When we talk about wasted youth we talk about wasted time. But who is talking about wasting youth? Youth echo these words, but the words themselves come from somewhere old and dark behind the frame. As if our lives offend—and they do offend—we are treated as though our time were a gift bestowed upon us, not the natural state that comes to all those fortunate enough to be born. Time belongs to us: the verdant, virulent young.

There is a vampiric force that wants to use our time up, fill it with deadlines, hem us in and take our freedom. This force exists, because we let it into ourselves. It is the fear of wasting our youth, making the wrong decision, and losing our time before we knew how much of it we had. But where does this fear come from?

Our whole approach to time has been broken down (time itself already fragmenting and lineating a [perhaps] once unbroken space). It is co-opted by older generations, by those who want to live outside of time. I am talking about the obsession with youth culture that fuels our way of life. It is exasperated by our technological extensions, which are all younger than us. Our new and improved body parts, always being replaced and upgraded faster than necessary or because of rapid production, speeding necessity. What’s more, they seem to appear out of nowhere, readymade and ready to use. Sort of like a child, the new tools are born with an unlimited potential. Only, there is no training necessary with these devices, no choices, just the good stuff all at once and then it is gone. We are mistakenly treated under the same expectation.

Youth should be a training ground beyond the seemingly simple career choices or smooth composure of the adult world, the mucky part where we are allowed to get things wrong, where we should make bad decisions, so we can fashion an understanding of the whole, see the world from all angles.

Instead, we see the world from the outside. Through the meteoric power of technology we have fallen victim to a catastrophic ideology: the new and improved in the hands of the old and decrepit. This is not a polemic against geriatric society, but against an old ideal, one held, typically, by the older members of society.

So, our worldview is not total or beautiful, but limited by our learned ideals and dislocated by our technology. Our children suffer more than a little from this way of life. But what do I mean by this? That we see reality from a distance. We view ourselves from a distance. Through our media devices, our tools and appliances, we externalize our functions: from digestion to nervous system, we exist outside ourselves. Our expectations are distorted by this birds-eye view and internalized. The technology that began as an outward expression of the imagination and pragmatism becomes the mode of creating internal views of ourselves. I believe this is part of what Marshall McLuhan meant when he wrote that we look forward through the rearview mirror.

This extended, disassociated self is now subject to the view of everyone else and is viewed through the lens of everyone else, mostly everyone we look up to. We become conscious curators of what we reveal to our media, or self-conscious observers of what our media reveal about our own identity and others’, conflating it all in our ego for some idealized whole.

From the vantage point of our infinitely long fingertips (read handheld computers) we hold up a distorted mirror and in it we see all of human history staring back with expectation. The vampire does not have a shadow, but we feel its living presence behind us like a deadly weight, pressing us further down the dark corridor, further into the looking glass.

We did not fabricate this reality[1], although we do play a central role in its continued existence, sparing no effort to justify this Moloch, this system of repression. We view ourselves from the distance of a god, a father god, the sky-god of Native cosmology or Nobodaddy of Christianity, of whom we seek constant approval. The best way to do this is to allow ourselves to be molded in his image. Only, it is not the most desirable state of being, so we must be coaxed, coerced, forced and forged into shape (during the teen years, where we are most rebellious, and perhaps least in control, most precarious- aside from childhood where the knowledge to rebel does not yet emerge). The many apparatuses that mold us are well documented, and all too familiar: the popular media and through it popular opinion[2], the denizens of the internet, ads, government, police, social groups, authors and others with agendas, especially our parents, and finally ourselves.

The monsters hunt us. With eyes closed, as lost in the dark forest as we are and hearing our cries, they think to reclaim their own “wasted youth” by devouring us whole. They want to wear our skins, but since they do not fit, they subvert us, makes us like them, make us ugly. In this way the cycle continues, each new crop of younglings forced into the awkward shapes and roles that their parents failed to fill.

These molds are not real. They are fantasies of an idealized past based on a very narrow conception of the present. You must learn the “way of the world”, that of the old world. This is what we are taught. We are not taught that we make the world we live in, that we are born shapers, naturals in the way of language, the way of change. Who shaped the world, who shapes it, who will shape it? There are different answers to each, but the same root fear hides behind all of them.

