Stil jete

Letter to a newborn child

Letter to a newborn child

Dear children born in 2025, you already have a label: you are Generation Beta. But try to rebel against our obsession with cataloguing even the future.

Dear children of Generation Beta, you have not yet begun to live and you have already been named. Or rather, you have been “branded.” They call you “sons of the future,” because your wheel of time has just begun to turn. But in fact, the future that is being built for you is only a projection of the present in which you are just beginning to take the first steps.

The generations that came before you, from baby boomers to millennials to Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), earned their title later, based on what they experienced and how they experienced it. You, on the other hand, are already classified. You have a history where you are only a secondary actor, but which risks weighing you down like a predetermined fate. Which is actually more like profiling – an identification of a type of consumer.

In this sense, your destiny is the same as that of Generation Alpha. Like them, you are identified primarily based on your future ability to influence your parents' economic behaviors and, later, by the purchasing power you are expected to achieve in a few years.

Most likely, and fortunately, all this excessive narrative about you will not match what you will actually do and be. In fact, all this “advice” and “opinions” that pedagogize and psychologize what children do and think are more of a placebo for parents who are increasingly lost, due to the generation gap we experience today.

They are also an increasingly lucrative market for advice “gurus” who prey on the passions and obsessions of young people. Caricatured by reductive labels such as screenagers, a human “fauna” immersed in technology, or addicted to social media, they are often victims of demonization and unfounded fear, just as “bad teachers” once were.

The mania for predicting the future

In fact, this tendency to predict time and mortgage the future is a child of our “last minute” society. But in reality it has much deeper roots, dating back to that civilization of the Decalogue, from which our vision of the world and life originates. This is a culture founded on the detailed classification of events and behaviors, in an attempt to leave nothing to chance.

First there was chaos, then came laws, and then came classifications and comparisons, which order things and people. Essentially, our need for classifications arises from the desire to make sense of the world, to order it, and to explain it.

But the truth is that every classification hides a way to shed light on the darkness of the world, to select what is most important. In other words, it is an attempt to cope with the infinite complexity of life by synthesizing it into a number or a label.

A reversal of history

In ancient civilizations, people looked to the past to understand the present. In modern society, we constantly ask, “How will it end?” This turns history from a study of causes to a prediction of consequences. The future becomes more important than the past.

For you, dear children of Generation Beta, the best message is this: Don't let our fears infect you. Learn to see all these labels for what they are: attempts to control the unexpectedness of life. You, perhaps more than we, can teach us how to balance the future with the present and how to use technology with wisdom and prudence.

Welcome to the world!

*This article was published by Bota.al and reposted by Tiranapost.al