Dear Fellow Survivors of the Analogue-Digital Divide,

This is a letter to those of us who learned patience by waiting for free-to-air cartoons after school, sitting through ads because there was no fast-forward button. We grew up in a world where missing the opening theme song was a tragedy and catching the final cliffhanger felt like an achievement. Now, we live in an age where everything is on demand, and we’re still managing to keep up.

Let’s take a moment to marvel at the fact that we made it. We, the children of cassette tapes and dial-up internet, remember the screech of a modem connecting and the art of yelling, “Don’t pick up the phone!” while downloading a single photo. We are the generation that spent hours recording songs off the radio, only for the DJ to ruin the last ten seconds by talking over it. Now, we are teaching our parents how to use Facetime, explaining why their phones keep “spamming” them with notifications, and setting up WhatsApp groups that everyone promptly forgets how to use.

We have lived through the greatest technological shift in human history and somehow came out the other side fluent in both analogue nostalgia and digital chaos. Powered by caffeine, sarcasm, and the occasional meme about existential despair, we are not just surviving this transition. We are navigating it with a mix of grit, humour, and sheer stubbornness.

The world before smartphones taught us patience. Tamagotchis introduced us to responsibility, rewinding VHS tapes was a lesson in endurance, and “streaming” was still something rivers did. Now we live in a world where scrolling through TikTok feels like a second job, and accidentally liking a post from 2012 induces instant shame. Life once made us wait for everything: photos to print, movies to buffer, or Mum to finish her call so we could get back online. Today, if a webpage takes more than three seconds to load, it feels like an eternity.

We are the human Venn diagrams of history, beautifully overlapping two wildly different worlds. One side taught us resilience and grit. The other demands we adapt at speeds no one prepared us for. Somehow, we juggle both. Frankly, we deserve medals or at least a strong drink.

The promise was that if we worked hard, got good grades, and followed the rules, life would reward us with stability. Instead, we graduated into financial crises, a housing market that laughed in our faces, and university loans that make mortgages look like bargains. We were told stability was just around the corner, but the ladder of opportunity kept morphing into an obstacle course. Many of us now live in overpriced rentals that feel like dumpsters inexplicably on fire, but with surprisingly good lighting.

Our generation is not just surviving these changes. We are the translators between what was and what will be. We explain memes to our parents while younger generations tell us to “touch grass” or inform us that our favourite emojis are now ancient relics. We are the unofficial tech support for family gatherings and the ones reminding the world that “not everything needs to be labelled as woke.”

People like to call us the bridge between two worlds, though it is less inspiring when you remember that bridges get stepped on. Still, we are the only generation that vividly remembers life before the internet rewired the world and what it became after. Fluent in the deliberate patience of analogue life and the hyperactive chaos of the digital age, we are stitching together the patchwork of this strange future.

We have learned to question everything. The rules we grew up with (work hard, stay quiet, and success will follow) were built for a world that no longer exists. Why accept systems that burn us out to meet someone else’s definition of success? Why let “tradition” excuse inefficiency or injustice? The rules were rigged, so we are rewriting them.

While we question the status quo, we navigate upheaval on every front: recessions, pandemics, political chaos, and a burning planet. Somehow, we kept going. Progress is rarely a straight line. More often, it looks like a messy stumble that somehow keeps moving forward.

Making it work has become our unofficial motto. Sometimes it is sending that overdue email at three in the morning. Sometimes it is cereal for dinner because cooking feels impossible. And sometimes it is simply getting out of bed despite headlines screaming that the world is on fire. We have become masters of the small wins.

Success no longer resembles what we were promised. It is not about owning a house, climbing a career ladder, or getting a gold watch at retirement. It is finding meaning in the everyday, keeping our plants alive for more than two weeks, and prioritising mental health in ways our parents never could. It might not be Instagram-perfect, but it is ours.

We are not waiting for the world to change. We are the ones doing the changing. Systems are being dismantled, patched up, and rebuilt with whatever tools we have on hand. Progress is slow, frustrating, and often invisible, but every small step matters.

Critics love to call us lazy, entitled, or aimless. They are wrong. We want a fairer, more sustainable world, one that feels less like an unending episode of Black Mirror. We are not asking for perfection. We just want enough progress to stop feeling like the punchline of a dystopian joke.

We know how to ask the hard questions. Why does poverty persist in a world with billionaires? Why do we have self-driving cars but not a livable minimum wage? Why does cancelling a subscription still take twenty minutes on hold? These questions may make people uncomfortable, but discomfort is where change begins.

Hustle culture has lost its appeal. The lie that working ourselves to exhaustion will pay off has been exposed. Refusing to tie our worth to productivity is not laziness. It is self-preservation.

We have been told to stay in our lane. Instead, we widen it, build new roads, or just walk through the grass. Progress is not always about grand gestures. It is in the unglamorous moments, like picking up someone else’s rubbish, having difficult conversations, or choosing to care when indifference would be easier.

Humour keeps us going. In a world that often feels completely absurd, laughing at its contradictions is sometimes the only way to keep moving. If we cannot laugh at the ridiculousness of spending twenty minutes on hold only to be transferred again, what else can we do?

Hope is not naive. It is what drives us to take the next step, even when the odds feel stacked against us. If history remembers us, it will not be for perfection. It will be for persistence. We did not wait for permission to act. We questioned, we built, and we did our best to leave the world better than we found it.

So lets keep questioning, building, and laughing at the circus around us. Together, we will keep doing our damned best to turn this beautiful mess into something worth inheriting.

With love, grit, resilience, and just enough coffee to function,
Moo x