Our freedom to choose is an inalienable asset that exists as long as we do. Yet, we are taught to trust and that trust is abused. We give them everything to fit into the world already made, forgetting the world we were making as we went along. We learned fear instead of freedom. We learned about history[3], not possibility. We become self-regulatory and do not come to know ourselves.

This is what I want to tell you. We are not being taught for our benefit, but for someone else’s, even if that someone else is ‘society’. There is a world of stored potential, but it is kept from expression. We are shown the castle grounds, the great spire of lavish stone cut from the same quarry as the surrounding prison walls. But the walls are small; we just don’t see it. We don’t even see the walls. Maybe that is natural, but it doesn’t have to be.

Time is made into a prison. The idea of a timeline, a trajectory well laid and rigidly defined, a deadline, a perimeter. And though our time is finite, we are made to believe it confining also. A child does not need to be told s/he will die. The child knows. Children are obsessed with death, and given time they might grow to respect it, not fear it. Do we fear the exploding sun? Only in an unhealthy state of paranoia. We misplace our trust in the universe, in life—in ourselves—when we place that trust into the hands of other fickle beings, even if they hold our hands and call themselves our protectors. Death does not need reinforcement to assert itself. So why live in a double shadow? There is light, yet.

The cruelty of this scheme (conscious or otherwise, this is what it is) is that the technologies that gives us more time by extending our faculties and senses outward have been the primary tool used to hem us in. Our little robots do not rebel, but micromanage à la Auto, the villainous AI in Wall-E, trying to protect us from a future that does not yet exist by using our nostalgia for a past that never did exist. Like this Autopilot AI, the evil is not inherent, but due to a faulty system, a bad approach or algorithm that needs repairs, needs an update.

And we are taught to let it run our lives. Trust in the bureaucracy; the other options are too frightening to consider. Our learned fear of wasting time makes us forget the large scale, to see only a narrow hallway with a pinhole of light at the end of the ever closing in walls.

We have exactly all the time in the world, our whole lives: our youth is vast. Youth is eternal. Our guardians do not seek to share in our youth, but to take it, manipulate it. This is exasperated in the insecurities of youth. We are distorted, disembodied by this drive, this obsession—nostalgia, Nosferatu. The vampire squats in his cave, turning the vampiric machine with the power of youth fuelling it, wasting the future on the sick desire to relive the past. We are the victims of nostalgia, the cruelest, dustiest monster in the attic[4]. Youth is both the vehicle and the object of the world-eating cultural machine. Not just the real, harried youth of today, but the idea of youths already passed, and never present.

In the doldrums of the everyday we are prepared for jobs that are already taken, for roles already filled. We are given the atrophied leftovers of a gone-by era, and told to labour over them, keep them clean and rust-free. Instead we should be creating new positions and new roles for ourselves: ones that better fit each individual, ones that work in the constantly changing environment of society. The jobs of today and the needs of tomorrow did not exist yesterday, and maybe this is a rare moment of revolution in human life, but we cannot go on as we have.

And before this starts sounding too idealistic, let me point out an example of new thought leading the present effectively. As is, there is no room for this risk-taking in the economic reality, or no perceived room. But then, look at Google, look at all the new positions being created in the online realm and actually driving the economy. A more creative class would spawn all kinds of renewals that go beyond the classic old money jobs.

There is no security, only a moving forward in the dark with a leash or umbilical to the past. Cut it, it is rotten anyway and when we turn to rely on it in fear, it will not be there for us.

We are taught that the world is crowded, that we are small and must strive to be smaller still. If the world was shrunk by the presence of two billion people, it is made a mote by nine, and will cease to exist when we reach ten billion. It is our thinking that is small, not the planet, not ourselves. Instead, we should be prepared to grow, to always grow and to learn. As the new culture of popular neuroscience takes wing with its message that the brain is best maintained when it is ready to change. To take a line form Churchill via Frank Underwood “perfection is to change often.”

The optimal state is to be one of constant learning, a readiness to shed the old and start again, to be young.