What Does Your Youth Mean To You?

@evegraay

Freedom to learn, change alter people around me. The willingness to be inspired

@katelynn.parsons

It means I am the change coming to the world and I can influence for the better

@ourdeepstfears

My youth means I’m still growing & I am always growing no matter what, always

@todorovicanna

My youth means everything to me! You can feel every moment so intensely…you can go out with friends you don’t have to be worried and you can live your life!! I’m lucky enough to grow up in a land where I can be whatever I wanna be and I’m really grateful for that! Youth means finding your true self, struggling and learning for your future life. Youth means trying new things and doing thinfs you wanna do as long as you can. But youth also means to me learning that not everything is so good and positive…when you are 8 you do not worry about a lot of things, but I’m 16 now and I slowly but surely see all of the things that happen in the world that makes me sad sometimes. Now I see that education is sooooo important and I should absolutely not take it for granted.

I love that I’m still young I love my failures and I’m learning to love myself.

@ohellepea

Youth. I don’t think it’s something held captive inside a tube of anti-wrinkle cream, or something positively correlated with regular attendance to bars and nightclubs. I don’t think it’s automatically granted to someone whose first breath was taken in the 21st century or someone who still lives at home and has just returned from Maccha Picchu, Angkor Wat and a skydiving jump in New Zealand.

The value of youth is high, and membership to this mindset is elusively low. The fact that youth can’t be awarded or purchased in this way is the same reason that it’s focused the minds of musicians and poets, advertisers and marketers, educators and – to a degree – politicians for decades.

Youth is an overwhelming breadth of possibility, and although becoming a world-class pole vaulter and/or cello prodigy admittedly do have smaller admission windows than other life ambitions I’ve looked into, there’s an unrivalled excitement that comes with knowing the world, really is, your oyster. But an infinite number of choices and the absence of a rulebook to follow can easily be coupled by fear. Of all the possibilities, there’s one that you may realise, 20 years down the line, is ‘the wrong choice’. For so many of us, the horizon-wide potential we’ve known will shrink and fade and extinguish with the arrival of popular benchmarks of success such as jobs promoted or businesses created, houses purchased and soulmates located.

Youth fuels protests, boycotts and petitions, but also declarations of love and masterpieces. From The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Greta Thunberg’s UN COP24 speech, these works are produced by a confidence that has yet to know failure, and that is ready for its rightful turn on the world’s stage.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s Ode, despite being all of 146 years old – will always, in my eyes, encapsulate the power in and of youth.

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems.

Forever. Not for now, or until your 18th, 21st or 25th birthday, but forever. We can change ourselves or the whole world, and we can do this whenever, forever.