"The Future Would Be Teenager"
August 6, 2025 - In Teenager: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875 - 1945, author and historian Jon Savage thoroughly explores the early concepts of the teenager, and then, after 465 pages, he leaves us with a cliffhanger.
“The postwar spread of American values would be spearheaded by the idea of the Teenager. This new type was the ultimate psychic match for the times: living in the now, pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, embodying the new global society where social inclusion was to be granted through purchasing power. The future would be Teenager.”
It’s been 60 years since WWII ended. Sixty years of the Teenager. A quick slideshow of those 60 years shows us images of Elvis; the Beatles; protests; Kent State; the end of the Beatles; Earth Day; more protests; Roe v. Wade; Karen Carpenter’s anorexia and death. The new century and millennia brought mass murder at Columbine High School; 9/11; mounting rates of gun violence in schools; the ubiquitous smart phone; COVID-19; exponentially rapid development of and use of artificial intelligence; climate crisis and Greta Thunberg.
The future would be Teenager and it was. Evidence of an adolescent sensibility abounds in the cultural psyche. The Peter Pan archetype is alive and well. That “living in the now, pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, [embodiment of] the new global society where social inclusion was to be granted through purchasing power” is currently being played out in the halls of governments across the world and with heartbreaking effects here in the United States. For the past 60 years, adolescence has not only shaped culture—it has embodied it. The Teenager as Jon Savage outlines emerged as both mirror and engine of a rapidly changing world, one driven by consumption, sensation, and the relentless present tense.
Today, we live with the long echo of that cultural shift. In the halls of government, in consumer trends, in how we define identity and belonging, the co-opted and profiteered adolescent spirit of a post-World War world still reverberates. But so too does the weight of a far more complicated now—school shootings, climate collapse, gender politics, social media, and artificial intelligence. If Savage were writing today, one wonders whether he might conclude with “It’s past time we grow up.”
An immersive experience
Imagine a pleasantly warm early summer day in Washington, DC. A couple enters the Katzen Arts Center at American University to see the new exhibit The Teen Experience, a stunning and sobering collaboration with the university, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Montgomery County Public Schools Visual Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary American Teenagers. The man and woman go because they have soon-to-be-adolescent grandchildren and feel like it might be a good idea to stay informed. Because, of course, it’s not the same world in which this older generation adolesced. Though they both argue that “kids are always kids, the world was hard when they were young, and look! they grew up just fine.”
They are in for a sobering surprise.
All of the pieces in the exhibition are produced by teens, showing the viewer what their internal and external experiences are as teenagers in 2025. At one installation, the couple stands silent. The man shakes his head and mutters, “Damn. I had no idea.” Hanging in mid-air are white-feathered wings with tattered white lace, and crosses hanging from strands of pearls. The bottom edges of the feathers, lace, and crosses are dipped in blood-red. The wings hover over a mirror facing upward, cracked. Fallen feathers and crosses lay on the mirror, and blood-red stains the cracks, as if they are open veins.
As they quietly move through the exhibit, they experience the uncanny silence and dark of a re-created classroom under lockdown, as a too-loud voice over the intercom announces, “This is a lockdown. This is not a drill.” Turn off the lights. Lock the door. Hide. Where there is nowhere to hide. Alex Weiss, Mia Melton, and Lois Proeller — the artists of The Classroom — explain in the accompanying placard:
“My first lockdown was in elementary school; I was 8. We learned how to make a classroom look empty and how to find the best places in a room to hide. We grew up in a culture where school shootings were a regular risk of going to school.” They go on to say, “It isn’t fair that our learning environment should come with a danger of death every single day. We beg for help and are ignored, and when something horrific happens, all we get are ‘thoughts and prayers.’ . . . This is our reality, 12 years of our childhood. A constant and looming threat of mortality shrouds our foundational years. In a lockdown, the walls close in, and a classroom has never felt more like a jail cell. You look around at your classmates, not knowing if these are the people you’ll spend your last moments with.”
The grandparents stand in a teenager’s bedroom during the COVID lockdown. Then a bathroom stall as seen through the eyes of a transgender youth. They begin to get a glimpse of the inner lives of today’s teenagers based on the titles of the artwork: Boxed In . . . . Tunnel Vision. . . . don’t grow up. . . . Isolation in Erasure. . . . Maybe My Body is Okay Sometimes. Sexuality, gender, cultural roots, identity, race, loneliness, creativity, hope, the body, time, childhood—a wide myriad of timeless experiences are represented in the exhibit across myriad cultures—Latinx, Native American, Asian, White.
The older couple leaves the exhibit changed. They weren’t who they were when they entered. They resonated with the unchanging nature of Adolescence and felt the intensity of the world through the hearts and eyes of today’s teenagers.
Just outside the exhibit, where the title and information placard about the project are displayed, is a long mural with sticky notes scattered across it. The viewer is invited to write a word or phrase on a sticky note describing their adolescence, whether it was in the past or in the current moment. Before entering, the man wrote, “I tried hard;” and she wrote, “dreamer.” They come out of the immersive experience understanding what they didn’t before. That adolescence was hard back then, and it’s hard now. The difference is that the world that supported them when they were young—that somewhat innocent world before Columbine and Covid, rising oceans, and faster rising fascism—is gone. Trying hard and dreaming are still adolescent experiences, but when it feels like the world is ending, neither seems enough. They have a better idea now of how to listen to their grandchildren.
Coming of age
What does it mean to come of age in a world created by the generations that came before? Walking through the MOCAT exhibit, the answer is clear: adolescence is as complex, courageous, and creatively alive as ever—but it is also heavier. Lockdown drills, pandemic isolation, cultural erasure, existential dread—these are the hallmarks of teenage life in the 2020s. And yet, from this weight emerges a stunning, necessary expression.
The Teenager remains central—not just to culture, but to its conscience. As the older couple in the exhibit discovered, the experience of adolescence is not confined to one generation. Their sticky-note reflections—“I tried hard” and “Dreamer”—echo across decades. We are always in dialogue with our inner adolescent and the world that shaped them. And as long as that dialogue continues, there remains the possibility of understanding, of bridging generations, and of transforming both the culture we inherit and the one we pass on. Here is a new future that would be Teenager. Here is a future where maybe we finally grow up.
Photo by: Jacob Lund