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My mother, for instance, actively tried to fast-track our childhood and adolescence. She wanted us to behave like functional adults, and so she treated us as such. That sense of early responsibility was her way of protecting us: she wanted us to understand that, unlike millions of children around the world, my brother and I were born with the responsibility—and the burden—of upholding her hopes, and those of an entire country. A nation stripped of all its rights. That is why we Sahrawis are born old.

Over the years, what surprised me the most was realising this upbringing wasn’t just something particular to my mother. As I approached adulthood, I lived alongside other youngsters who felt the same way: they had been born old. That famous proverb, “youth, divine treasure,” felt like a stale metaphor from a different period, to us who were already exhausted and anxious, living in chronic uncertainty.

Where I was born, civil rights are still a distant prospect: material rights are but the priority—what people in Spain now call “las cosas del comer” (food concerns). Many of those I grew up with left the country as soon as they finished their degrees. Gradually, the town I was raised in became emptied of youth.

Photo_ Mark Bonica_ CC BY 2.0

With this piece, I hope to let my personal experience resonate with other realities and help the reader understand that youth is a broad notion—one that changes a lot depending on where and under what conditions one is brought to this world. To be born under occupation, as a refugee, as the child of migrants, or simply in one neighbourhood instead of another, profoundly shapes what it means to “be young”. In fact, my youth was hardly that of my twin brother’s, despite being born on the same day and into the same cultural and political context—simply because he is a boy, and I am a girl.

A Faucet in the Desert: New Forms of Digital Socialisation

Like that film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it feels as though most of my generation was born old: with the price of environmental debt already looming over us, precarious jobs as our only certainty, anxiety settling in before we even turned 20… They told us that youth was meant for dreaming, and yet we had to learn how to survive.

In 2002, when I first began travelling to Spain under a hosting programme, many of us children from Sahrawi refugee camps came only to spend a summer away from the extreme heat. We arrived excited to try new flavours, eat different things, and bring souvenirs back to our families. I was lucky enough to be hosted by a family with substantial purchasing power, from a town in Alicante full of factories and entrepreneurial spirit. Although at the time, to me, every Spanish person seemed wealthy. I had the impression that the whole town—even those who didn’t live in that enormous house I stayed in—enjoyed the same pleasures at the very least. My host mother’s friends had weekly routines for playing tennis, meeting for breakfast, and going to the cinema.

On any given summer day, that house would fill up with couples, friends of my host parents, who came round to share a meal. The day after, over 20 young friends of my host sisters would repeat the same ritual, and so it would go on and on until summer drew to a close. When August arrived, we would set off as a family, doing the rounds and visiting friends who owned flats by the sea or cottages in some remote corner of Spain. We could join as many as five families, including all their children of different ages, in the same house.

My fundamental childhood wishes starkly contrasted with that setting: “I want a faucet for my mum” was the first thing I asked for. I’ll never forget the day they took me to buy a one to bring back to the Sahara—nor the huge disappointment that took over me after realising water didn’t just endlessly flow from. That was the moment I glimpsed the importance of the system and infrastructure needed to have water at home.

As I hadn’t achieved that goal, I set my sights on the next one: “I want a cow for my mum.” I’d never seen one, but I often heard my mother say it was her dream, since they were gentle animals that produced a lot of milk. When I saw one for the first time—that massive animal—I realised it would be impossible to take it all the way to our refugee camps. What worried me most, though, was what the cow would eat, considering that no trees grew there.

Ultimately, I settled on an even more ambitious goal: “I want a million euros.” My host mother and her friends laughed, but in my mind, all Spanish people were still rich. Our host mother gifted us a ceramic piggy bank to teach my twin brother and me the value of money and saving. We kept it by the entrance of the house and, every time someone visited, they would drop in a coin. To me, every euro felt like a million. By the end of the summer, we had collected €300—an amount that substantially supported my mother in caring for us during the harsh winters of the Hamada, the Algerian desert.

In 2007, I had the chance to stay throughout the entire winter under the hosting scheme, so I could continue my studies. That initial two-month summer experience gave way to a much greater challenge: attending school with children I didn’t know, with whom I could barely communicate, and with whom, on the surface, I seemed to have almost nothing in common. I would spend hours reading encyclopaedias just to be able to do my homework. At home, they had encyclopaedias bigger than I was, filled with all the world’s knowledge, with pictures and maps that looked hand-drawn. In towns like that, the internet was still something of a myth.

