Transcriber: V M Reviewer: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka
This is me as a child.
Can you guess what I wanted to do when I grew up?
First of all, can we all acknowledge how much of a cool kid I was?
Just look at my fashion sense.
But what I wanted to do when I grew up: I wanted to be an explorer.
I wanted to travel
around the country, around the planet,
and even further than that.
I wanted to travel into outer space.
And I know what you’re all thinking: “Am I listening to an astronaut today?”
Well, unfortunately, you’re not.
I haven’t traveled into space.
Well, at least not yet, anyway.
In fact, I actually work in an investment bank.
But I feel I’ve really inherited a lot of shared goals from my childhood.
I’m curious,
I like to question things,
I love to solve problems.
I feel childhood goals and dreams are very important
because they derive from a time when we weren’t influenced by money.
We didn’t care about, necessarily, over things outside.
All we really cared about was what we were interested in.
It really begs the question:
“What do today’s children want to do?”
In 2019, I came across this survey.
It was conducted by Lego
and asked a thousand eight to 12-year-olds
in the UK, the US, and China,
what they wanted to do when they grew up.
As you can see, I think that the results are very surprising.
I know this certainly shocked me.
So in the UK, in the US,
the most popular career choice
was actually to become a vlogger or a YouTuber.
This, to me, is mind-blowing
because this career simply didn’t exist 10 years ago,
when I was a kid, guys.
Even in China,
a country where there’s actual limits in place for social media -
it sometimes even bans in place -
almost 20 percent of children
actually want to pursue a social media career.
And this is more so than typically maybe an astronaut or an athlete.
So it’s really mind-blowing,
and it really leads to the question:
“What is the impact of this?”
So,
social media is really key to this,
and I think we first need to evaluate its actual use within society.
At its core, social media is addictive.
It’s designed to take us in and consume us.
Think about it.
I’m sure we’re all guilty of maybe replying to a message,
and before we know it,
we’ve wasted multiple hours even
consuming people’s holiday photos, pictures of dogs.
All this stuff is really pointless, but yet we still consume it anyway.
And if it can damage our attention spans as adults,
why are we actually subjecting this to children?
You talk about maybe social media actually damaging social skills.
A lot of these children have actually grown up in this digital world,
raised and born in it.
And this is all they will actually have ever known.
Maybe they might not have even raised these social skills in the first place.
And that's quite a worrying prospect.
As well as that, think about the psychological damage.
There’s been various studies and cases
of correlations between social media usage
and mental health cases.
It’s clear that social media offers a platform of constant comparison.
People see these models, these influencers, these gamers.
They supposedly have it all.
Well, that’s at least what appears on the screen.
Children are striving to try and be like them.
And it’s really transitioning them from doing their job,
which they enjoy so much that they want to do it for free,
to doing a job where they get paid
quite a lot for their very little work.
It’s fueling an inherent sense of materialism within society.
It’s making them wish that they have that, and that they want that.
So ultimately, social media is very damaging.
As a recent economics graduate,
I also think about
how this could harm them and productivity.
The constant sense of distraction in children’s lives
can really impact their drive, their desire,
and really their passions for everything around them.
More so than that,
there’s also problems in the world today.
I’m pretty sure there can be lots of problems in the future as well.
These problems are really the current youth of today’s problem,
and maybe even inherited for the future generations after that.
If they cannot instill within themselves some passion and drive,
then it’s really a scary prospect.
It’s clear social media is here.
It’s here in a big way,
and it’s not going anywhere.
So let’s think about how we can rectify this.
How can we limit some of the disadvantages of social media usage?
First thoughts for a solution.
How about thinking of restricting and limiting content?
So, the first thing that comes to mind
is actually the reduction in access to social media.
There’s age restrictions in place for alcohol, gambling, driving.
Why not social media as well?
Whilst many platforms do actually state this,
it’s hardly stringent.
How about making this stricter,
limiting the amount of distractions
that these children can actually get access to?
Whilst it's not an absolute solution, it's actually a relative solution.
Let’s cast our minds back to the survey.
Even in China, when there are limits in place on social media usage,
still almost 20 percent of children
wanted to pursue a career in social media.
It’s clearly not the key to solve this problem completely.
I think to do that
we actually have to redefine how social media is viewed and consumed.
And really to do this,
I think we need to really revert back to social media’s original intentions.
This was to connect, to raise awareness,
and really to facilitate learning environment.
Not only that, I think we can also look at ourselves.
Are we offering the best role models we can for children?
Are we actually empowering them to follow their passions in life?
I want to end by asking you all a question.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Remember the dreams, remember the goals, the passion.
Let’s make sure the future generation
also have similar goals and dreams for their life.