The question from the title has been posed many times and yet not many of us can answer it straight away. It's either because we have never contemplated our future or we just simply have no idea and we rather go with the flow and see what life will bring us down the road. Both are perfectly fine if you're young and still haven't decided on your path but I'm not gonna elaborate on them today. There's another thing that makes me feel concerned about the young generation and their future.
The number of paths you can choose when you're a teenager is tremendous and it constantly grows. You can choose whatever you want and become whoever you want. There's even a space for errors, so you can try a couple of different professions along the way to find out the best one for you. Unfortunately, though, a lot of youngies decide to choose a seemingly easier alternative option - to become a so-called influencer. I heard of research that young girls were asked about the profession they would choose and almost half of them found having a social media account an attractive professional activity in the future. That same question was asked to parents, and as you may guess, the answers were more realistic - they wanted their children to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and so on. This kind of research tells us a lot about the upcoming generation and their attitude toward life. They want to work smart, not hard, and therefore becoming an influencer seems reasonable at first glance. The thing that I find wrong with this approach is that if you genuinely want to influence people you need to have something to offer but most of the time the influencer wannabes have nothing to give in exchange. What they really want to achieve is to make a lot of money hand over fist, so they try to find the easiest possible way to get a multitude of people to be attracted to their social media accounts. Being an influencer, in and of itself, isn't something bad but what young people don't know is that becoming one is a long journey full of hard work and there are no shortcuts. Of course, you might get lucky and strike gold in no time but it's seldom and therefore I wouldn't put all my eggs into one basket. The only right road to influence people is to become an expert in something and then start building a business around it, not the other way around.
Having said that, I think we need to wake up to the fact that if we don't do anything about it now then modern society will be full of smartass cocky young adults with no valuable knowledge and skills. The future is still in our hands but sooner or later the generation of people I described in this post will take over. Hopefully, they'll be smarter and more intelligent than us otherwise, we gonna live in a society where dumb influencers with no expertise try to influence an even more dumb society.
Hmm… Hasn't it always been like this? The young people wanting to be stars of some kind? Like singer, professional athlete or actor? To be an influencer requires also the skill to sell, the skill of professional marketing. Since it is a long road and only the fewest can bring it to a level, where they can live from it, in the end most of the others will have to take conventional jobs. Persistence and discipline are rare. That's society… Not everybody can be famous, because then nobody would be famous.
I think times are changing so some youngsters want to break off the traditional values that have been put on us for decades such as getting in a prestigious university, becoming a doctor or engineer, raising a family before 30 and so on and so forth. I guess being an influencer isn't the be-all and end-all and not to mention, the world is opening a lot of doors for youths now. In modern times, fame is getting short-lived for a lot of people even though they might break the internet overnight. It only lasts for at least a few months. Then, they are found nowhere since they have nothing exciting to bring to the table. One more thing is pretty privilege is scary. If you don't have that, you need to learn to have what it takes to become an long lasting influencer first.