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Life In The Future Essay | Essay About Life In The Future Plans for Students and Children in English

December 24, 2021 by Prasanna

Life In The Future Essay: Our life in the future will be a lot more different from today in many aspects. The environment, transportation, communication, and people’s lifestyles will see transformational changes. There are some reasons to be optimistic about life in the future. Human lives will go through a lot of changes in the future. Whether it is better or worse depends on how we would handle the changes and how they can influence our lives. There is a path to a future filled with amazing opportunities, with advanced technologies and extraordinary facilities leading the way. Life is a balance of work, emotions, and relationships and we should keep that in mind while preparing us for the future.

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Long Essay on Life In The Future

A Convenient Life

Along with the development of technology, people will have more means of transport like solar-powered and electrically operated cars which are much more environment-friendly. Traveling by driverless vehicles will become the new trend. Most of the analytical work will be performed by artificial intelligence and the workplace will be dominated by smart assistance to achieve quick results. Online platforms will be the means of interactions and education and everything will be virtually connected and internet-based. In the future, human habits will undergo significant change as more and more facilities will come up to ease our lives. Maybe students won’t move out to go to school. Online education will take the charge.

Houses would have all the high-end technological devices and robots will likely assist in manual work. Machines are getting more efficient and will replace humans in factories as well as in household work. Robots will also act as friends and companions with programmed features and with help of artificial intelligence. Trackless trains, driverless vehicles, and underwater transportation will be a common sight. Communication and accessibility will be at unimaginable speed. Food, entertainment, and news would be ready for our consumption at our will and choices.

The Crisis Awaited

There will be an increase in environmental pollution and climate-related hazards in the future. These hazards can appear in the form of increased drought and flooding and extreme weather. Trees will perhaps be preserved in the museum as it will be among the endangered species. With an increase in population, more deforestation will happen to accommodate people and it would leave little fresh air for breathing. People will be dependent on an oxygen mask for daily activities. The demand for the world’s energy resources will be severe and alternative resource utilization becomes mandatory. With more and more advancement, the materialistic approach will be dominant.

Relationships will be too formal and emotional space will be replaced by a mechanical approach. People will spend most of their time online and avoid talking to people face to face. People won’t need to do manual or household work because robots will be engaged to do all such activities. Whether it’s study, job, or entertainment, people will be glued o smart devices throughout the day which makes them much lazier and obese. In the absence of outdoor activities, maintaining physical fitness will be a challenge. People will be affected more by health problems and the pharmaceutical industry will be on the boom as people will be drug dependent.

Short Essay on Life In The Future

Introduction

Life is very unpredictable and uncertain. No one can say what is stored for the future. But we can predict life in the future from the present development and happenings. People plan a lot of things for the future as all like to see and live a generous life in the future. There is a lot of hope and aspiration of people involved when looking at their lives in the future.

High-end Technology 

Nothing can be said for certain but seeing the present technological advancements in the last few years we can surely think of a life with much more advancement in various technological aspects. Today the internet and highly mechanized gadgets have our life on a different level as compared to the lifestyles of people a few years back. Today even a small child can operate a mobile phone or a laptop and desktop. They are quite comfortable in operating various electronics gadgets with ease. So it could be easily understood that life in the future will be more advanced technologically. People can connect with their friends, relatives, and others easily with just a finger touch. So distance is not a matter. Our workload will decrease greatly due to the modern gadgets and maybe robots which will be available to ease our work.

The Adversities

While getting ahead technologically, people are losing their personal touch with one another. Today a large number of populations do not bother to feel for the elders or even neglect the children due to the race of life. So this has become a trend of having only a self-centered life. This trend will increase in the future so life will be more self-centered where feelings for others will take a back seat. So we can say clearly that along with lists of advancements in the future, a lot of negative aspects do move side by side. Technologically life in the future will be a great enhancement but a life without fellow feeling will be a part of it.

Similarly, a person will forget to do manual labor which is also required for a healthy life. Children will be more inclined towards the internet and less interested in reading books and outdoor activities. The new generation in the future will suffer from lots of health problems due to intense indoor activities and more inclination towards technologies. Hence life in the future will show us some positive and some negative shades of life and this is true for generations throughout.

FAQ’s on Life In The Future Essay

Question 1. What does the future of space travel look like?

Answer: Space visits would be commercialized by offering people the opportunity to visit other planets.

Question 2. How will lifestyles change in the future under the influence of technology?

Answer: There will be gadgets for every work and everything would be available online which limits physical activities, movements, and interactions resulting in physical and mental health issues.

Question 3. Why is protecting the natural environment essential for the existence of human life in the future?

Answer: Human life is dependent on the environment so extreme climate and pollution will affect their very existence. Therefore it is important to maintain a perfect balance between technical and natural environments.

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What Will Life Be Like in 2050?

By mid-century there will likely be 9 billion people on the planet, consuming ever more resources and leading ever more technologically complex lives. What will our cities be like? How much will artificial intelligence advance? Will global warming trigger catastrophic changes, or will we be able to engineer our way out of the climate change crisis?

Making predictions is, by nature, a dicey business, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Smithsonian magazine Big Think asked top minds from a variety of fields to weigh in on what the future holds 40 years from now. The result is our latest special series, Life in 2050 . Demographic changes in world population and population growth will certainly be dramatic. Rockefeller University mathematical biologist Joel Cohen says it’s likely that by 2050 the majority of the people in the world will live in urban areas, and will have a significantly higher average age than people today . Cities theorist Richard Florida thinks urbanization trends will reinvent the education system  of the United States, making our economy less real estate driven and erasing the divisions between home and work.

Large migrations from developing countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Mexico, and countries in the Middle East could disrupt western governments and harm the unity of France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, and the  United Kingdom  under the umbrella of the  European Union .

And rapidly advancing technology will continue ever more rapidly. According to Bill Mitchell, the late director of MIT’s Smart Cities research group, cities of the future won’t look like “some sort of science-fiction fantasy” or “Star Trek” but it’s likely that “discreet, unobtrusive” technological advances and information overlays, i.e. virtual reality and augmented reality, will change how we live in significant ways. Self-driving cars will make the roads safer, driving more efficient, and provide faster transports. A larger version of driverless cars—driverless trucks—may make long haul drivers obsolete.

Charles Ebinger, Director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution also thinks that by 2050 we will also have a so-called “smart grid” where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems , allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand. Such a technology would greatly benefit energy hungry nations like  China  and India, while potentially harming fossil fuel energy producers like Canada and .

Meanwhile, the Internet will continue to radically transform media , destroying the traditional model of what a news organization is, says author and former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who believes the most common kinds of news organizations in the future will be “individuals and small alliances of individuals” reporting and publishing on niche topics. 

But what will all this new technology mean? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the director of the Information & Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, hopes that advances in technology will make us more empowered, motivated and active , rather than mindless consumers of information and entertainment. And NYU interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky worries that technological threats could endanger much of the openness that we now enjoy online , perhaps turning otherwise free-information countries into mirrors of closed states like China and Turkey.

Some long view predictions are downright dire. Environmentalist Bill McKibben says that if we don’t make major strides in combating global warming, it’s likely we could see out-of-control rises in sea levels — particularly dangerous in island nations like the Philippines — enormous crop shortfalls, and wars over increasingly scarce freshwater resource s. But information technology may yield some optimism for our planet, says oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who thinks that services like Google Earth have the potential to turn everyday people into ocean conservationists .

In the financial world, things will be very different indeed, according to MIT professor Simon Johnson, who thinks many of the financial products being sold today, like over-the-counter derivatives, will be illegal —judged, accurately, by regulators to not be in the best interests of consumers and failing to meet their basic needs. If economic growth rates remain steady, however, it may present a challenge to regulators.

We will live longer and remain healthier. Patricia Bloom, an associate professor in the geriatrics department of Mt. Sinai Hospital, says we may not routinely live to be 120, but it’s possible that we will be able to extend wellness and shorten decline and disability for people as they age . AIDS research pioneer David Ho says the HIV/AIDS epidemic will still be with us , but we will know a lot more about the virus than we do today—and therapies will be much more effective. Meanwhile, Jay Parkinson, the co-founder of Hello Health, says the health care industry has a “huge opportunity” to change the way it communicates with patients by conceiving of individual health in relation to happiness.

In terms of how we will eat, green markets founder and “real food” proponent Nina Planck is optimistic that there will be more small slaughterhouses, more small creameries, and more regional food operations—and we’ll be healthier as a result . New York Times cooking columnist Mark Bittman, similarly, thinks that people will eat fewer processed foods , and eat foods grown closer to where they live. And Anson Mills farmer Glenn Roberts thinks that more people will clue into the “ethical responsibility” to grow and preserve land-raised farm systems . And what will our culture be like? We may not get rid of racism in America entirely in the next 40 years, but NAACP President Benjamin Jealous predicts that in the coming decades the issue of race will become “much less significant,” even as the issue of class may rise in importance. Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, says it’s even likely that we’ll see a black pope , reversing centuries of Euro-centrism in favor of Catholics in  Africa. Nigeria is one such country with a large Catholic population. Meanwhile, prisons expert Robert Perkinson says he thinks there will be fewer Americans in prison in 2050 , because we will realize that the current high levels of incarceration are out of sync with our history and values. Historian and social scientist Joan Wallach Scott worries, however, that unless the countries of Europe figure out how to accommodate Muslim immigrant populations, t here will be more riots, and increasing divisions along economic, religious and ethnic lines , such instability could have knock on effects in countries ranging from Egypt and Iran to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. —

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Thinking About the Future Makes Life More Meaningful

Mindfulness is all the rage these days, and for good reason. Focusing on the moment can improve our well-being , foster compassion , and help our relationships . What about going beyond the present moment? Yes, thinking about the future can trigger anxiety—but a growing body of research suggests that it can also make our lives more meaningful.

Humans aren’t alone in having some ability to consider the future, a process that scientists call “prospection.” After all, your dog gets excited when they see you holding a leash because they anticipate a walk is imminent; your cat may show similar excitement at the sound of a can being opened. There’s even evidence that some animals—like bonobos and ravens —can choose and save tools that they plan to use in the future.

But prospection’s unique benefits to humans extend beyond that of other animals. Not only do we fantasize about our next vacation or decide whether it would be better to take the stairs or the elevator, but our prospection can cast far into the future: We might save for our children’s education or plan for our retirement decades from now. We can make predictions about our own futures based on what we’ve learned about other people’s experiences and even from characters in books and movies. And we can consider multiple directions our futures might take.

It is this remarkable ability to simulate our possible futures that makes prospection special. Just like gold prospecting may literally make you rich, studies suggest that prospecting about your future can enrich your life in at least four ways.

1. Helps us make more prudent decisions

Perhaps one of the most fundamental and important functions of prospection is that it helps us decide how to act: Thinking about what the future likely holds helps us decide what course to take in the here-and-now. Several studies have examined how thinking about the future shapes our decision-making.

Researchers have been particularly interested in the psychology that drives our process of deciding between receiving something now versus receiving something of greater value later. In general, people tend to choose smaller but more immediate rewards over larger rewards that they have to wait for, a phenomenon known as “delay discounting.”

But they don’t always choose short-term rewards over long-run gains. For instance, studies have shown that present-day connection to a possible future event can counteract delay discounting. In one study from the United Kingdom, participants were told either to vividly imagine spending 35 pounds at a pub 180 days from now or to simply estimate what they thought could be purchased for 35 pounds. Participants in the former condition showed an increased willingness to wait for a larger future reward than the participants in the latter condition. In other words, visualizing a specific possible future counteracted the effects of delay discounting.

Another study showed that participants who felt closer to their future selves were more willing to wait for a larger reward than those who anticipated changing; the same was true when they were asked to make decisions on behalf of a fictional character who they knew would go through a life-changing event (like a religious conversion or returning home from war).

While interesting in its own right, this research could have important personal ramifications. If people could be made to feel a more immediate connection to their eventual retirement (and consequent drop in income), they may be more motivated to make prudent decisions.

In fact, one experiment found that manipulating how people think about the time until their retirement—in days rather than years—caused them to plan to start saving for retirement sooner, because the shift in time perspective made the participants feel more connected to their future selves. A 2014 study found that viewing realistic computer-generated images of what they may look like in the future decreased their discounting of future rewards and led them to contribute more to a hypothetical retirement account.

2. Motivates us to achieve our goals (if we do it right)

Prospection has another important application: It motivates us to achieve our goals. But the relationship here is not a simple one. Work by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues shows that whether thinking about the future helps us actually reach our goals depends on how we think about the future.

In fact, research has found that positive thinking about our future can backfire . The more people positively fantasize about successfully reaching their goals, the less effort they actually put into realizing them. For example, in one study , the people who fantasized more about successfully losing weight actually lost less weight. Another study found that students who fantasized about their transition into a professional career were less successful in their job search and students who dreamed more about their crush were less likely to start a relationship with their crushee.

