overpopulated and despoiled planet that looks to visitors from other planets, or advanced civilizations in other universes, for guidance and direction. In all the past ages of humankind, there have been gurus or sages or prophets who started on their journeys of post-enlightenment teaching at an early age. Jiddu Krishnamurti, the wise and venerable teacher from India, is one example. I feel more and more sure that there are virtually unknown teachers using a platform such as YouTube to reach many thousands of viewers and listeners. This would have seemed preposterous in the age of radio, TV and printed newspapers. Media notables and stars worked long and hard over many years to get a mass audience in what was once called “mass media.” The few broadcasting to the many, while today that has been reversed. Anyone can be a vlogger, have a travel blog, an online journal, a digital newsletter, be a podcaster, “influencer,” or a Substack author. It’s free and easy.

I have been reading a lot about how young people today are more depressed and suicidal than earlier generations. They are addicted to their phones and social media, and are losing the desire and ability to interact with real-life people, including friends and family. It’s a scary time not only for them, but for previous generations who have directly contributed to the causes of our civilizational and planetary woes. If I weren’t as old as I am, I would probably feel similarly alienated and depressed.

Another vlogger in college said this recently on YouTube:

I always thought it had to be this way, that everything had to be bad “, that I always had to be the bad guy, that I never had to have any friends, that everything was just horrible, you know, but after you live your life for a long time. [For many vloggers 20 years is a “long life] You start to realize that nobody is coming to save you. In fact, you could die on the sidewalk and people would step right over you. You know, sometimes all you want is to just be seen, to be heard, you know, but after all of that you’re still sitting in your room crying over tragedies. You know things that you can never get over, you know.

Day after day, this young YouTuber expounds on the deepest fears and concerns of his generation, and he does so in the form of advice and admonishments to his viewers. It’s general and yet deeply autobiographical, but he tries to disguise that aspect. He’s pretty transparent, however. If you look at the comments he gets, many others relate strongly to what he says, or offer their own advice. Turns out, as one would expect, that many of these deepest concerns are universally human.

In reading over some of the comments the first vlogger I quoted made, I was moved to devote a bit of time and energy, futilely, to offering some of my own “wisdom” on the subjects he talks about. As was the case here, and with others of his generation, my comments were maybe read, but then ignored. If I hadn’t thought the substance of what he said deserved some kind of response, I certainly wouldn’t have bothered.

When these deeply serious youth present their ideas about life based on very little lived experiences, some readers who happen upon their YouTube channels by chance, ridicule them for presuming to know anything at their young ages. While they may be partly right, I think these older critics miss the point. Because of the Internet and the vast amount of information available to the millennials and earlier generations, they are more knowledgeable in many ways than we who grew up in pre-Internet times can even imagine. They grew up with computers, laptops, iPads, Chromebooks and smart phones. It’s now their main way of communicating, learning and being entertained. It’s almost as if they are a different species of human. I therefore feel I can learn much about life in 2024 by at least trying to listen and respond to what some of them say. Yes, you can go on Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and other platforms to take the pulse of the younger generations, but for me, YouTube, with its longer videos and mass appeal, is much more useful, informative, and long-lasting, both from the standpoint of viewers and creators of content. It’s always amusing when a vlogger apologizes for a “lame” episode and promises better “content” the next time. Maybe he or she needs to hire writers?

This entire essay was prompted by my somewhat petty sense of grievance at being ignored. Rather than have some perfectly good thoughts disappear into the ether and mists of the internet, I am sharing what I wrote.

The only reason I bother with this is that I find some of the vlogs fascinating, laughable, intelligent, overbearing and sometimes unwittingly pretentious. But they are real. What an opportunity to share your thoughts about everything with a potentially vast audience, whereas when I was that age I scribbled my deepest, late adolescent thoughts about college, life and my little pre-Internet universe, in a black, lined-paper ledger book, only sharing parts of it online decades later. What angst and deep loneliness and introspection are revealed in those hand-written pages! I’ve carefully saved it through all the decades since, and it’s located in a satchel of invaluable personal writings, mementoes and photos that I can quickly snatch up if I have to quickly leave my apartment , for whatever reason, such as a mandatory hurricane evacuation order or other emergency.

As I alluded to earlier, now is both a promising and frightening world to be alive. I often shudder to think what will be happening five or ten years from now, or perhaps, before this tumultuous and dire year is over.

It used to be that youth was a time of unlimited promise and hope for a better life. Today, not so much.

My comments to the vlogger:

“Childhood” never ends if you don’t let society, other people (even “friends”) and institutions stamp it out of you at an early age. By “childhood” I mean the capacity for wonder, joy, innocence and fun. Our souls are not meant to be locked up in jobs or lives we despise and mindlessly carry on with.

Youth is merely an extension of childhood where we gradually become aware of what we’ve lost, but battle vociferously to hold onto all the lame, destructive, hedonistic and misguided striving and jockeying for position and status, that we might in youth think life is all about, mimicking work overlords, peers, friends, and social media influencers who are similarly insecure but seeking validation from others.

The goal is to stay on the true path instead of wandering aimlessly off on those dead-end forks in the road. I’ve taken many of forks and gone down lots of dead-ends, but I learned major life lessons doing so.

In order to return to this straight and narrow path we impulsively insist on leaving, and which leads to our highest fulfillment in this life, we need those mistakes of youth, and the suffering we at times experience as adults, to learn the lessons adversity has to teach us. Later in life we realize this much more fully, and, in fact, return to that state of lost innocence as we approach the end of our earthly journeys, or better, pilgrimages. As the great poet, William Wordsworth said in “my Heart Leaps Up,” “the child is father to the man.”

I truly believe the world is about to experience a great series of trials and upheavals, and then, hopefully the great shift in consciousness that so many of us have hoped was coming. Maybe then our lost innocence and sense of wonder will be fully restored