Your Kids Are Training for Jobs That Don't Exist Yet

When you see your kid spending six hours on content that looks like nothing—streaming, gaming, making TikToks, managing Discord servers—you might think they're wasting time.

Consider the alternative: they're training for an economy you can't see yet.

The Skills That Don't Have Names

What does your kid actually do during all that "screen time"?

Content creation. Even casual content creation—editing a video, crafting a post, designing a thumbnail—develops skills in visual communication, audience understanding, and iterative refinement.

Algorithm navigation. Understanding what gets engagement, when to post, how to ride trends—this is market research performed intuitively by millions of teenagers who've never taken a marketing class.

Multi-platform presence management. Different personas for different platforms, different content strategies, different audience expectations. That's brand management across channels.

Parasocial relationship maintenance. Engaging with audiences, building community, creating connection at scale. These are the skills of the emerging creator economy.

Community moderation. Running a Discord server is managing a community—handling conflicts, setting norms, cultivating culture, making decisions about inclusion and exclusion.

Attention arbitrage. Figuring out what captures attention and how to direct it. This is the core competency of the 21st-century economy.

None of these appear on any school curriculum. All of them will matter more than most things that do.

The Job Your Kid Will Have Doesn't Exist

Here's a thought experiment: go back to 2005 and try to explain the job "social media manager" to someone. Or "content creator." Or "influencer marketing specialist." Or "community manager." Or "growth hacker."

These jobs didn't exist. They couldn't be prepared for through traditional education. The people who got them first were the ones who'd been doing adjacent things before the job category crystallized.

Now project forward. What jobs will exist in 2040 that don't exist now?

We don't know. Nobody knows. But we can make educated guesses about the skills that will matter:

• Navigating information environments
• Managing attention (yours and others')
• Creating and curating content
• Building community and network
• Understanding algorithmic systems
• Adapting rapidly to new platforms
• Working with AI tools effectively

Look at what your kid does "for fun." Many of them are developing exactly these skills.

The Hidden Curriculum

School teaches:

• Following instructions
• Memorizing content
• Performing on standardized tests
• Sitting still for long periods
• Respecting institutional authority
• Linear career preparation

The screen teaches:

• Self-directed learning
• Iterative experimentation
• Real-time feedback loops
• Parallel processing
• Navigating distributed authority
• Adaptive skill acquisition

One of these hidden curricula matches the emerging economy better than the other. It's not the one with grades.

The Creator Economy Is Not a Fad

"But most people won't become influencers."

True. Most people also won't become professional athletes, but we don't dismiss youth sports as useless.

The creator economy isn't just about the creators. It's about the entire ecosystem:

• Editors, designers, producers
• Managers, agents, strategists
• Platform operators, moderators
• Tool builders, analytics providers
• Audience researchers, brand liaisons

For every visible creator, there's an invisible team of people with skills developed through exactly the kind of "time-wasting" parents worry about.

And even if your kid never works in the creator economy directly, the skills transfer. Communication, audience awareness, digital fluency, attention management—these matter in nearly every industry that will exist.

The Preparation Fallacy

Traditional education operates on a preparation model: learn these things now, use them later. The assumption is that we know what will be needed.

When change was slow, this worked. Your grandfather could reasonably prepare for a career that would look like his father's. The skills learned in school would still apply decades later.

That's not the world your kid is entering.

The preparation model fails when:

• The content you're preparing becomes obsolete before you use it
• The skills that will matter haven't been identified yet
• The jobs themselves are still being invented
• The pace of change exceeds the pace of curriculum updates

What works instead is learning agility—the ability to learn new things quickly, unlearn outdated things, and transfer skills across novel contexts.

And guess what develops learning agility? Navigating constantly changing digital environments. Adapting to new platforms. Figuring out new systems without formal instruction.

Your kid is training. Just not in a classroom.

What Looks Like Wasting Time

To you, it looks like your kid is:

• Endlessly scrolling TikTok
• Playing video games for hours
• Making content nobody watches
• Talking to strangers on Discord
• Following drama in communities you don't understand

To your kid, they're:

• Learning what captures attention and why
• Developing hand-eye coordination, strategic thinking, and teamwork
• Iterating on creative output with instant feedback
• Building relationships and navigating social complexity
• Understanding how communities form, conflict, and evolve

The activities aren't valuable because they're fun. They're valuable because they develop capacities that will matter in an economy we can't fully see yet.

The Only Preparation That Works

Here's what we actually know about preparing kids for an uncertain future:

Adaptability matters more than specific skills. The ability to learn new things quickly beats having the right skills at any given moment.

Meta-skills beat object-level skills. Learning how to learn, how to navigate new systems, how to find information—these are stable while specific knowledge becomes obsolete.

Network matters. Who you know, who knows you, what communities you're part of—these create opportunities that credentials alone don't.

Digital fluency is baseline. Not coding specifically, but comfort with digital environments, understanding of how platforms work, ability to leverage tools.

Experimentation develops capacity. Trying things, failing, adjusting—this is how skills develop in uncertain domains.

Look at your kid's "wasted" time through this lens. Are they developing adaptability? Meta-skills? Network? Digital fluency? Experimental capacity?

Probably more than you realized.

The Reframe

You can't prepare your kid for a job that doesn't exist. You can only help them develop the capacity to figure it out when it arrives.

Traditional education prepares for a predicted future. Your kid's "time-wasting" might be preparing for an unpredicted one.

The skills they're building don't appear on résumés yet. The jobs they'll apply for haven't been named. The economy they'll work in is still emerging from the same digital substrate they're swimming in right now.

They're not wasting time. They're training.

You just can't see the game yet.

This is Part 8 of the Kids Are Alright series. Next: "Co-Regulation in Chaos."