Importantly, both of these studies found the opposite effect for having positive expectations (“judging a desired future as likely”). People who expected to lose weight were more likely to actually lose weight; students who expected they would find a job were more likely to actually land one; and students who expected to enter a relationship with their crush were more likely to actually do so.

It makes sense that having positive expectations—optimism, essentially—could increase our ability to achieve our goals, but why might fantasizing about the future actually decrease the chance of achieving what we want? Because, write Oettingen and Klaus Michel Reininger, positive fantasies “lead people to mentally enjoy the desired future in the here and now, and thus curb investment and future success.”

But often our goals come from our fantasies. We want to excel at work, find Mr. or Mrs. Right, or run a marathon. How do we turn these fantasies into behaviors that can help us reach our goals? Research suggests that while optimism is important, it is also helpful to draw a contrast between our fantasies and our current reality, which allows us to see barriers that must be overcome.

For example, one study asked students to mentally contrast their positive fantasies about benefiting from a vocational training program with aspects of the program that could impede their progress. This reflection caused students who expected to do well in the program to commit themselves more, and those who expected to do poorly to commit themselves less—again pointing to the importance of optimistic expectations to success. But the mental contrasting was also key: Positive expectations did not increase commitment in participants who were not assigned to compare their present situation with their future desires.

Results from a later study suggest that the effectiveness of mental contrasting is due to “energization”—meaning that, when people have high expectations for succeeding at something, considering what might impede their goals gives them energy to try to overcome those barriers. In other words, it helps to stress yourself out a little bit.

Mental contrasting, particularly when used in conjunction with “implementation intentions”—making plans to help move past potential barriers—has been shown to help people reach their goals. To describe this process, Oettingen and colleagues use the acronym WOOP

: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. In studies, WOOP-type interventions have helped people break a bad snacking habit , get more exercise , and improve academic performance .

Thus, research suggests that thinking about the future can motivate us to take the steps necessary to reach our goals—but only if we take obstacles into account.

3. Improves psychological well-being

More on goal-setting.

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How to choose goals that make you come alive .

Besides helping us make decisions and reach our goals, there is evidence that prospection may improve psychological health more generally. It might even help people who are struggling with depression and those recovering from trauma.

Indeed, some researchers pose a link between poor prospection and certain psychological disorders such as depression.

“We see faulty prospection as a core underlying process that drives depression,” write psychologists Martin Seligman and Anne Marie Roepke in the book Homo Prospectus . In particular, they note that people with depression imagine possible futures that are more negative than people without depression. Moreover, people with depression tend to overestimate risk and to have more pessimistic beliefs about the future.

That might be why research suggests that targeting negative beliefs about the future can be helpful. Some techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, involve correcting how people think about the future, and some studies have shown that cognitive behavioral therapy can improve prospection . There is a 10-week program called “Future Directed Therapy” that induces participants to spend less time dwelling on the past or on current struggles. Instead, they are asked to spend more time thinking about what they want from the future, while developing skills to reach those future goals. A nonrandomized pilot study found that patients with major depressive disorder who completed this intervention showed significant improvements in depression, anxiety, and quality of life compared to patients who completed standard cognitive behavioral therapy.

For people recovering from trauma, a 2018 study suggests that writing optimistically about the future—an intervention called prospective writing—might encourage post-traumatic growth (that is, positive psychological growth following a traumatic life event). In this study, adults who had recently experienced trauma were randomly assigned to a prospective writing intervention group, a factual writing control group, or a no-writing control. Throughout the study, those in the prospective writing group showed greater improvement in surveys measuring aspects of post-traumatic growth, including relationship quality, meaning in life, life satisfaction, gratitude, and religiosity-spirituality. The other two groups did not show the same progress.

There’s another technique that may help anyone improve their psychological health: “anticipatory savoring.” Taking time to simulate and enjoy a positive experience in advance—whether it be an upcoming meal, visit with friends, or vacation—can allow you to derive benefits for the experience twice. One 2018 study found that taking the opportunity to savor an upcoming experience actually heightened people’s enjoyment both during the unfolding of the experience and when remembering it later.

One way to engage in anticipatory savoring, suggested by Roepke and Seligman in a recent review article , is to modify the “three good things” gratitude exercise. Instead of writing three good things that happened today, you can write three good things you anticipate happening tomorrow and what you can do to make it more likely that those things actually happen. For people who are struggling, they suggest also writing down three methods that could be used to mitigate disappointment if the good things do not actually happen. These could include coping strategies (exercise, reaching out to a friend, etc.) or alternative strategies to making the good thing happen (e.g., if a friend canceled lunch, you could suggest lunch next week).

4. Makes us more kind and generous

How we think about the future doesn’t just influence our own lives. It can also influence how we treat other people.

In particular, picturing yourself helping someone in the future may make you more likely to actually do so. For instance, a 2018 study found that participants reported being more willing to help other people who needed help (such as a person who was locked out of their house or who lost their dog) if they had previously been asked to imagine helping a person in a similar scenario. People who were asked to imagine the helping scenario more vividly—by picturing the event occurring in a familiar location—were even more willing to help. One experiment even found that people who imagined helping actually gave more money to people in need when given the opportunity.

Another study found that when people think more broadly about the future consequences that could come from helping others, they might feel inspired to behave in more prosocial ways. In one experiment, researchers asked people who had volunteered for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts to imagine the meaning and consequences of their trip—or to think concretely about how they would be helping. Those who imagined the consequences of helping predicted that they would have a more rewarding trip than those who thought concretely about their actions. A second experiment replicated this finding: People predicted that giving money to someone they had never met would be more rewarding when they were asked to think about the more abstract meaning and consequences of their actions (e.g., how this decision fit in with their life’s past and future experience) than when they were asked to consider a more concrete perspective.

Could this abstract-versus-concrete effect have real-world consequences? The researchers think so:

We believe that our results suggest an intervention that could be used to prompt and sustain prosocial behavior. To the extent that people avoid or cease prosocial actions because of concrete costs, inviting people to construe those actions abstractly could help them persist at prosocial actions that have enduring personal and social benefits.

While there’s a lot left for researchers to discover about prospection, you don’t need to wait for their published studies. You can try your own experiments right now, to see if prospection helps you to live a more generous, happier, and more meaningful life.

About the Author

Summer Allen

Summer Allen, Ph.D. , is a Research/Writing Fellow with the Greater Good Science Center. A graduate of Carleton College and Brown University, Summer now writes for a variety of publications including weekly blog posts for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also very active on twitter: follow her , or just reach out and say hello!

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Where Do I See Myself in 10 Years: Envisioning a Decade Ahead

Table of contents, where i see myself in 10 years: a profound exploration, 10 years from now: nurturing personal and professional growth, how do i see myself 10 years from now: a commitment to values, embracing the journey of the next decade, turning dreams into reality: the road to my future, navigating the career landscape: a fulfilling professional journey, fostering personal growth: a holistic approach to well-being, a global citizen: making a positive impact on society, conclusion: a journey of transformation and purpose.

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Follow YES! For Teachers

Eight brilliant student essays on what matters most in life.

Read winning essays from our spring 2019 student writing contest.

For the spring 2019 student writing contest, we invited students to read the YES! article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age” by Nancy Hill. Like the author, students interviewed someone significantly older than them about the three things that matter most in life. Students then wrote about what they learned, and about how their interviewees’ answers compare to their own top priorities.

The Winners

From the hundreds of essays written, these eight were chosen as winners. Be sure to read the author’s response to the essay winners and the literary gems that caught our eye. Plus, we share an essay from teacher Charles Sanderson, who also responded to the writing prompt.

Middle School Winner: Rory Leyva

High School Winner:  Praethong Klomsum

University Winner:  Emily Greenbaum

Powerful Voice Winner: Amanda Schwaben

Powerful Voice Winner: Antonia Mills

Powerful Voice Winner:  Isaac Ziemba

Powerful Voice Winner: Lily Hersch

“Tell It Like It Is” Interview Winner: Jonas Buckner

From the Author: Response to Student Winners

Literary Gems

From A Teacher: Charles Sanderson

From the Author: Response to Charles Sanderson

Middle School Winner

Village Home Education Resource Center, Portland, Ore.

The Lessons Of Mortality 

“As I’ve aged, things that are more personal to me have become somewhat less important. Perhaps I’ve become less self-centered with the awareness of mortality, how short one person’s life is.” This is how my 72-year-old grandma believes her values have changed over the course of her life. Even though I am only 12 years old, I know my life won’t last forever, and someday I, too, will reflect on my past decisions. We were all born to exist and eventually die, so we have evolved to value things in the context of mortality.

One of the ways I feel most alive is when I play roller derby. I started playing for the Rose City Rollers Juniors two years ago, and this year, I made the Rosebud All-Stars travel team. Roller derby is a fast-paced, full-contact sport. The physicality and intense training make me feel in control of and present in my body.

My roller derby team is like a second family to me. Adolescence is complicated. We understand each other in ways no one else can. I love my friends more than I love almost anything else. My family would have been higher on my list a few years ago, but as I’ve aged it has been important to make my own social connections.

Music led me to roller derby.  I started out jam skating at the roller rink. Jam skating is all about feeling the music. It integrates gymnastics, breakdancing, figure skating, and modern dance with R & B and hip hop music. When I was younger, I once lay down in the DJ booth at the roller rink and was lulled to sleep by the drawl of wheels rolling in rhythm and people talking about the things they came there to escape. Sometimes, I go up on the roof of my house at night to listen to music and feel the wind rustle my hair. These unique sensations make me feel safe like nothing else ever has.

My grandma tells me, “Being close with family and friends is the most important thing because I haven’t

always had that.” When my grandma was two years old, her father died. Her mother became depressed and moved around a lot, which made it hard for my grandma to make friends. Once my grandma went to college, she made lots of friends. She met my grandfather, Joaquin Leyva when she was working as a park ranger and he was a surfer. They bought two acres of land on the edge of a redwood forest and had a son and a daughter. My grandma created a stable family that was missing throughout her early life.

My grandma is motivated to maintain good health so she can be there for her family. I can relate because I have to be fit and strong for my team. Since she lost my grandfather to cancer, she realizes how lucky she is to have a functional body and no life-threatening illnesses. My grandma tries to eat well and exercise, but she still struggles with depression. Over time, she has learned that reaching out to others is essential to her emotional wellbeing.  

Caring for the earth is also a priority for my grandma I’ve been lucky to learn from my grandma. She’s taught me how to hunt for fossils in the desert and find shells on the beach. Although my grandma grew up with no access to the wilderness, she admired the green open areas of urban cemeteries. In college, she studied geology and hiked in the High Sierras. For years, she’s been an advocate for conserving wildlife habitat and open spaces.

Our priorities may seem different, but it all comes down to basic human needs. We all desire a purpose, strive to be happy, and need to be loved. Like Nancy Hill says in the YES! Magazine article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” it can be hard to decipher what is important in life. I believe that the constant search for satisfaction and meaning is the only thing everyone has in common. We all want to know what matters, and we walk around this confusing world trying to find it. The lessons I’ve learned from my grandma about forging connections, caring for my body, and getting out in the world inspire me to live my life my way before it’s gone.

Rory Leyva is a seventh-grader from Portland, Oregon. Rory skates for the Rosebuds All-Stars roller derby team. She loves listening to music and hanging out with her friends.

High School Winner

Praethong Klomsum

  Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, Calif.

Time Only Moves Forward

Sandra Hernandez gazed at the tiny house while her mother’s gentle hands caressed her shoulders. It wasn’t much, especially for a family of five. This was 1960, she was 17, and her family had just moved to Culver City.

Flash forward to 2019. Sandra sits in a rocking chair, knitting a blanket for her latest grandchild, in the same living room. Sandra remembers working hard to feed her eight children. She took many different jobs before settling behind the cash register at a Japanese restaurant called Magos. “It was a struggle, and my husband Augustine, was planning to join the military at that time, too.”

In the YES! Magazine article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” author Nancy Hill states that one of the most important things is “…connecting with others in general, but in particular with those who have lived long lives.” Sandra feels similarly. It’s been hard for Sandra to keep in contact with her family, which leaves her downhearted some days. “It’s important to maintain that connection you have with your family, not just next-door neighbors you talk to once a month.”

Despite her age, Sandra is a daring woman. Taking risks is important to her, and she’ll try anything—from skydiving to hiking. Sandra has some regrets from the past, but nowadays, she doesn’t wonder about the “would have, could have, should haves.” She just goes for it with a smile.

