Would he be proud of me today? Charles Assisi reflects on his younger self

How easily we surrender our dreams, reinvent ourselves. I feel I owe an apology to the younger me. Thankfully, it’s not too late to start again.

My two daughters belong to Gen Z (the generation now aged 13 to 28).

Look again: A still from the videogame Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (2025). Set across two timelines, it follows a group of young women as they revisit their adolescence.

Lately, they’ve been walking around with digital cameras hanging from one shoulder; the same kinds of Canons and Sonys I had in the’90s.

They like the washed-out light and grainy texture, they say. They have moved past the scores of filters available on each phone and want that first take: the unflattering angle, closed eyes, uneven light. They call it authentic. I initially found it bewildering.

Now in my early 50s, I belong to Gen X. I like to think of ours as the generation that invented personal digital curation. We were the first to sand down every rough edge of our lives before we shared it via a fledgling internet. We presented only the Photoshopped versions of our vacations, our lives, ourselves. We saw it as “winning”.

Yet, when my daughters show me an out-of-focus dog or an underexposed street scene, I can see the earnestness in it. It feels more real. I have begun to wonder: How did reality became something we had to work “backwards” to reach?

Why did we buy into the idea that so much of real life — passion, failure, embarrassment, flawed dreams and imperfect photographs — is cringe?

When I was a boy, for instance, I wanted to be a fast bowler. Not just any bowler, but one with swagger. I was neither fast nor accurate. The ball rarely troubled the batsman. But I thundered in anyway, convinced that flair was half the job.

There is a photograph I still have from those days. I am in my late teens, grinning at the camera, middle finger raised in defiance, steel kada shining on one wrist. A Sikh granthi barely older than me had given it to me at the local gurudwara, where I remember spending a lot of time. There is such frankness, enthusiasm and innocence in that image.

Then, a few years later, I landed my first job, earning about ₹3,500 a month as a sub-editor. I thought I had arrived. I took friends to the then-iconic Gokul bar at Colaba in South Mumbai, paid for beer and chicken chilli, and came home floating. The money smelled like freedom. Only later did I see I was being paid to work 16-hour days for a gruelling man.

Today, when my kids now ask me what I wanted to be when I was their age, I feel like I don’t have the answer. A fast bowler? A writer? A filmmaker?

How have I not though about that all these years?

The truth is I stopped dreaming for the same reason I stopped bowling like I was playing for India at a pivotal juncture: I learned to be ashamed of trying too hard. Thinking back, I can see the turning points.

One friend carried a camera everywhere, saw light in ways I never could. She said she had no patience for my theatrics. Her art was quiet. Mine was noise.

So I stopped bowling. Stopped wearing things I couldn’t explain. Somewhere in that transformation, the version of me that believed momentum and belief could be the same thing went quiet.

Many in my generation did this. “Stop trying too hard”, we told ourselves; or others told us. We called it maturity. Glibness became epidemic. Then we built entire platforms (Orkut, LinkedIn, Twitter) where we could perform curated versions of the selves we had created.

The millennials grew up in a world of these platforms, and added more of their own, with more filters. Is it any wonder Gen Z is walking around with cameras that won’t let them fix anything? It’s the finest kind of rebellion.

Watching my daughters, I feel I owe a kind of apology to the young man who would have once agreed with them; who loved trying and wasn’t daunted by vulnerability. But the truth is, I owe him a harder question: Have I become someone he wouldn’t recognise?

As we celebrate new beginnings, some of us this month, some a couple of months from now, perhaps it’s worth looking back to ask: What kindness can I extend to the younger me? What parts of that younger person can I pick up, restore and re-attach?

Because it isn’t too late to start again.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)