WHAT AM I THINKING? Lidewij Edelkoort shares personal insights into what’s going through her mind…
While travelling and on flights over the past couple of weeks, I have encountered more children than ever before. It seems that staying home for school holidays is no longer an option, everybody is on the road. Parents with several kids struggle to hold them together and it is a great moment to observe the families of today. Father and child in printed T-shirts, mother and daughter in denim and beige knits, brother and sister in sibling workwear. Grandmother and granddaughter are also seen in magnificent matching glitter. Public expressions of endearment with kissing, cuddling and hugging, tender moments while waiting in line without being on-line. Is this the result of parenting during covid when people finally really discovered their kids? Age differences seem non-consequential and the dynamics of being together are at work 24/7 with the remarkable return of card and board games as well as book reading. Where are the phones?
This view of a new generation makes me aware of a completely different species being born and bred, children who are in no way comparable to their teenage brothers and sisters. This is not like the mild and muted differences between Gen Z and Alpha. This is a hallucinating totally new archetype that is mature beyond any physical age and expresses itself in definite movements and gestures. As if playing in a theatre, they dance, jump and strike poses better than the best drag queens. They are driven by curiosity in everything they can touch and feel.
They have intellectual discussions from an early age and question the big topics of life and death. Incredibly sophisticated in their choice of words and attitudes, they seem to be preparing for careers in public life. As a result, they don’t look like babies and toddlers anymore, nor do they look like miniature adults but instead seem to have a morphology all their own. Their faces communicate with strangers and show large degrees of openness, embracing the world with an outgoing smile. So suddenly it dawns on me that this new generation might at last represent the infamous Indigo Children that first appeared in New Age teachings in the 1970s. Described as a chosen kind of kids with an indigo aura, they were singled out with extreme forms of compassion, fostering high intelligence as well as supernatural traits and extraordinary abilities.
Therefore, I studied the written profiles of these most recent blue beings and learned that they have innate empathy, are innovative thinkers, and are gifted with heightened perception and an independent spirit, with a strong inner compulsion to speak and hear the truth, which seems a logical evolution from the fake-news culture they are born into. They tend to be precocious and have a solid imagination, as we see when they indulge in storytelling and book reading. They are born around the pandemic and seem to have survived with much less trauma than their peers, showing resilient optimism, and using intuition to navigate unknown circumstances. They will challenge authority by using TikTok as a speakeasy and will call their teachers Alexa. As they are natural leaders, with a deep sense of purpose, I cannot wait to see them govern the world!
— L. E.
November 1st, 2024