What did you worry about at fifteen?
Travels with Charley, November 2024
Hi readers,
What did you care about when you were a teenager? What felt really urgent?
When you’re a teen, everything can feel like a crisis. (Seriously. Do you remember how exhausting and exhilarating that time was? I have never again since felt the particular, crushing intensity of learning that I was the only one not invited to [redacted]’s sleepover birthday party or of waiting for [redacted] to text me back. Not to mention the fraught experience of getting bangs.)
But many young people today are actually living through climate emergency. Across the world, the climate crisis won’t take place in a hazy, theoretical future; it’s happening now, at the same time, for teens, as nerve-racking first crushes and door-slamming fights with parents and life-defining college admissions exams. It frames all the other wonderful, terrible moments of growing up. When wildfires destroy your home, or heat waves make groceries unaffordable, or air pollution makes your skin burn when you step outside, climate change becomes a constant, the lens through which you see the world.
Yet growing up is ungainly and all-consuming, even in the midst of climate disaster. Climate catastrophe disrupts adolescence in a million small, devastating ways: It prevents young people from hanging out with their friends, from gaining independence, from defining themselves as individuals with their own interests and ideas. And it forces them to grapple with how climate change will reshape and restrict their futures.
For The New York Times Magazine, I talked to teenagers in affected regions across the globe about trying to figure out who they want to be while reckoning with the world they’ll inherit. They’re young enough to remember a more hospitable world, but are clear-eyed enough to suspect that they’re too late to preserve it.
Read it online today and a longer version in print on Sunday.
My conversations with these teenagers have made me think differently about the climate crisis. They don’t have the luxury of turning away from it when they get overwhelmed, like most Americans do. Climate change casts a shadow over everything: Both their present, as they go through the pains and triumphs of growing up, and their future, as they plan with the knowledge of how much worse climate will get in their lifetimes.
A few of the teens I talked to (including some details that didn’t make it into the story, because what else is my newsletter for than my cut darlings):
“I feel like I was born in the wrong generation,” Ayesha Ali, a bubbly sixteen-year-old in Dhaka, Bangladesh, told me. “If I had been born before, like even in the early 2000s, then I would have a chance to enjoy my country, but now I feel like my country is the worst.” Ayesha’s long hair has started to fall out, which she believes is due to air pollution; because of the blazing sun and dense particulates in Dhaka, she gets painful acne when she goes outside, which makes her feel really self-conscious. When she gets together with her friends, they mostly talk about their climate-caused aches and pains, including debilitating headaches and insomnia. She wishes they could talk about gossip and fantasy novels instead.
Sara Saumanaia, 14, is from Tuvalu; she and her family live in east Christchurch, New Zealand, in a predominantly working-class neighborhood of Māori and other Pacific Islander immigrants. She grieves for a homeland where she will likely never get to live, since the low-lying atolls of Tuvalu will probably be largely underwater in her lifetime. Sara told me about how she finds it easier to connect with other kids of Pacific Islander heritage, because they too reckon with grief and guilt. Her two closest friends are Samoan and Tongan. “We’re all brought up the same way, with our strict parents implanting our cultures in us,” she says. “They especially feel for me, because they know my country will probably be one of the first countries to be gone because of climate change.”
Daniela Bazán, 16, talked to me about a strange kind of nostalgia: a longing for a version of home that she never got to experience. She lives in Huaraz, in the Peruvian Andes, where she can see glaciers from her house. For her, losing the glaciers is both a spiritual and a practical crisis: She and her family make offerings to Pachamama, the Earth goddess, and the Apus, the mountain gods; combined with drought, the shrinking glaciers mean there isn’t enough water to grow the corn that they sell for income. Bazán feels like she’s coming of age during an awful in-between: Too late to save the physical landscapes she loves, but just on time to watch their destruction. “I feel nostalgia for the glacier, and sadness, because little by little, it's disappearing,” Bazán says. “It won't be here forever.” She hears from her parents about a time when the rivers were full of fish and the land was lush; she doesn’t want to have to tell her children what it was like before the glaciers disappeared, which will likely happen in her lifetime. “I don’t want the generations to come to be left without seeing the landscapes, or only to have seen a photo and hear that it existed,” she says. “Then one is left with nothing.”
Feels obvious, but because I’m sending this hours before election day: These teenagers are a big part of why I vote, and call my senators, and talk to friends and family about uncomfortable political issues. They have less power than we do, and are far more affected by climate change (and so much else) than we are. We owe it to these young people to agitate for a better world and not to turn away from what’s hard. After all, they don’t have that luxury.
From my commonplace book
On the high-stakes feelings of childhood and adolescence—
From Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought:
Metamorphosis is an unsentimental business, and I was a long time in the thick of it, knees scraped, clothes awry, nerves strained and wearied.
From Mary Karr’s interview in The Paris Review:
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate.
From “Miss Lora,” by Junot Díaz:
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you.
From “Goodbye to All That,” by Eula Biss:
I hardly even knew the story back then—I had only a vague sense that the heroine was young and that the moral had something to do with being in the right place at the right time. I was ready for anything.
If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)
yours,
Charley