Sandra thought harder about her last important thing, the blue and green blanket now finished and covering

her lap. “I’ve definitely lived a longer life than most, and maybe this is just wishful thinking, but I hope I can see the day my great-grandchildren are born.” She’s laughing, but her eyes look beyond what’s in front of her. Maybe she is reminiscing about the day she held her son for the first time or thinking of her grandchildren becoming parents. I thank her for her time and she waves it off, offering me a styrofoam cup of lemonade before I head for the bus station.

The bus is sparsely filled. A voice in my head reminds me to finish my 10-page history research paper before spring break. I take a window seat and pull out my phone and earbuds. My playlist is already on shuffle, and I push away thoughts of that dreaded paper. Music has been a constant in my life—from singing my lungs out in kindergarten to Barbie’s “I Need To Know,” to jamming out to Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” in sixth grade, to BTS’s “Intro: Never Mind” comforting me when I’m at my lowest. Music is my magic shop, a place where I can trade away my fears for calm.

I’ve always been afraid of doing something wrong—not finishing my homework or getting a C when I can do better. When I was 8, I wanted to be like the big kids. As I got older, I realized that I had exchanged my childhood longing for the 48 pack of crayons for bigger problems, balancing grades, a social life, and mental stability—all at once. I’m going to get older whether I like it or not, so there’s no point forcing myself to grow up faster.  I’m learning to live in the moment.

The bus is approaching my apartment, where I know my comfy bed and a home-cooked meal from my mom are waiting. My mom is hard-working, confident, and very stubborn. I admire her strength of character. She always keeps me in line, even through my rebellious phases.

My best friend sends me a text—an update on how broken her laptop is. She is annoying. She says the stupidest things and loves to state the obvious. Despite this, she never fails to make me laugh until my cheeks feel numb. The rest of my friends are like that too—loud, talkative, and always brightening my day. Even friends I stopped talking to have a place in my heart. Recently, I’ve tried to reconnect with some of them. This interview was possible because a close friend from sixth grade offered to introduce me to Sandra, her grandmother.  

I’m decades younger than Sandra, so my view of what’s important isn’t as broad as hers, but we share similar values, with friends and family at the top. I have a feeling that when Sandra was my age, she used to love music, too. Maybe in a few decades, when I’m sitting in my rocking chair, drawing in my sketchbook, I’ll remember this article and think back fondly to the days when life was simple.

Praethong Klomsum is a tenth-grader at Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica, California.  Praethong has a strange affinity for rhyme games and is involved in her school’s dance team. She enjoys drawing and writing, hoping to impact people willing to listen to her thoughts and ideas.

University Winner

Emily Greenbaum

Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 

The Life-Long War

Every morning we open our eyes, ready for a new day. Some immediately turn to their phones and social media. Others work out or do yoga. For a certain person, a deep breath and the morning sun ground him. He hears the clink-clank of his wife cooking low sodium meat for breakfast—doctor’s orders! He sees that the other side of the bed is already made, the dogs are no longer in the room, and his clothes are set out nicely on the loveseat.

Today, though, this man wakes up to something different: faded cream walls and jello. This person, my hero, is Master Chief Petty Officer Roger James.

I pulled up my chair close to Roger’s vinyl recliner so I could hear him above the noise of the beeping dialysis machine. I noticed Roger would occasionally glance at his wife Susan with sparkly eyes when he would recall memories of the war or their grandkids. He looked at Susan like she walked on water.

Roger James served his country for thirty years. Now, he has enlisted in another type of war. He suffers from a rare blood cancer—the result of the wars he fought in. Roger has good and bad days. He says, “The good outweighs the bad, so I have to be grateful for what I have on those good days.”

When Roger retired, he never thought the effects of the war would reach him. The once shallow wrinkles upon his face become deeper, as he tells me, “It’s just cancer. Others are suffering from far worse. I know I’ll make it.”

Like Nancy Hill did in her article “Three Things that Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” I asked Roger, “What are the three most important things to you?” James answered, “My wife Susan, my grandkids, and church.”

Roger and Susan served together in the Vietnam war. She was a nurse who treated his cuts and scrapes one day. I asked Roger why he chose Susan. He said, “Susan told me to look at her while she cleaned me up. ‘This may sting, but don’t be a baby.’ When I looked into her eyes, I felt like she was looking into my soul, and I didn’t want her to leave. She gave me this sense of home. Every day I wake up, she makes me feel the same way, and I fall in love with her all over again.”

Roger and Susan have two kids and four grandkids, with great-grandchildren on the way. He claims that his grandkids give him the youth that he feels slowly escaping from his body. This adoring grandfather is energized by coaching t-ball and playing evening card games with the grandkids.

The last thing on his list was church. His oldest daughter married a pastor. Together they founded a church. Roger said that the connection between his faith and family is important to him because it gave him a reason to want to live again. I learned from Roger that when you’re across the ocean, you tend to lose sight of why you are fighting. When Roger returned, he didn’t have the will to live. Most days were a struggle, adapting back into a society that lacked empathy for the injuries, pain, and psychological trauma carried by returning soldiers. Church changed that for Roger and gave him a sense of purpose.

When I began this project, my attitude was to just get the assignment done. I never thought I could view Master Chief Petty Officer Roger James as more than a role model, but he definitely changed my mind. It’s as if Roger magically lit a fire inside of me and showed me where one’s true passions should lie. I see our similarities and embrace our differences. We both value family and our own connections to home—his home being church and mine being where I can breathe the easiest.

Master Chief Petty Officer Roger James has shown me how to appreciate what I have around me and that every once in a while, I should step back and stop to smell the roses. As we concluded the interview, amidst squeaky clogs and the stale smell of bleach and bedpans, I looked to Roger, his kind, tired eyes, and weathered skin, with a deeper sense of admiration, knowing that his values still run true, no matter what he faces.

Emily Greenbaum is a senior at Kent State University, graduating with a major in Conflict Management and minor in Geography. Emily hopes to use her major to facilitate better conversations, while she works in the Washington, D.C. area.  

Powerful Voice Winner

Amanda Schwaben

Wise Words From Winnie the Pooh

As I read through Nancy Hill’s article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” I was comforted by the similar responses given by both children and older adults. The emphasis participants placed on family, social connections, and love was not only heartwarming but hopeful. While the messages in the article filled me with warmth, I felt a twinge of guilt building within me. As a twenty-one-year-old college student weeks from graduation, I honestly don’t think much about the most important things in life. But if I was asked, I would most likely say family, friendship, and love. As much as I hate to admit it, I often find myself obsessing over achieving a successful career and finding a way to “save the world.”

A few weeks ago, I was at my family home watching the new Winnie the Pooh movie Christopher Robin with my mom and younger sister. Well, I wasn’t really watching. I had my laptop in front of me, and I was aggressively typing up an assignment. Halfway through the movie, I realized I left my laptop charger in my car. I walked outside into the brisk March air. Instinctively, I looked up. The sky was perfectly clear, revealing a beautiful array of stars. When my twin sister and I were in high school, we would always take a moment to look up at the sparkling night sky before we came into the house after soccer practice.

I think that was the last time I stood in my driveway and gazed at the stars. I did not get the laptop charger from

my car; instead, I turned around and went back inside. I shut my laptop and watched the rest of the movie. My twin sister loves Winnie the Pooh. So much so that my parents got her a stuffed animal version of him for Christmas. While I thought he was adorable and a token of my childhood, I did not really understand her obsession. However, it was clear to me after watching the movie. Winnie the Pooh certainly had it figured out. He believed that the simple things in life were the most important: love, friendship, and having fun.

I thought about asking my mom right then what the three most important things were to her, but I decided not to. I just wanted to be in the moment. I didn’t want to be doing homework. It was a beautiful thing to just sit there and be present with my mom and sister.

I did ask her, though, a couple of weeks later. Her response was simple.  All she said was family, health, and happiness. When she told me this, I imagined Winnie the Pooh smiling. I think he would be proud of that answer.

I was not surprised by my mom’s reply. It suited her perfectly. I wonder if we relearn what is most important when we grow older—that the pressure to be successful subsides. Could it be that valuing family, health, and happiness is what ends up saving the world?

Amanda Schwaben is a graduating senior from Kent State University with a major in Applied Conflict Management. Amanda also has minors in Psychology and Interpersonal Communication. She hopes to further her education and focus on how museums not only preserve history but also promote peace.

Antonia Mills

Rachel Carson High School, Brooklyn, N.Y. 

Decoding The Butterfly

For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must first digest itself. The caterpillar, overwhelmed by accumulating tissue, splits its skin open to form its protective shell, the chrysalis, and later becomes the pretty butterfly we all know and love. There are approximately 20,000 species of butterflies, and just as every species is different, so is the life of every butterfly. No matter how long and hard a caterpillar has strived to become the colorful and vibrant butterfly that we marvel at on a warm spring day, it does not live a long life. A butterfly can live for a year, six months, two weeks, and even as little as twenty-four hours.

I have often wondered if butterflies live long enough to be blissful of blue skies. Do they take time to feast upon the sweet nectar they crave, midst their hustling life of pollinating pretty flowers? Do they ever take a lull in their itineraries, or are they always rushing towards completing their four-stage metamorphosis? Has anyone asked the butterfly, “Who are you?” instead of “What are you”? Or, How did you get here, on my windowsill?  How did you become ‘you’?

Humans are similar to butterflies. As a caterpillar

Suzanna Ruby/Getty Images

becomes a butterfly, a baby becomes an elder. As a butterfly soars through summer skies, an elder watches summer skies turn into cold winter nights and back toward summer skies yet again.  And as a butterfly flits slowly by the porch light, a passerby makes assumptions about the wrinkled, slow-moving elder, who is sturdier than he appears. These creatures are not seen for who they are—who they were—because people have “better things to do” or they are too busy to ask, “How are you”?

Our world can be a lonely place. Pressured by expectations, haunted by dreams, overpowered by weakness, and drowned out by lofty goals, we tend to forget ourselves—and others. Rather than hang onto the strands of our diminishing sanity, we might benefit from listening to our elders. Many elders have experienced setbacks in their young lives. Overcoming hardship and surviving to old age is wisdom that they carry.  We can learn from them—and can even make their day by taking the time to hear their stories.  

Nancy Hill, who wrote the YES! Magazine article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” was right: “We live among such remarkable people, yet few know their stories.” I know a lot about my grandmother’s life, and it isn’t as serene as my own. My grandmother, Liza, who cooks every day, bakes bread on holidays for our neighbors, brings gifts to her doctor out of the kindness of her heart, and makes conversation with neighbors even though she is isn’t fluent in English—Russian is her first language—has struggled all her life. Her mother, Anna, a single parent, had tuberculosis, and even though she had an inviolable spirit, she was too frail to care for four children. She passed away when my grandmother was sixteen, so my grandmother and her siblings spent most of their childhood in an orphanage. My grandmother got married at nineteen to my grandfather, Pinhas. He was a man who loved her more than he loved himself and was a godsend to every person he met. Liza was—and still is—always quick to do what was best for others, even if that person treated her poorly. My grandmother has lived with physical pain all her life, yet she pushed herself to climb heights that she wasn’t ready for. Against all odds, she has lived to tell her story to people who are willing to listen. And I always am.

I asked my grandmother, “What are three things most important to you?” Her answer was one that I already expected: One, for everyone to live long healthy lives. Two, for you to graduate from college. Three, for you to always remember that I love you.

What may be basic to you means the world to my grandmother. She just wants what she never had the chance to experience: a healthy life, an education, and the chance to express love to the people she values. The three things that matter most to her may be so simple and ordinary to outsiders, but to her, it is so much more. And who could take that away?

Antonia Mills was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and attends Rachel Carson High School.  Antonia enjoys creative activities, including writing, painting, reading, and baking. She hopes to pursue culinary arts professionally in the future. One of her favorite quotes is, “When you start seeing your worth, you’ll find it harder to stay around people who don’t.” -Emily S.P.  

  Powerful Voice Winner

   Isaac Ziemba

Odyssey Multiage Program, Bainbridge Island, Wash. 

This Former State Trooper Has His Priorities Straight: Family, Climate Change, and Integrity

I have a personal connection to people who served in the military and first responders. My uncle is a first responder on the island I live on, and my dad retired from the Navy. That was what made a man named Glen Tyrell, a state trooper for 25 years, 2 months and 9 days, my first choice to interview about what three things matter in life. In the YES! Magazine article “The Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” I learned that old and young people have a great deal in common. I know that’s true because Glen and I care about a lot of the same things.

For Glen, family is at the top of his list of important things. “My wife was, and is, always there for me. My daughters mean the world to me, too, but Penny is my partner,” Glen said. I can understand why Glen’s wife is so important to him. She’s family. Family will always be there for you.

Glen loves his family, and so do I with all my heart. My dad especially means the world to me. He is my top supporter and tells me that if I need help, just “say the word.” When we are fishing or crabbing, sometimes I

think, what if these times were erased from my memory? I wouldn’t be able to describe the horrible feeling that would rush through my mind, and I’m sure that Glen would feel the same about his wife.

