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Growing up in a world that never stands still

Growing up in a world that never stands still
Growing up in a world that never stands still | Photo: Imagine Buddy

Published on 29 March 2026 at 10:17 GMT

By Joan Ubide


Today I come of age with the feeling that I no longer see the world as a child. By this stage of life, a person has already gathered memories, fears, losses, comparisons and a first real sense of what the future might mean. Adolescence is not simply a bridge between childhood and adulthood. It is a decisive phase in human development, when identity begins to take shape, emotional awareness becomes more complex, and reality starts to be judged in one’s own voice. One does not yet possess the distance of a mature adult, but innocence has already started to fall away.

 

That is why coming of age today feels so different from reaching the same point in earlier generations. A century ago, many young people lived within narrower circles of information, custom and geography. Now, a teenager belongs not only to a family, a school or a town, but also to a global society. News, conflict, beauty, fear, ambition and propaganda arrive on the same screen, often within minutes. The modern adolescent grows up under a constant flow of images and opinions, and that has profound consequences for adolescent psychology, emotional development and mental health.

 

Still, not every young person carries the same burden. The inner world of someone raised in peace and stability is not the same as that of another who has grown up surrounded by war, forced displacement or chronic fear. A child in Gaza or Ukraine does not learn uncertainty in theory, but through direct experience. A child in New Zealand may also know anxiety, pressure and confusion, but these are shaped by very different surroundings. Developmental psychology teaches that the environment is not a decorative backdrop to life. It is one of the main forces shaping how a person thinks, feels, trusts, hopes and imagines the future.

 

It is worth explaining what a psychologist is. A psychologist is a professional who studies how people think, feel and behave, and how life experiences and surroundings influence the human mind. The American psychologist Laurence Steinberg, one of the leading experts in adolescent development, has argued that the teenage brain is especially sensitive to reward, social approval, emotion and belonging. That helps explain why a young person can show remarkable moral clarity about injustice and yet remain uncertain, impulsive or vulnerable in personal decisions. This is not weakness. It is part of the complexity of youth.

 

Earlier, the German-American psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described adolescence as the life stage shaped by the search for identity. His work remains highly relevant because identity formation is no longer driven only by family, school and local culture. It is now also shaped by social media, global crises, online comparison and permanent exposure to the lives of others. In practical terms, this means that many teenagers grow up asking not only who they are, but how they are being seen, measured and judged by the wider world.

 

This produces a psychological tension that older generations did not experience in the same way. A young adult today may feel inexperienced in life but overloaded in awareness. They may know far too much about war, climate anxiety, economic instability, political manipulation and digital pressure, while still lacking the emotional shelter that time and experience sometimes provide. A person of 50 or 56 may also worry about these same realities, but usually from a different mental position, with more distance, more memory and more perspective. The younger mind, by contrast, often experiences the world not as a sequence of issues to evaluate, but as a tide that arrives all at once.

 

And yet there is something deeply valuable in that stage of life. One can still be wounded by injustice without becoming indifferent to it. One can still react to cruelty with sincerity rather than routine. There may be less certainty, but there is often greater openness to moral urgency. This is why youth mental health, adolescent wellbeing and the social conditions of teenage life should matter to all of us. They are not marginal questions. They tell us what kind of society we are building, and what kind of future we are handing over.

 

For me, the real meaning of this threshold is not simply legal adulthood. It is the recognition that personal identity is now formed inside a shared global condition. Whether one grows up in conflict or calm, wealth or scarcity, the individual mind is increasingly shaped by the same planetary conversation. That can be dangerous when it spreads panic, hatred or lies. But it can also be powerful when it builds empathy, knowledge and collective responsibility.

 

This is where the column ceases to be only about youth and becomes about the rest of us as well. The common ground between someone just entering adult life and someone who, like me, is 56 lies in the need to correct a world marked by violence, inequality, manipulation and confusion. We may stand at different ages of life, but we are exposed to many of the same fractures. The task before us is therefore shared. Governments matter, institutions matter, schools matter, but so do public conscience, reliable information, psychological understanding and the will to act as a human community.

 

Perhaps that is the most serious lesson of coming of age in our era. The world shapes the young, but the young also stand at the threshold of shaping the world. And if global society is capable of doing one thing well, it should be this: helping the next generation to inherit not only our problems, but also our determination to repair them.

 

Further information

WHO, adolescent health and wellbeing:



American Psychological Association, what psychologists do: https://www.apa.org/topics/psychotherapy/about-psychologists


Laurence Steinberg, Temple University profile: https://liberalarts.temple.edu/directory/laurence-steinberg


Erik Erikson, Encyclopaedia Britannica profile: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erik-Erikson

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