Childhood

I'd like you to take a moment and contemplate a question.  "Is this a world I'd want to grow up in?" - for some of you who are parents, or who are expecting children you have probably already thought about this question at length, but for the moment try looking at it from another angle.  I'd like everyone to think about what they went through growing up, what it was like, and think about how the world has changed in your lifetime and how different you think your childhood would be if you were going through it all again.

Discarding beliefs for a moment, the concept of reincarnation is something that has existed for quite a while.  The idea that when you die, you begin a new life, some beliefs put this as a new human life, others put it as the possibility of coming back as any living thing.  I was asked how I would feel about growing up in this world, if reincarnation was real and I was to be reborn as a child, with no recollection of this life.  The question made me think about how attached I am to the life I live now, and how the definition of who I am has been shaped.  It made me realise that if I was reborn today as a child, most of what I went through would not happen again.  I say that as I was born in 1988, and while I am a Millennial, I was born in that odd interim period, where growing up I witnessed the transition from old tech to new, from a world without the internet to a world with it, from a world without the ubiquity of smart phones, to a world where they have essentially become an extra limb.

The people I have grown closest to, beyond my family, are people I met online.  People who I met in other countries, and people who for the most part had nothing to do with my childhood.  I grew up in a small town, I knew a few people yet knew a lot about many more because that's how small towns work, everyone knows everything about everybody.  Nevertheless, the fact the number of people I knew was so limited put me in a position where I felt lonely.  I felt that way because I didn't connect with the people around me.  I had interests they did not.  I loved video games when it was still considered a geeky thing to be interested in.  I loved computers when they were not as widely available as they are now - our first was second-hand from a relative so we didn't pay that much for it so I had a head start on that front.  Even the TV shows and things that I watched, other kids my age didn't seem interested in.  I loved Pokémon and later Yu-Gi-Oh when both were considered geeky things to like.  In short I was the odd kid.

I think if I was growing up today, with the internet available to me, I would find people I shared common interests with.  It wasn't until I was about 19, a year after I had left that small town to study at University, that I started using the internet to join forums, and sign up to websites dedicated to things I was interested in and formed connections for the first time with complete strangers who liked the same things I did, and was able to have conversations without feeling judged.  I was able to indulge in my interests.  I feel today the dominance of social networks have led many to feel isolated and alone online because they are in essence digital equivalents of small towns.  Your facebook, twitter, instagram, and tumblr accounts etc all inevitably become filled with people you follow who have crossovers with others you follow up until the point where you realise you are living in a bubble online.  I feel forums are something which particularly younger people don't tend to venture into as much, but those forums are communities, and when you want to feel less isolated and less alone online the way to remedy that is through an online community that you can engage in, and become a part of in order to express yourself more openly and connect with people who share your interests.

In many ways I feel the fact I grew up experiencing the transition from old world to new, I got to explore the different ways people used the technology.  With the internet being so ubiquitous I think there is a complacency that can develop when you grow up never having lived without it.  I think your view of what it can actually be used for can be rather limited.  It's like growing up with certain foods in your life constantly, at some point you experience another culture or simply another way of living where you see the same foods but cooked in completely different ways and have that moment of epiphany when you finally say "Wait, you can do that?" and your horizons expand.  There is an oft quoted fact, that we only use a small fraction of the web, and that there are two levels, a surface web and a deep web, the former is small and the latter is gargantuan in comparison.  The former is reached through search engines, and the latter is not searchable.  Even at that we only use a small fraction of the surface web.  I like to think of this in terms of the planet.  We live in a country, which is in essence the surface.  The rest of the world is the depth we never explore, and of the surface country we live in, even at that we only explore a tiny fraction of it.

I don't know how different my life would be if I grew up in the world as it is today, but in my lifetime the size of this planet has felt like it has shrunk.  I am aware today of people in countries around the world, no longer as abstract concepts but on a personal level, the people I have met online and engage with almost every day cover an area that spans the globe, from Sydney, to Tokyo, to Indonesia, to Germany, to the UK, to Canada, and the USA and beyond.  I don't know how different my life would be but with my horizon expanded so much I'd like to think I'd have found my tribe at a much younger age and perhaps it wouldn't have taken me as long to find happiness.