My uncle once told me that the world is always going to change over time. It’s what the world has turned out to be that worries me. Both Glen and I are extremely concerned about climate change and the effect that rising temperatures have on animals and their habitats. We’re driving them to extinction. Some people might say, “So what? Animals don’t pay taxes or do any of the things we do.” What we are doing to them is like the Black Death times 100.

Glen is also frustrated by how much plastic we use and where it ends up. He would be shocked that an explorer recently dived to the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean—seven miles!— and discovered a plastic bag and candy wrappers. Glen told me that, unfortunately, his generation did the damage and my generation is here to fix it. We need to take better care of Earth because if we don’t, we, as a species, will have failed.

Both Glen and I care deeply for our families and the earth, but for our third important value, I chose education and Glen chose integrity. My education is super important to me because without it, I would be a blank slate. I wouldn’t know how to figure out problems. I wouldn’t be able to tell right from wrong. I wouldn’t understand the Bill of Rights. I would be stuck. Everyone should be able to go to school, no matter where they’re from or who they are.  It makes me angry and sad to think that some people, especially girls, get shot because they are trying to go to school. I understand how lucky I am.

Integrity is sacred to Glen—I could tell by the serious tone of Glen’s voice when he told me that integrity was the code he lived by as a former state trooper. He knew that he had the power to change a person’s life, and he was committed to not abusing that power.  When Glen put someone under arrest—and my uncle says the same—his judgment and integrity were paramount. “Either you’re right or you’re wrong.” You can’t judge a person by what you think, you can only judge a person from what you know.”

I learned many things about Glen and what’s important in life, but there is one thing that stands out—something Glen always does and does well. Glen helps people. He did it as a state trooper, and he does it in our school, where he works on construction projects. Glen told me that he believes that our most powerful tools are writing and listening to others. I think those tools are important, too, but I also believe there are other tools to help solve many of our problems and create a better future: to be compassionate, to create caring relationships, and to help others. Just like Glen Tyrell does each and every day.

Isaac Ziemba is in seventh grade at the Odyssey Multiage Program on a small island called Bainbridge near Seattle, Washington. Isaac’s favorite subject in school is history because he has always been interested in how the past affects the future. In his spare time, you can find Isaac hunting for crab with his Dad, looking for artifacts around his house with his metal detector, and having fun with his younger cousin, Conner.     

Lily Hersch

 The Crest Academy, Salida, Colo.

The Phone Call

Dear Grandpa,

In my short span of life—12 years so far—you’ve taught me a lot of important life lessons that I’ll always have with me. Some of the values I talk about in this writing I’ve learned from you.

Dedicated to my Gramps.

In the YES! Magazine article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age,” author and photographer Nancy Hill asked people to name the three things that mattered most to them. After reading the essay prompt for the article, I immediately knew who I wanted to interview: my grandpa Gil.      

My grandpa was born on January 25, 1942. He lived in a minuscule tenement in The Bronx with his mother,

father, and brother. His father wasn’t around much, and, when he was, he was reticent and would snap occasionally, revealing his constrained mental pain. My grandpa says this happened because my great grandfather did not have a father figure in his life. His mother was a classy, sharp lady who was the head secretary at a local police district station. My grandpa and his brother Larry did not care for each other. Gramps said he was very close to his mother, and Larry wasn’t. Perhaps Larry was envious for what he didn’t have.

Decades after little to no communication with his brother, my grandpa decided to spontaneously visit him in Florida, where he resided with his wife. Larry was taken aback at the sudden reappearance of his brother and told him to leave. Since then, the two brothers have not been in contact. My grandpa doesn’t even know if Larry is alive.         

My grandpa is now a retired lawyer, married to my wonderful grandma, and living in a pretty house with an ugly dog named BoBo.

So, what’s important to you, Gramps?

He paused a second, then replied, “Family, kindness, and empathy.”

“Family, because it’s my family. It’s important to stay connected with your family. My brother, father, and I never connected in the way I wished, and sometimes I contemplated what could’ve happened.  But you can’t change the past. So, that’s why family’s important to me.”

Family will always be on my “Top Three Most Important Things” list, too. I can’t imagine not having my older brother, Zeke, or my grandma in my life. I wonder how other kids feel about their families? How do kids trapped and separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border feel?  What about orphans? Too many questions, too few answers.

“Kindness, because growing up and not seeing a lot of kindness made me realize how important it is to have that in the world. Kindness makes the world go round.”

What is kindness? Helping my brother, Eli, who has Down syndrome, get ready in the morning? Telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear? Maybe, for now, I’ll put wisdom, not kindness, on my list.

“Empathy, because of all the killings and shootings [in this country.] We also need to care for people—people who are not living in as good circumstances as I have. Donald Trump and other people I’ve met have no empathy. Empathy is very important.”

Empathy is something I’ve felt my whole life. It’ll always be important to me like it is important to my grandpa. My grandpa shows his empathy when he works with disabled children. Once he took a disabled child to a Christina Aguilera concert because that child was too young to go by himself. The moments I feel the most empathy are when Eli gets those looks from people. Seeing Eli wonder why people stare at him like he’s a freak makes me sad, and annoyed that they have the audacity to stare.

After this 2 minute and 36-second phone call, my grandpa has helped me define what’s most important to me at this time in my life: family, wisdom, and empathy. Although these things are important now, I realize they can change and most likely will.

When I’m an old woman, I envision myself scrambling through a stack of storage boxes and finding this paper. Perhaps after reading words from my 12-year-old self, I’ll ask myself “What’s important to me?”

Lily Hersch is a sixth-grader at Crest Academy in Salida, Colorado. Lily is an avid indoorsman, finding joy in competitive spelling, art, and of course, writing. She does not like Swiss cheese.

  “Tell It Like It Is” Interview Winner

Jonas Buckner

KIPP: Gaston College Preparatory, Gaston, N.C.

Lessons My Nana Taught Me

I walked into the house. In the other room, I heard my cousin screaming at his game. There were a lot of Pioneer Woman dishes everywhere. The room had the television on max volume. The fan in the other room was on. I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to learn something powerful.

I was in my Nana’s house, and when I walked in, she said, “Hey Monkey Butt.”

I said, “Hey Nana.”

Before the interview, I was talking to her about what I was gonna interview her on. Also, I had asked her why I might have wanted to interview her, and she responded with, “Because you love me, and I love you too.”

Now, it was time to start the interview. The first

question I asked was the main and most important question ever: “What three things matter most to you and you only?”

She thought of it very thoughtfully and responded with, “My grandchildren, my children, and my health.”

Then, I said, “OK, can you please tell me more about your health?”

She responded with, “My health is bad right now. I have heart problems, blood sugar, and that’s about it.” When she said it, she looked at me and smiled because she loved me and was happy I chose her to interview.

I replied with, “K um, why is it important to you?”

She smiled and said, “Why is it…Why is my health important? Well, because I want to live a long time and see my grandchildren grow up.”

I was scared when she said that, but she still smiled. I was so happy, and then I said, “Has your health always been important to you.”

She responded with “Nah.”

Then, I asked, “Do you happen to have a story to help me understand your reasoning?”

She said, “No, not really.”

Now we were getting into the next set of questions. I said, “Remember how you said that your grandchildren matter to you? Can you please tell me why they matter to you?”

Then, she responded with, “So I can spend time with them, play with them, and everything.”

Next, I asked the same question I did before: “Have you always loved your grandchildren?” 

She responded with, “Yes, they have always been important to me.”

Then, the next two questions I asked she had no response to at all. She was very happy until I asked, “Why do your children matter most to you?”

She had a frown on and responded, “My daughter Tammy died a long time ago.”

Then, at this point, the other questions were answered the same as the other ones. When I left to go home I was thinking about how her answers were similar to mine. She said health, and I care about my health a lot, and I didn’t say, but I wanted to. She also didn’t have answers for the last two questions on each thing, and I was like that too.

The lesson I learned was that no matter what, always keep pushing because even though my aunt or my Nana’s daughter died, she kept on pushing and loving everyone. I also learned that everything should matter to us. Once again, I chose to interview my Nana because she matters to me, and I know when she was younger she had a lot of things happen to her, so I wanted to know what she would say. The point I’m trying to make is that be grateful for what you have and what you have done in life.

Jonas Buckner is a sixth-grader at KIPP: Gaston College Preparatory in Gaston, North Carolina. Jonas’ favorite activities are drawing, writing, math, piano, and playing AltSpace VR. He found his passion for writing in fourth grade when he wrote a quick autobiography. Jonas hopes to become a horror writer someday.

From The Author: Responses to Student Winners

Dear Emily, Isaac, Antonia, Rory, Praethong, Amanda, Lily, and Jonas,

Your thought-provoking essays sent my head spinning. The more I read, the more impressed I was with the depth of thought, beauty of expression, and originality. It left me wondering just how to capture all of my reactions in a single letter. After multiple false starts, I’ve landed on this: I will stick to the theme of three most important things.

The three things I found most inspirational about your essays:

You listened.

You connected.

We live in troubled times. Tensions mount between countries, cultures, genders, religious beliefs, and generations. If we fail to find a way to understand each other, to see similarities between us, the future will be fraught with increased hostility.

You all took critical steps toward connecting with someone who might not value the same things you do by asking a person who is generations older than you what matters to them. Then, you listened to their answers. You saw connections between what is important to them and what is important to you. Many of you noted similarities, others wondered if your own list of the three most important things would change as you go through life. You all saw the validity of the responses you received and looked for reasons why your interviewees have come to value what they have.

It is through these things—asking, listening, and connecting—that we can begin to bridge the differences in experiences and beliefs that are currently dividing us.

Individual observations

Each one of you made observations that all of us, regardless of age or experience, would do well to keep in mind. I chose one quote from each person and trust those reading your essays will discover more valuable insights.

“Our priorities may seem different, but they come back to basic human needs. We all desire a purpose, strive to be happy, and work to make a positive impact.” 

“You can’t judge a person by what you think , you can only judge a person by what you know .”

Emily (referencing your interviewee, who is battling cancer):

“Master Chief Petty Officer James has shown me how to appreciate what I have around me.”

Lily (quoting your grandfather):

“Kindness makes the world go round.”

“Everything should matter to us.”

Praethong (quoting your interviewee, Sandra, on the importance of family):

“It’s important to always maintain that connection you have with each other, your family, not just next-door neighbors you talk to once a month.”

“I wonder if maybe we relearn what is most important when we grow older. That the pressure to be successful subsides and that valuing family, health, and happiness is what ends up saving the world.”

“Listen to what others have to say. Listen to the people who have already experienced hardship. You will learn from them and you can even make their day by giving them a chance to voice their thoughts.”

I end this letter to you with the hope that you never stop asking others what is most important to them and that you to continue to take time to reflect on what matters most to you…and why. May you never stop asking, listening, and connecting with others, especially those who may seem to be unlike you. Keep writing, and keep sharing your thoughts and observations with others, for your ideas are awe-inspiring.

I also want to thank the more than 1,000 students who submitted essays. Together, by sharing what’s important to us with others, especially those who may believe or act differently, we can fill the world with joy, peace, beauty, and love.

We received many outstanding essays for the Winter 2019 Student Writing Competition. Though not every participant can win the contest, we’d like to share some excerpts that caught our eye:

Whether it is a painting on a milky canvas with watercolors or pasting photos onto a scrapbook with her granddaughters, it is always a piece of artwork to her. She values the things in life that keep her in the moment, while still exploring things she may not have initially thought would bring her joy.

—Ondine Grant-Krasno, Immaculate Heart Middle School, Los Angeles, Calif.

“Ganas”… It means “desire” in Spanish. My ganas is fueled by my family’s belief in me. I cannot and will not fail them. 

—Adan Rios, Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

I hope when I grow up I can have the love for my kids like my grandma has for her kids. She makes being a mother even more of a beautiful thing than it already is.

—Ashley Shaw, Columbus City Prep School for Girls, Grove City, Ohio

You become a collage of little pieces of your friends and family. They also encourage you to be the best you can be. They lift you up onto the seat of your bike, they give you the first push, and they don’t hesitate to remind you that everything will be alright when you fall off and scrape your knee.

— Cecilia Stanton, Bellafonte Area Middle School, Bellafonte, Pa.

Without good friends, I wouldn’t know what I would do to endure the brutal machine of public education.

—Kenneth Jenkins, Garrison Middle School, Walla Walla, Wash.

My dog, as ridiculous as it may seem, is a beautiful example of what we all should aspire to be. We should live in the moment, not stress, and make it our goal to lift someone’s spirits, even just a little.

—Kate Garland, Immaculate Heart Middle School, Los Angeles, Calif. 

I strongly hope that every child can spare more time to accompany their elderly parents when they are struggling, and moving forward, and give them more care and patience. so as to truly achieve the goal of “you accompany me to grow up, and I will accompany you to grow old.”

—Taiyi Li, Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

I have three cats, and they are my brothers and sisters. We share a special bond that I think would not be possible if they were human. Since they do not speak English, we have to find other ways to connect, and I think that those other ways can be more powerful than language.

—Maya Dombroskie, Delta Program Middle School, Boulsburg, Pa.

We are made to love and be loved. To have joy and be relational. As a member of the loneliest generation in possibly all of history, I feel keenly aware of the need for relationships and authentic connection. That is why I decided to talk to my grandmother.

—Luke Steinkamp, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

After interviewing my grandma and writing my paper, I realized that as we grow older, the things that are important to us don’t change, what changes is why those things are important to us.

—Emily Giffer, Our Lady Star of the Sea, Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich.

The media works to marginalize elders, often isolating them and their stories, and the wealth of knowledge that comes with their additional years of lived experiences. It also undermines the depth of children’s curiosity and capacity to learn and understand. When the worlds of elders and children collide, a classroom opens.

—Cristina Reitano, City College of San Francisco, San Francisco, Calif.

My values, although similar to my dad, only looked the same in the sense that a shadow is similar to the object it was cast on.

—Timofey Lisenskiy, Santa Monica High School, Santa Monica, Calif.

I can release my anger through writing without having to take it out on someone. I can escape and be a different person; it feels good not to be myself for a while. I can make up my own characters, so I can be someone different every day, and I think that’s pretty cool.

—Jasua Carillo, Wellness, Business, and Sports School, Woodburn, Ore. 

Notice how all the important things in his life are people: the people who he loves and who love him back. This is because “people are more important than things like money or possessions, and families are treasures,” says grandpa Pat. And I couldn’t agree more.

—Brody Hartley, Garrison Middle School, Walla Walla, Wash.  

Curiosity for other people’s stories could be what is needed to save the world.

—Noah Smith, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

Peace to me is a calm lake without a ripple in sight. It’s a starry night with a gentle breeze that pillows upon your face. It’s the absence of arguments, fighting, or war. It’s when egos stop working against each other and finally begin working with each other. Peace is free from fear, anxiety, and depression. To me, peace is an important ingredient in the recipe of life.

—JP Bogan, Lane Community College, Eugene, Ore.

From A Teacher

Charles Sanderson

Wellness, Business and Sports School, Woodburn, Ore. 

The Birthday Gift

I’ve known Jodelle for years, watching her grow from a quiet and timid twelve-year-old to a young woman who just returned from India, where she played Kabaddi, a kind of rugby meets Red Rover.

One of my core beliefs as an educator is to show up for the things that matter to kids, so I go to their games, watch their plays, and eat the strawberry jam they make for the county fair. On this occasion, I met Jodelle at a robotics competition to watch her little sister Abby compete. Think Nerd Paradise: more hats made from traffic cones than Golden State Warrior ball caps, more unicorn capes than Nike swooshes, more fanny packs with Legos than clutches with eyeliner.

We started chatting as the crowd chanted and waved six-foot flags for teams like Mystic Biscuits, Shrek, and everyone’s nemesis The Mean Machine. Apparently, when it’s time for lunch at a robotics competition, they don’t mess around. The once-packed gym was left to Jodelle and me, and we kept talking and talking. I eventually asked her about the three things that matter to her most.

She told me about her mom, her sister, and her addiction—to horses. I’ve read enough of her writing to know that horses were her drug of choice and her mom and sister were her support network.

I learned about her desire to become a teacher and how hours at the barn with her horse, Heart, recharge her when she’s exhausted. At one point, our rambling conversation turned to a topic I’ve known far too well—her father.

Later that evening, I received an email from Jodelle, and she had a lot to say. One line really struck me: “In so many movies, I have seen a dad wanting to protect his daughter from the world, but I’ve only understood the scene cognitively. Yesterday, I felt it.”

Long ago, I decided that I would never be a dad. I had seen movies with fathers and daughters, and for me, those movies might as well have been Star Wars, ET, or Alien—worlds filled with creatures I’d never know. However, over the years, I’ve attended Jodelle’s parent-teacher conferences, gone to her graduation, and driven hours to watch her ride Heart at horse shows. Simply, I showed up. I listened. I supported.

Jodelle shared a series of dad poems, as well. I had read the first two poems in their original form when Jodelle was my student. The revised versions revealed new graphic details of her past. The third poem, however, was something entirely different.

She called the poems my early birthday present. When I read the lines “You are my father figure/Who I look up to/Without being looked down on,” I froze for an instant and had to reread the lines. After fifty years of consciously deciding not to be a dad, I was seen as one—and it felt incredible. Jodelle’s poem and recognition were two of the best presents I’ve ever received.

I  know that I was the language arts teacher that Jodelle needed at the time, but her poem revealed things I never knew I taught her: “My father figure/ Who taught me/ That listening is for observing the world/ That listening is for learning/Not obeying/Writing is for connecting/Healing with others.”

Teaching is often a thankless job, one that frequently brings more stress and anxiety than joy and hope. Stress erodes my patience. Anxiety curtails my ability to enter each interaction with every student with the grace they deserve. However, my time with Jodelle reminds me of the importance of leaning in and listening.

In the article “Three Things That Matter Most in Youth and Old Age” by Nancy Hill, she illuminates how we “live among such remarkable people, yet few know their stories.” For the last twenty years, I’ve had the privilege to work with countless of these “remarkable people,” and I’ve done my best to listen, and, in so doing, I hope my students will realize what I’ve known for a long time; their voices matter and deserve to be heard, but the voices of their tias and abuelitos and babushkas are equally important. When we take the time to listen, I believe we do more than affirm the humanity of others; we affirm our own as well.

Charles Sanderson has grounded his nineteen-year teaching career in a philosophy he describes as “Mirror, Window, Bridge.” Charles seeks to ensure all students see themselves, see others, and begin to learn the skills to build bridges of empathy, affinity, and understanding between communities and cultures that may seem vastly different. He proudly teaches at the Wellness, Business and Sports School in Woodburn, Oregon, a school and community that brings him joy and hope on a daily basis.

From   The Author: Response to Charles Sanderson

Dear Charles Sanderson,

Thank you for submitting an essay of your own in addition to encouraging your students to participate in YES! Magazine’s essay contest.

Your essay focused not on what is important to you, but rather on what is important to one of your students. You took what mattered to her to heart, acting upon it by going beyond the school day and creating a connection that has helped fill a huge gap in her life. Your efforts will affect her far beyond her years in school. It is clear that your involvement with this student is far from the only time you have gone beyond the classroom, and while you are not seeking personal acknowledgment, I cannot help but applaud you.

In an ideal world, every teacher, every adult, would show the same interest in our children and adolescents that you do. By taking the time to listen to what is important to our youth, we can help them grow into compassionate, caring adults, capable of making our world a better place.

Your concerted efforts to guide our youth to success not only as students but also as human beings is commendable. May others be inspired by your insights, concerns, and actions. You define excellence in teaching.

Get Stories of Solutions to Share with Your Classroom

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Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today

An intelligent digital agent could be a companion for life—and other predictions for the next 125 years.

• Kara Platoni archive page

Happy birthday, baby.

You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the algorithm. 

Your arrival coincided with the 125th anniversary of this magazine. With a bit of luck and the right genes, you might see the next 125 years. How will you and the next generation of machines grow up together? We asked more than a dozen experts to imagine your joint future. We explained that this would be a thought experiment. What I mean is: We asked them to get weird. 

Just about all of them agreed on how to frame the past: Computing shrank from giant shared industrial mainframes to personal desktop devices to electronic shrapnel so small it’s ambient in the environment. Previously controlled at arm’s length through punch card, keyboard, or mouse, computing became wearable, moving onto—and very recently into—the body. In our time, eye or brain implants are only for medical aid; in your time, who knows? 

In the future, everyone thinks, computers will get smaller and more plentiful still. But the biggest change in your lifetime will be the rise of intelligent agents. Computing will be more responsive, more intimate, less confined to any one platform. It will be less like a tool, and more like a companion. It will learn from you and also be your guide.

What they mean, baby, is that it’s going to be your friend.

Present day to 2034  Age 0 to 10

When you were born, your family surrounded you with “smart” things: rockers, monitors, lamps that play lullabies.  

But not a single expert name-checked those as your first exposure to technology. Instead, they mentioned your parents’ phone or smart watch. And why not? As your loved ones cradle you, that deliciously blinky thing is right there . Babies learn by trial and error, by touching objects to see what happens. You tap it; it lights up or makes noise. Fascinating!

Cognitively, you won’t get much out of that interaction between birth and age two, says Jason Yip, an associate professor of digital youth at the University of Washington. But it helps introduce you to a world of animate objects, says Sean Follmer, director of the SHAPE Lab in Stanford’s mechanical engineering department, which explores haptics in robotics and computing. If you touch something, how does it respond?

You are the child of millennials and Gen Z—digital natives, the first influencers. So as you grow, cameras are ubiquitous. You see yourself onscreen and learn to smile or wave to the people on the other side. Your grandparents read to you on FaceTime; you photobomb Zoom meetings. As you get older, you’ll realize that images of yourself are a kind of social currency. 

Your primary school will certainly have computers, though we’re not sure how educators will balance real-world and onscreen instruction, a pedagogical debate today. But baby, school is where our experts think you will meet your first intelligent agent, in the form of a tutor or coach. Your AI tutor might guide you through activities that combine physical tasks with augmented-­reality instruction—a sort of middle ground. 

Some school libraries are becoming more like makerspaces, teaching critical thinking along with building skills, says Nesra Yannier, a faculty member in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is developing NoRILLA, an educational system that uses mixed reality—a combination of physical and virtual reality—to teach science and engineering concepts. For example, kids build wood-block structures and predict, with feedback from a cartoon AI gorilla, how they will fall. 

Learning will be increasingly self-­directed, says Liz Gerber, co-director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design at Northwestern University. The future classroom is “going to be hyper-­personalized.” AI tutors could help with one-on-one instruction or repetitive sports drills. 

All of this is pretty novel, so our experts had to guess at future form factors. Maybe while you’re learning, an unobtrusive bracelet or smart watch tracks your performance and then syncs data with a tablet, so your tutor can help you practice. 

What will that agent be like? Follmer, who has worked with blind and low-vision students, thinks it might just be a voice. Yannier is partial to an animated character. Gerber thinks a digital avatar could be paired with a physical version, like a stuffed animal—in whatever guise you like. “It’s an imaginary friend,” says Gerber. “You get to decide who it is.” 

Not everybody is sold on the AI tutor. In Yip’s research, kids often tell him AI-enabled technologies are … creepy. They feel unpredictable or scary or like they seem to be watching . 

Kids learn through social interactions, so he’s also worried about technologies that isolate. And while he thinks AI can handle the cognitive aspects of tutoring, he’s not sure about its social side. Good teachers know how to motivate, how to deal with human moods and biology. Can a machine tell when a child is being sarcastic, or redirect a kid who is goofing off in the bathroom? When confronted with a meltdown, he asks, “is the AI going to know this kid is hungry and needs a snack?”

2040 Age 16

By the time you turn 16, you’ll likely still live in a world shaped by cars: highways, suburbs, climate change. But some parts of car culture may be changing. Electric chargers might be supplanting gas stations. And just as an intelligent agent assisted in your schooling, now one will drive with you—and probably for you.  

Paola Meraz, a creative director of interaction design at BMW’s Designworks, describes that agent as “your friend on the road.” William Chergosky, chief designer at Calty Design Research, Toyota’s North American design studio, calls it “exactly like a friend in the car.”

While you are young, Chergosky says, it’s your chaperone, restricting your speed or routing you home at curfew. It tells you when you’re near In-N-Out, knowing your penchant for their animal fries. And because you want to keep up with your friends online and in the real world, the agent can comb your social media feeds to see where they are and suggest a meetup. 

Just as an intelligent agent assisted in your schooling, now one will drive with you—and probably for you.

Cars have long been spots for teen hangouts, but as driving becomes more autonomous, their interiors can become more like living rooms. (You’ll no longer need to face the road and an instrument panel full of knobs.) Meraz anticipates seats that reposition so passengers can talk face to face, or game. “Imagine playing a game that interacts with the world that you are driving through,” she says, or “a movie that was designed where speed, time of day, and geographical elements could influence the storyline.” 

Without an instrument panel, how do you control the car? Today’s minimalist interiors feature a dash-mounted tablet, but digging through endless onscreen menus is not terribly intuitive. The next step is probably gestural or voice control—ideally, through natural language. The tipping point, says Chergosky, will come when instead of giving detailed commands, you can just say: “Man, it is hot in here. Can you make it cooler?”

An agent that listens in and tracks your every move raises some strange questions. Will it change personalities for each driver? (Sure.) Can it keep a secret? (“Dad said he went to Taco Bell, but did he ?” jokes Chergosky.) Does it even have to stay in the car? 

Our experts say nope. Meraz imagines it being integrated with other kinds of agents—the future versions of Alexa or Google Home. “It’s all connected,” she says. And when your car dies, Chergosky says, the agent does not. “You can actually take the soul of it from vehicle to vehicle. So as you upgrade, it’s not like you cut off that relationship,” he says. “It moves with you. Because it’s grown with you.”

2049 Age 25

By your mid-20s, the agents in your life know an awful lot about you. Maybe they are, indeed, a single entity that follows you across devices and offers help where you need it. At this point, the place where you need the most help is your social life. 

Kathryn Coduto, an assistant professor of media science at Boston University who studies online dating, says everyone’s big worry is the opening line. To her, AI could be a disembodied Cyrano that whips up 10 options or workshops your own attempts. Or maybe it’s a dating coach. You agree to meet up with a (real) person online, and “you have the AI in a corner saying ‘Hey, maybe you should say this,’ or ‘Don’t forget this.’ Almost like a little nudge.”

“There is some concern that we are going to see some people who are just like, ‘Nope, this is all I want. Why go out and do that when I can stay home with my partner, my virtual buddy?’” T. Makana Chock, director, the Extended Reality Lab, Syracuse University

Virtual first dates might solve one of our present-day conundrums: Apps make searching for matches easier , but you get sparse—and perhaps inaccurate—info about those people. How do you know who’s worth meeting in real life? Building virtual dating into the app, Coduto says, could be “an appealing feature for a lot of daters who want to meet people but aren’t sure about a large initial time investment.”

T. Makana Chock, who directs the Extended Reality Lab at Syracuse University, thinks things could go a step further: first dates where both parties send an AI version of themselves in their place. “That would tell both of you that this is working—or this is definitely not going to work,” Chock says. If the date is a dud—well, at least you weren’t on it.

Or maybe you will just date an entirely virtual being, says Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn, who directs the Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems at the University of Georgia. Or you’ll go to a virtual party, have an amazing time, “and then later on you realize that you were the only real human in that entire room. Everybody else was AI.”

This might sound odd, says Ahn, but “humans are really good at building relationships with nonhuman entities.” It’s why you pour your heart out to your dog—or treat ChatGPT like a therapist. 

There is a problem, though, when virtual relationships become too accommodating, says Chock: If you get used to agents that are tailored to please you, you get less skilled at dealing with real people and risking awkwardness or rejection. “You still need to have human interaction,” she says. “And there is some concern that we are going to see some people who are just like, ‘Nope, this is all I want. Why go out and do that when I can stay home with my partner, my virtual buddy?’”

By now, social media, online dating, and livestreaming have likely intertwined and become more immersive. Engineers have shrunk the obstacles to true telepresence: internet lag time, the uncanny valley, and clunky headsets, which may now be replaced by something more like glasses or smart contact lenses. 

Online experiences may be less like observing someone else’s life and more like living it. Imagine, says Follmer: A basketball star wears clothing and skin sensors that track body position, motion, and forces, plus super-thin gloves that sense the texture of the ball. You, watching from your couch, wear a jersey and gloves made of smart textiles, woven with actuators that transmit whatever the player feels. When the athlete gets shoved, Follmer says, your fan gear “ can really shove you right back.”

Gaming is another obvious application. But it’s not the likely first mover in this space. Nobody else wants to say this on the record, so I will: It’s porn. (Baby, ask your parents and/or AI tutor when you’re older.)

By your 20s, you are probably wrestling with the dilemmas of a life spent online and on camera. Coduto thinks you might rebel, opting out of social media because your parents documented your first 18 years without permission. As an adult, you’ll want tighter rules for privacy and consent, better ways to verify authenticity, and more control over sensitive materials, like a button that could nuke your old sexts.

But maybe it’s the opposite: Now you are an influencer yourself. If so, your body can be your display space. Today, wearables are basically boxes of electronics strapped onto limbs. Tomorrow, hopes Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, who runs the Hybrid Body Lab at Cornell University, they will be more like your own skin. Kao develops wearables like color-changing eyeshadow stickers and mini nail trackpads that can control a phone or open a car door. In the not-too-distant future, she imagines, “you might be able to rent out each of your fingernails as an ad for social media.” Or maybe your hair: Weaving in super-thin programmable LED strands could make it a kind of screen. 

What if those smart lenses could be display spaces too? “That would be really creepy,” she muses. “Just looking into someone’s eyes and it’s, like, CNN.”

2059 Age 35

By now, you’ve probably settled into domestic life—but it might not look much like the home you grew up in. Keith Evan Green, a professor of human-centered design at Cornell, doesn’t think we should imagine a home of the future. “I would call it a room of the future,” he says, because it will be the place for everything—work, school, play. This trend was hastened by the covid pandemic.

Your place will probably be small if you live in a big city. The uncertainties of climate change and transportation costs mean we can’t build cities infinitely outward. So he imagines a reconfigurable architectural robotic space: Walls move, objects inflate or unfold, furniture appears or dissolves into surfaces or recombines. Any necessary computing power is embedded. The home will finally be what Le Corbusier imagined: a machine for living in.

Green pictures this space as spartan but beautiful, like a temple—a place, he says, to think and be. “I would characterize it as this capacious monastic cell that is empty of most things but us,” he says.

Our experts think your home, like your car, will respond to voice or gestural control. But it will make some decisions autonomously, learning by observing you: your motion, location, temperature. 

Ivan Poupyrev, CEO and cofounder of Archetype AI, says we’ll no longer control each smart appliance through its own app. Instead, he says, think of the home as a stage and you as the director. “You don’t interact with the air conditioner. You don’t interact with a TV,” he says. “You interact with the home as a total.” Instead of telling the TV to play a specific program, you make high-level demands of the entire space: “Turn on something interesting for me; I’m tired.” Or: “What is the plan for tomorrow?”

Stanford’s Follmer says that just as computing went from industrial to personal to ubiquitous, so will robotics. Your great-grandparents envisioned futuristic homes cared for by a single humanoid robot—like Rosie from The Jetsons . He envisions swarms of maybe 100 bots the size of quarters that materialize to clean, take out the trash, or bring you a cold drink. (“They know ahead of time, even before you do, that you’re thirsty,” he says.)

Baby, perhaps now you have your own baby. The technologies of reproduction have changed since you were born. For one thing, says Gerber, fertility tracking will be way more accurate: “It is going to be like weather prediction.” Maybe, Kao says, flexible fabric-like sensors could be embedded in panty liners to track menstrual health. Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

Also, goodbye to sleep deprivation. Gerber envisions a device that, for lack of an existing term, she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine. 

2074 Age 50

Now you are at the peak of your career. For professions heading toward AI automation, you may be the “human in the loop” who oversees a machine doing its tasks. The 9-to-5 workday, which is crumbling in our time, might be totally atomized into work-from-home fluidity or earn-as-you-go gig work.

Ahn thinks you might start the workday by lying in bed and checking your messages—on an implanted contact lens. Everyone loves a big screen, and putting it in your eye effectively gives you “the largest monitor in the world,” she says. 

You’ve already dabbled with AI selves for dating. But now virtual agents are more photorealistic, and they can mimic your voice and mannerisms. Why not make one go to meetings for you?

Kori Inkpen, who studies human-­computer interaction at Microsoft Research, calls this your “ditto”—more formally, an embodied mimetic agent, meaning it represents a specific person. “My ditto looks like me, acts like me, sounds like me, knows sort of what I know,” she says. You can instruct it to raise certain points and recap the conversation for you later. Your colleagues feel as if you were there, and you get the benefit of an exchange that’s not quite real time, but not as asynchronous as email. “A ditto starts to blend this reality,” Inkpen says.

In our time, augmented reality is slowly catching on as a tool for workers whose jobs require physical presence and tangible objects. But experts worry that once the last baby boomers retire, their technical expertise will go with them. Perhaps they can leave behind a legacy of training simulations.

Inkpen sees DIY opportunities. Say your fridge breaks. Instead of calling a repair person, you boot up an AR tutorial on glasses, a tablet, or a projection that overlays digital instructions atop the appliance. Follmer wonders if haptic sensors woven into gloves or clothing would let people training for highly specialized jobs—like surgery—literally feel the hand motions of experienced professionals.

For Poupyrev, the implications are much bigger. One way to think about AI is “as a storage medium,” he says. “It’s a preservation of human knowledge.” A large language model like ChatGPT is basically a compendium of all the text information people have put online. Next, if we feed models not only text but real-world sensor data that describes motion and behavior, “it becomes a very compressed presentation not of just knowledge, but also of how people do things.” AI can capture how to dance, or fix a car, or play ice hockey—all the skills you cannot learn from words alone—and preserve this knowledge for the future.

2099 Age 75

By the time you retire, families may be smaller, with more older people living solo. 

Well, sort of. Chaiwoo Lee, a research scientist at the MIT AgeLab, thinks that in 75 years, your home will be a kind of roommate—“someone who cohabitates that space with you,” she says. “It reacts to your feelings, maybe understands you.” 

By now, a home’s AI could be so good at deciphering body language that if you’re spending a lot of time on the couch, or seem rushed or irritated, it could try to lighten your mood. “If it’s a conversational agent, it can talk to you,” says Lee. Or it might suggest calling a loved one. “Maybe it changes the ambiance of the home to be more pleasant.”

The home is also collecting your health data, because it’s where you eat, shower, and use the bathroom. Passive data collection has advantages over wearable sensors: You don’t have to remember to put anything on. It doesn’t carry the stigma of sickness or frailty. And in general, Lee says, people don’t start wearing health trackers until they are ill, so they don’t have a comparative baseline. Perhaps it’s better to let the toilet or the mirror do the tracking continuously. 

Green says interactive homes could help people with mobility and cognitive challenges live independently for longer. Robotic furnishings could help with lifting, fetching, or cleaning. By this time, they might be sophisticated enough to offer support when you need it and back off when you don’t.  

Kao, of course, imagines the robotics embedded in fabric: garments that stiffen around the waist to help you stand, a glove that reinforces your grip.

If getting from point A to point B is becoming difficult, maybe you can travel without going anywhere. Green, who favors a blank-slate room, wonders if you’ll have a brain-machine interface that lets you change your surroundings at will. You think about, say, a jungle, and the wallpaper display morphs. The robotic furniture adjusts its topography. “We want to be able to sit on the boulder or lie down on the hammock,” he says.

Anne Marie Piper, an associate professor of informatics at UC Irvine who studies older adults, imagines something similar—minus the brain chip—in the context of a care home, where spaces could change to evoke special memories, like your honeymoon in Paris. “What if the space transforms into a café for you that has the smells and the music and the ambience, and that is just a really calming place for you to go?” she asks.  

Gerber is all for virtual travel: It’s cheaper, faster, and better for the environment than the real thing. But she thinks that for a truly immersive Parisian experience, we’ll need engineers to invent … well, remote bread. Something that lets you chew on a boring-yet-nutritious source of calories while stimulating your senses so you get the crunch, scent, and taste of the perfect baguette.

2149 Age 125

We hope that your final years will not be lonely or painful. 

Faraway loved ones can visit by digital double, or send love through smart textiles: Piper imagines a scarf that glows or warms when someone is thinking of you, Kao an on-skin device that simulates the touch of their hand. If you are very ill, you can escape into a soothing virtual world. Judith Amores, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, is working on VR that responds to physiological signals. Today, she immerses hospital patients in an underwater world of jellyfish that pulse at half of an average person’s heart rate for a calming effect. In the future, she imagines, VR will detect anxiety without requiring a user to wear sensors—maybe by smell.

“It is a little cool to think of cemeteries in the future that are literally haunted by motion-activated holograms.” Tim Recuber, sociologist, Smith College

You might be pondering virtual immortality. Tim Recuber, a sociologist at Smith College and author of The Digital Departed , notes that today people create memorial websites and chatbots, or sign up for post-mortem messaging services. These offer some end-of-life comfort, but they can’t preserve your memory indefinitely. Companies go bust. Websites break. People move on; that’s how mourning works.

What about uploading your consciousness to the cloud? The idea has a fervent fan base, says Recuber. People hope to resurrect themselves into human or robotic bodies, or spend eternity as part of a hive mind or “a beam of laser light that can travel the cosmos.” But he’s skeptical that it’ll work, especially within 125 years. Plus, what if being a ghost in the machine is dreadful ? “Embodiment is, as far as we know, a pretty key component to existence. And it might be pretty upsetting to actually be a full version of yourself in a computer,” he says. 

There is perhaps one last thing to try. It’s another AI. You curate this one yourself, using a lifetime of digital ephemera: your videos, texts, social media posts. It’s a hologram, and it hangs out with your loved ones to comfort them when you’re gone. Perhaps it even serves as your burial marker. “It is a little cool to think of cemeteries in the future that are literally haunted by motion-activated holograms,” Recuber says.

It won’t exist forever. Nothing does. But by now, maybe the agent is no longer your friend.

Maybe, at last, it is you.

Baby, we have caveats.

We imagine a world that has overcome the worst threats of our time: a creeping climate disaster; a deepening digital divide; our persistent flirtation with nuclear war; the possibility that a pandemic will kill us quickly, that overly convenient lifestyles will kill us slowly, or that intelligent machines will turn out to be too smart . 

We hope that democracy survives and these technologies will be the opt-in gadgetry of a thriving society, not the surveillance tools of dystopia. If you have a digital twin, we hope it’s not a deepfake. 

You might see these sketches from 2024 as a blithe promise, a warning, or a fever dream. The important thing is: Our present is just the starting point for infinite futures. 

What happens next, kid, depends on you. 

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You Should Be Able to Live a Good Life Without a College Degree

J an moved to my area about 15 years ago to be closer to family but couldn’t find a job as an office manager, though she’d been one for years. She was a bright, articulate, middle-aged woman with glowing references. But times had changed in the decade since she’d last looked for a job. She wasn’t even getting a chance to interview, as one potential employer after another told her: No bachelor’s degree, no interest.

The same has been happening to people across the country seeking middle-management jobs, or those in sales, customer service, and support—jobs that had never required a four-year education before. The work demands hadn’t changed appreciably, but the educational minimums had. Instead of looking for the most skilled and enthusiastic applicants, employers were looking for “pieces of paper”—college degrees. It’s been bad for the economy, bad for diversity in the workplace, and bad for uplifting low-income families and populations. But only now are employers and the public at large realizing that not everyone wants or should need a four-year college education to lead a good life.

What this so-called “degree inflation” means is that smart, skilled, personable people who haven’t followed the conventional college route after high school have been shut out of jobs they could have performed well—which often means that people of color, who are less likely to attend college, are denied an opportunity for social mobility. Meanwhile, people with college degrees are often underemployed, taking on jobs that didn’t make use of their education. A full decade after receiving their bachelor’s degree, 45% of bachelor’s holders are working jobs that don’t require a college grad’s skills.

For decades, teenagers and families heard this refrain: If you want to be someone, you have to get a bachelor’s degree. It’s the only way to make good money. Without it, you’ll be left out of the 21 st century global economy. High schools were rated by how many of their graduates went on to four-year schools, and many still are. But for too many college-goers, the results haven’t been great. A third leave college without a degree—but often with plenty of student debt.

Read More: Too Many High School Seniors Are Turning Away from College Altogether

Antonio Santos is one of the more than 100 people I interviewed for my book, Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree . He attended college to become a video editor but left when he found the instruction too rigid. “I felt like my teachers kept stifling any creative ideas I had,” he told me. When he dropped out, he took with him $70,000 in student debt. Ultimately, he taught himself video editing with the help of mentors he cultivated and now makes six figures doing what he loves.

Meanwhile, a shocking 45% of people with college degrees are underemployed , taking on jobs that don’t need a bachelor’s. The bottom fourth of college grads actually make less money , when adjusted for inflation, than they did two decades ago.

During the Great Recession, employers searching for higher-quality employees turned to college grads, which were in plentiful supply. In essence, they were using a degree as a proxy for smarts—which wasn’t very smart of them. Degree inflation is bad for business, according to a 2017 report by Harvard Business Review. Managers pay more for college grads yet they ultimately find that experienced employees without degrees perform just as well. Meanwhile, college grads, seeing these jobs as beneath them, leave sooner. Rapid staff turnover is expensive and time-consuming.

That doesn’t make a college degree worthless. On average, bachelor’s holders still earn more money than the average high school or community college grad and the number of good new jobs for them is predicted to grow . Usually at least some post-high-school training is needed to earn a good living—with growth in good jobs predicted for this sector as well.

But nearly 30% of people with a two-year associate’s degree actually earn more than the average four-year grad, according to a 2021 Georgetown University report. Just imagine how much income gaps might close if employers opened more good jobs to people with less than a bachelor’s in cases where it really isn’t needed.

That’s how things work in Switzerland. University there is for students who succeed at a very rigorous high-school curriculum and are moving into professions such as doctor, teacher, or engineer. But those interested in the hospitality industry, tech, manufacturing, and other fields typically attend high school half time for the last two years, and work at a paid, part-time apprenticeship in their field of choice. They then might train for an extra year or so before starting careers that in this country would require a bachelor’s or even a master’s degree. One expat in Switzerland told me that her husband, a longtime bank executive, decided to go to university only at the point where he started working with American bankers, because he knew they wouldn’t respect him without a college degree. Hotel managers here generally need a bachelor’s degree; in Switzerland, apprenticeship and some extra training suffices.

The pendulum is starting to swing in the United States, though too slowly. The pandemic created a labor shortage; at the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement made employers get more serious about hiring a diverse workforce.

Prodded by such nonprofits as Opportunity@Work, which lobbies employers to hire based on skills rather than pedigree, more companies are opening previously college-grads-only jobs to people who have built their resumes through other kinds of training. Tech companies have been among the first to drop requirements; in my book there are several programmers who learned via short-term programs or, in one case, a man who self-taught and is now making close to $200,000 a year. The federal government and more than 20 states have removed bachelor’s requirements from public jobs that really don’t need a degree.

In Denver, philanthropist Noel Ginsburg started a white-collar apprenticeship program in tandem with some of the local high schools and businesses. One of the young women in that program had grown up in a household so financially strapped that she relied on free meals at school to eat well; by age 20, she was making six figures and the only debt she had was the mortgage on her new house.

Major companies, especially in the insurance and corporate-support sectors, have started their own apprenticeship programs through community colleges.

There’s legitimate fear that in a skills-over-degrees world, schools will channel Black and Latino students toward non-college careers. Our nation must keep working at making college more affordable and accessible for all students who crave a college education. Forget the “College is a scam” movement. Higher education is worthwhile for many students and should not be reduced in our minds to mere job training. Intellectual pursuit enriches minds and society.

At the same time, college isn’t for everyone, just as it wasn’t for Santos. We can build more financially stable families if states create robust white-collar apprenticeship programs in public high schools and require school counselors to learn about and honor the many paths—not just skilled labor and the military, but the creative fields, entrepreneurialism, tech, management, sales, aviation and even some forms of volunteerism—to a rewarding career and life.

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Yuki Tsunoda Promised Red Bull Seat If He Keeps Racing Like He Is

Saajan jogia | 8 hours ago.

VCARB CEO Peter Bayer has confirmed that Yuki Tsunoda will be considered for promotion to Red Bull alongside Max Verstappen if he consistently delivers outstanding performances. The comments come days after team principal Laurent Mekies praised the Japanese driver as the key to the junior team's future.

Tsunoda started off the 2024 season with full throttle, delivering several praise-worthy race finishes in the 14 races thus far and heading the team to its current 6th position in the Constructors' Championship. He outperformed his teammate Daniel Ricciardo on most weekends, thereby proving that he continues to be the top performer, despite the Australian driver having more F1 racing experience.

However, when Red Bull driver Sergio Perez experienced a significant slump in performance due to a drop in form over the past few months, rumors linked Ricciardo to the Red Bull seat after it was rumored that Perez would be dropped from his role during the summer break. While Ricciardo was also under the scanner due to his underperformance, it was speculated that he could either be asked to leave, or he could earn a promotion to Red Bull as a chance to up his form in a faster car.

But with none of the drivers losing a seat during the summer break, questions arose about why Tsunoda wasn't considered for a Red Bull promotion. The 24-year-old driver has expressed his ambition to race for Red Bull in the future and confidently stated that he could challenge Verstappen for the championship if given the opportunity.

It was believed that Tsunoda did not fit into Red Bull's narrative for the seat alongside the three-time world champion. Red Bull senior advisor Helmut Marko stated that the team would be considering internal talent to replace drivers in the leading team, such as reserve driver Liam Lawson, who eagerly awaits his chance to race in the premier class.

Fortunately for Tsunoda, there's one reason to look forward to a Red Bull seat in the future after Bayer revealed that he could be an option if he delivers consistently. He told Motorsport.com :

“Helmut [Marko] said it himself, in German you say a swallow doesn't make a summer.

“What it means is that if Yuki keeps racing on this level consistently, he will be considered for a seat in Red Bull Racing.

“That's ultimately exactly our mission and the mission we've been given by the shareholders, and if that means that he needs another season next to a very strong Daniel, that could be an option.

“It could also be an option [to] say that, okay, we now believe he's ready. So [then] we'll talk to Liam. We're not in a hurry, despite all the people [who] think we are, because we do have all the options in our hands.”

Team boss Mekies added that Tsunoda's "phenomenal" performance was a reference point, and it would have been wrong if he didn't possess the ambition to drive for Red Bull. He added:

“You expect a lot of things from a young guy between the first and the second year, maybe between the second and the third year.

“But you don't expect that sort of phenomenal step between third and fourth, so - yes, he's faster. Yes, he's calmer. Yes, he's better integrating the team, better feedback, hopefully happy!

“But seriously, he has been a reference point in the way that he gets out of the garage on Friday FP1 - and, bang: the first lap, he is there.

“Yuki is a Red Bull driver. He must have the ambition to drive for Red Bull Racing. If he doesn't have that - it's wrong."

SAAJAN JOGIA

10-Year Life Plan Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Educational Plan

Lifestyle plan, works cited.

Planning ten years of my life seems like a kind of challenge now. We can’t predict what will happen to us after several months. However, I believe that great success is impossible without personal motivation and clearly defined goals. Thus, my life plan essay should start with a clear objective.

In ten years, I want to own an event company that can be the best in its field. I have always been fascinated with this idea. The following 10-year life plan essay will consist of three parts that can help me structure my future and achieve all my goals.

I would like to organize great performances at different events every day. Can you imagine a holiday that never ends? And this will be my work. I will make people happier. Now I need to plan all the steps to help me achieve my dream.

The first step of the way of my goal’s achievement is education. My education will be done at the University of Nevada, where I am planning to study hospitality management as a major and event management as a minor. I am sure of the importance of hard study for my future work. I need to get at least a 3.5 GPA. The multiple locations can help me gain a diversified background and extend my knowledge.

Therefore, I want to do some internship while studying. Perhaps, I will visit different countries to explore the modern tendencies of business start and its future development. Swope says: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: “Try to please everybody” (Swope).

Therefore, I am planning to get experience in different fields because I am sure of their future importance for my business. The examples of some international companies can help me understand how to make my business prosper. To extend my experience, I will start my practice during the study.

I think that education is very important. The lack of knowledge can lead to the business’s incapacity and collapse. Today, the diploma plays a significant role. It gives an appropriate status and respect. A man with a diploma looks more confident and, of course, qualified.

Accreditation provides much more opportunities in life. Therefore, I am planning to study hard and get as much knowledge as possible. I am sure that the university I chose can help me achieve my goals. My education will give me the base for my future business.

It is the most important part of the life plan, which should clarify the goal and approaches to its achievement. Nowadays, the leaders of all companies know the value of settings achievable and understandable goals. Such issues are called smart goals, which need to get better results. These smart ideas help me share my vision of the business with the possible assistants (“Life Planning”).

My attention is turned to the use of certain tools that may help my project. For instance, I need to identify and list all the barriers that may be between me and my goal. I shouldn’t be scared of possible problems because it is an integral part of my future success. Being realistic, I realize all the difficulties I should overcome.

In the beginning, I have to clarify who will be involved in my business. This can be a family company, or I can cooperate with a wide circle of partners. What results do I want to achieve? I want to own a successful company that will be famous around the country.

Choosing the place location, I prefer my native city because it will be easier to find clients and partners. Thinking about these questions, I can clearly understand all the important keys to my goal’s achievement. I will get so many opportunities, so I shouldn’t be lazy in its use (Ashton 8). This is why I think it is the most important period of my life.

My lifestyle should accomplish my educational and professional background and skills. I am planning to do a huge social work and to promote equality among people. I want to help everyone that I can. But I have to learn more from the closest one.

My business will be closely related to people from different communities. Therefore, matching my wants, I should be ready to keep my mind open to different cultural issues and views. I plan to visit many countries to learn about cultural features. This will help in my work with clients.

According to Bukofsky, even my religious and spiritual conditions are very important for my business (34). Family relations also play a huge role in the business success achievement. Life planning is a process that may lead a person to take a more active role and to think about the future. Thinking about my future, I imagine a family that will support me and give me more motivation.

I totally agree with Carlson that “self-actualization is the key to self-help” (9). Although no one can control all life’s events, it is better to try being over random chance and fate.

There is a difference between the person who goes to one’s goal and the man who can easily be influenced by random events. I will structure my life according to the daily plan. This will allow me to follow the main idea, which will lead to success. The life plan is a perfect method to figure out what is really important in life.

I have so many ideas and interests in different fields. I am fascinated by people who can concentrate on the most important idea and follow the plan. However, I should follow my own life plan for the future result. I agree with the statement of Barnett that people should discipline themselves. Following the main idea of life, it is possible to get better results and to make it fast (Barnett).

I have always been a goal-setter. Thereby, my Ten Year Plan is focused on achieving my high ideals and realistic goals. From time to time, it seems that goals are something that we strive to achieve but fail due to personal reasons or social barriers.

However, I am completely sure that a good life plan and motivation can lead to success in spite of all problems that may occur. My Ten Year Life Plan helps me to specify my goals and to see the key moments and the most important steps which can lead me to success.

Ashton, Robert. The Life Plan: 700 Simple Ways to Change Your Life for the Better . 1st ed. UK: Prentice Hall, 2006. Print.

Barnett, John S. Discipline Yourself for Godliness . Tulsa, OK: Mullerhouse Publishing, 2007. Web.

Bykofsky, Sheree, and Richard Carlson. Me: Five Years from Now: The Life-Planning Book You Write Yourself! 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1999. Print.

“Life Planning”. myGoals, n.d. Web.

Swope, Herbert. “Failure Quotes.” Wisdom Quotes . Wisdom Quotes. Web.

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Can China’s ‘city of the future’ Xiongan really convince people to swap Beijing life?

• Advocates say the site 100km south of Beijing has a lot of potential, but empty streets and buildings suggest this is yet to be realised

The city, about 100km (60 miles) south of Beijing, was designed to reduce population pressure on the capital and speed up development in the surrounding province of Hebei and neighbouring mega-port of Tianjin.

The site, which was an open plain dotted by rivers and wetlands and home to a small rural community a decade ago, is now fully connected physically and digitally to the rest of China.

Unlike most major cities in China, there are no skyscrapers, underground passes or overhead walkways.

Instead, all its buildings are of medium height and, most unusually for a major city in China, more than 70 per cent of the city is given over to green spaces such as parks and lakes, while every road has cycle lanes running alongside them.

But although it has an official population of 1.2 million permanent residents, another striking feature is the relative lack of people out on the streets.

China’s new megacity Xiongan takes shape near Beijing with residential area ready by summer 2023

In the city’s Rongdong district – which hosts the planned finance district and tech park – most of the street-level commercial spaces remained vacant, waiting for businesses to move in.

David Chew, the founder of a Tokyo-based tech start-up, said Xiongan was still flying “under the radar”.

“Xiongan is yet to differentiate itself in terms of branding … is Xiongan becoming Beijing 2.0? It is still unknown for me,” Chew said.

However, some businesses such as real estate agents and kindergartens said they were seeing signs of increased activity – a possible sign that more Beijing residents were preparing to make the move.

In one apartment block, which has its own kindergarten and plenty of green spaces, a sales agent said all units in the estate were ready for people to move in and around two-thirds of the units had been sold, many to Beijingers preparing for a future move.

Elsewhere, plenty of convenience stores and pharmacies and well-equipped kindergartens and primary schools could be seen every 10 blocks or so.

Xiongan is yet to differentiate itself in terms of branding

At one kindergarten decorated in baby blue, one of the teachers said it was preparing for the arrival of its first American teacher in September.

The teacher said the centre were also trying to appeal to families by offering classes in English and Russian and offering child care late into the afternoon for parents who may need to spend more time at work before they can pick up their children.

The monthly fees of US$950 put it well beyond the budget of most current Xiongan residents – but the teacher said 40 children had already enrolled at the kindergarten – and it was confident it would eventually reach its target of having 100 children.

One of the busiest shops was a high-end dry cleaners and shoeshine store, where one of the employees said they were dealing with more than 200 items – most of them apparently luxury or tailored items – a possible sign that business from Beijingers visiting the city is picking up.

But even if that is the case, the lure of life in the capital remains strong.

Mike Yang, who moved to Xiongan in May, said he only came because he found a job in the city, but he still spent most weekends in Beijing.

“The truth is, people haven’t come yet,” said the 24-year-old, but added that the government may force more people to move there from the capital in the next few years.

Construction in full swing to build China’s ‘city of the future’, Xiongan

Luo Tien, an architect in his early 30s and working for a state-owned construction company in Beijing, said he did not want to move from the capital to the new city because it would mean “rebuilding my social networks from scratch” and public services such as education and health “will not be able to match what’s available in Beijing for a long time”.

However, he admitted that if people had to move from the capital to keep their jobs, most would do so.

Richard Hu, an urban planner and professor at the Canberra Business School who visited the city in December, said the concept behind the city might be too “idealistic”.

He said people from across China were drawn to Beijing because it offered better career prospects and public services such as schools and hospitals, but “now the government wants to counter that force and move people and resources out”.

“People moving from Xiongan to Beijing is upward migration but moving from Beijing to Xiongan is downward migration,” Hu said.

“People move due to government orders, they have to do that and they don’t have other options … But when we talk about migration, it must be voluntary and driven by personal pursuits and social economic considerations.

“[Xiongan] is a government project, a state project, and there is strong political will to define the idea.”

Another problem the city faces is that it is struggling to attract private businesses – especially from abroad where it is little known.

People moving from Xiongan to Beijing is upward migration but moving from Beijing to Xiongan is downward migration

Michael Schumann, chairman of the board at the Berlin-based German Federal Association for Economic Development and Foreign Trade (BWA), led a delegation to visit the city in March.

He said: “It’s so amazing what they built there. It’s a pity then that you don’t hear about [Xiongan] so much in the sense of other future cities that are being built currently and that are being discussed currently.”

Schumann believes some of the urban technologies being developed in Xiongan to improve everyday life for residents could well be more advanced than in other comparable planned future cities.

Alain Saas, founder of a Toronto-based AI start-up, said the city’s “relative emptiness” and low rents could help attract start-ups.

But he said it needed better “interoperability with the world” – such as unrestricted internet access and rules making it easier for foreigners to acquire visas or residency permits.

It’s so amazing what they built there. It’s a pity then that you don’t hear about [Xiongan] so much

“If the city had the level of interconnection to the world as Hong Kong, a new city with the potential for cheap housing and like-minded pioneers, I’d move right away,” said Saas.

Edward Neale Knight, a China researcher from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change who visited Xiongan in June, said it would take a long time for the city to rival the likes of Shenzhen, the tech hub on the border with Hong Kong that has developed rapidly in recent decades.

Xiongan’s future will depend on factors such as rent and the ease of getting a residency permit, or hukou, that allows people to use public services.

“If rent is cheap and they have less stringent hukou policies, lots of people will be willing to live there and attain an urban hukou. If the rent gets too high and the hukou policy is too restrictive, it will be a much less attractive destination,” Knight said.

“Of course the city was slightly empty [when I visited] but it is not meant to be finished for a number of years and actually the city was closer to completion than I thought it would be.”

He predicted: “Given the progress I saw, and the clear desire to embrace technology and take a green approach, I think Xiongan will be like Beijing’s less significant but slightly friendlier little brother in 10 years.”

More From Forbes

The future of life insurance: keeping an eye on millennial and gen-z needs.

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Mike Vietri is Chief Distribution Officer for AmeriLife , a national leader in distributing and marketing insurance and financial solutions.

The life insurance industry may be at a pivotal juncture—one characterized by significant shifts in generational dynamics. Recent data from the 2024 Insurance Barometer Study by Life Happens and LIMRA revealed that while the overall ownership of life insurance has remained relatively stable, the specific demographics of policyholders and their motivations for purchasing insurance reflect broader societal changes.

Throughout my time in this industry, I’ve been proud to serve the 50-plus demographic. And as we continue our focus on our core customer base, we’re learning to react to this surge in younger clients. The younger demographic has begun to take a proactive approach to financial security, influenced heavily by the technological developments of their time and broader accessibility to and fluency with digital platforms. While they may not prefer the classic kitchen table conversation, younger generations are spending the time online to figure out what’s right for them.

New data, including that from the 2024 LIMRA and Life Happens study, underscores a critical shift: Younger generations are not only recognizing the need for life insurance, they’re actively engaging in the market. Consider MIB Group's 2023 annual report that also showed a notable increase in life insurance applications from people under 50. It’s important that we keep this in mind as we work toward the future of the life insurance industry.

Generational Differences

We know that younger generations are more connected than ever and have been deeply affected by global events—especially the Covid-19 pandemic. Major events like the pandemic may force one to reflect on the unpredictability of life, bolstering the importance of holistic health and financial planning.

Growth is the most pronounced among Millennials and Gen-Z, with 50% of Millennials and 44% of Gen-Z considering buying life insurance within the next year.

These statistics aren’t merely numbers; we’re seeing this significant shift in life insurance buyers toward a younger audience who are interested in traditional life insurance policies as well as looking for products that align with their unique life stages and financial needs. For young adults confronting the world’s unpredictability, life insurance becomes an attractive option.

Strategies For Appealing To Younger Generations

These younger generations, particularly Millennials and Gen-Z, are digital natives who are accustomed to managing their lives and finances online. This extends to their approach to purchasing life insurance, where they often favor online applications and digital-first communication. To effectively engage these younger demographics, we must learn to innovate our product, sales and marketing strategies.

Here are just a few targeted approaches teams can take:

1. Simplify the process. Streamline application processes using technology and digital platforms to cater to the expectations of speed and efficiency prevalent among younger consumers.

2. Educate and inform. Leverage social media and online platforms to educate younger potential customers about the benefits and necessities of life insurance beyond the death benefit.

3. Know all relevant products. Stay educated in order to offer products that align with younger adults' life stages and financial situations, such as term policies with critical illness riders or combination products that include long-term care benefits.

4. Emphasize flexibility and customization. Highlight the ability to customize life insurance policies and the portability of benefits, which may be particularly appealing to job-hopping Gen-Z workers.

5. Prioritize corporate social responsibility. Younger generations often favor companies with a good culture and strong ethical values . Emphasizing a commitment to fairness and equality can enhance appeal.

Embracing Change For Future Success

The life insurance industry's ability to adapt to generational shifts isn’t just a tactical adjustment but a strategic imperative. As companies continue to thrive with those they serve and learn to navigate any changes, the insights drawn from data and trends can inform their strategies and help them remain relevant and responsive to the needs of all generations.

This approach can help secure the financial futures of customers across generations, in addition to sustaining the growth and relevance of our industry in the years to come. As industry leaders, our challenge is to foresee these shifts and proactively adapt, ensuring that life insurance continues to fulfill its foundational promise of security and peace of mind for every generation.

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Home / Essay Samples / Life / Future Plan

Future Plan Essay Examples

My vision for the future: a fulfilling life in 20 years.

Here in 20 years from now essay I will explore my future plans and inspirations. So I see myself as a successful entrepreneur running my own sustainable business. I envision a future where I have achieved financial stability and created a positive impact in the...

Embracing Life after School's Journey of Growth and Discovery

Graduating from school marks a significant milestone in one's life. For years, school has been a structured environment, a place of learning, growth, and social interaction. As students step into the realm of life after school, they embark on a new journey filled with opportunities,...

Unleashing the Potential: My Future Plan and Academic Aspirations

As a high school senior, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my future plan, a part of it I wrote in this essay. I have always been passionate about science and technology, and I plan to pursue a degree in computer science....

My Hopes for the Future

The canvas of the future stretches before us, awaiting the brushstrokes of our dreams, aspirations, and actions. As I contemplate what lies ahead, I am filled with a sense of anticipation and determination. My hopes for the future are anchored in the pursuit of personal...

Embracing the Unknown: a Personal Understanding of the Future

Understanding career opportunities, in my future essay sample I will sgare my plane for career development. I am currently in my second year of study in architecture at Coventry University. My plan is to be a registered architect as my future career. It is not...

Personal Future Plans and Goals in Education

There was experience in my life that ahs showed what I really want to do in the future. Within the future plans and goals essay I will share some plans through personal experience of working as a teacher and what it has changed in my...

Sharing My Future Plan and Career Goals after Graduation

My future plan after graduation is revealed in this essay. After graduation, I really want to pursue a career in marketing. I have always been fascinated by the power of branding and advertising, and I believe that a career in marketing will allow me to...

My Plans to Become a Practicing Consultant in Business Questions

After careful consideration of the various ways to advance my career, I decided to apply to Depaul University Masters program in Accounting. The hope is that this masters programme will equip me with advanced skills and applicable knowledge I require for management and leadership; I...

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