Facebook, founded in 2004 in the United States, began gaining ground in Spain around 2008–2009, especially among university students and young adults. Its more minimalist design and global reach soon overtook Tuenti, marking the transition to a new kind of digital socialisation—one that would forever change how young people relate to notions like intimacy, identity, and community.

The Financial Crisis and the Butterfly Effect

Those winters allowed me, little by little, to really get to know Spanish society and gradually understand that working-class families in Spain not only had many of their material needs met, but could also afford the occasional treat: holidays at the beach or skiing trips over Christmas.

On television, there was constant talk of advances in civil rights. At the time, under the leadership of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain underwent significant social transformations: equal marriage, the Historical Memory Law, the Gender Equality Law… But it was also a period marked by the outbreak of the financial crisis.

The words ecjoed most often across all TV channels—my primary source for learning Spanish—were “crisis,” “economic crisis,” and “recession.” The few times I managed to call my family in the refugee camps, I tried translating that word into my mother tongue. Frightened, my mother would pray and try to reassure me. None of us understood back then that an economic crisis in Spain could have a direct impact on international aid. Those €300 I managed to save each year were beginning to not be enough. Crises, I later realised, work like the butterfly effect: a financial flutter in Europe can mean a harsher winter in the desert.

During the years of the crisis, it became increasingly common for young Spaniards of my generation to move to England for work, drop out of university because they could no longer afford it, or juggle their studies with low-paid weekend jobs. The collective message sent slowly began to normalise the disappearance of the Spanish middle class, and even to romanticise certain forms of precarity. Yet, at the same time, many of my host parents’ friends still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that even they could lose their jobs, and that perhaps their children would not be able to enjoy their financial support, to go to university or to afford the deposit to rent a flat.

That memory left a deep scar on my teenage years and early adulthood. In a way, being poor hurt—and embarrassed—me. Perhaps that’s why I could relate so closely to the collective numbness that was beginning to take hold in Spain when, almost overnight, many could not even afford holidays anymore, could no longer save, access higher education, find work or earn a decent wage. They went from a relatively stable life to one of hardship, simply trying to make ends meet.

Soon after, the more austere and economically liberal right came to power in Spain, with Mariano Rajoy as Prime Minister. Social cuts and austerity policies marked his leadership. Getting a permanent job became something of a myth: the dream for many among the young was to find precarious work abroad, particularly in England. Upon returning, they would complain about the racism they experienced from the English.

What could I tell any of them, when many of those complaining about xenophobia had behaved in exactly the same way towards me? At least they could move freely across Europe and travel to whichever country they liked. Yet, despite everything, we had more in common than I realised at the time.

Photo_ YouthQuake Live_ CC BY 2.0

Many of my university peers had to take on the burden of paying off their parents’ abusive mortgages, after seeing them lose their jobs at the age of fifty and being unable to find other posts. Others witnessed their homes go into foreclosure, ending up in the hands of yet another bank. At that precise moment, the children of the Spanish financial crisis became parents. They began to worry about the material conditions of the generation that preceded them. They tried to pile up degrees and PhDs to apply for those competitive public service calls offering 50 positions for 50.000 applicants.

The conditions were ripe for the majority to start identifying their peers, sons and daughters of the working class, as adversaries, rather than pointing the finger at the economic elites.
That generation, too, was failed by the absence of a strong state. The media dubbed them the “Ni-nis” (neither studying nor working), thus cementing the most neoliberal and divisive concept in the history of class struggle: meritocracy—“I have this because I deserve it, because I worked for it”— as if others hadn’t worked just as hard as you, or even more.

As austerity advanced, the rise of Twitter—now X—alongside Facebook and Instagram gave way to an increasingly interconnected digital society. The internet became much more affordable, and those calls to my mother, which had once been prohibitively expensive, became free—I could simply make them using WhatsApp. The dizzying pace of digital transformation was visible in something as simple as my host mother’s holiday photos: at first, there were just a few, scanned and saved on a floppy disk; later, I taught her to burn them onto a CD, and storage possibilities multiplied; then came the USB stick and, suddenly, “the cloud”. Like many others, she never had the time to keep up with so much change. It would have taken non-stop digital training just to keep up with such ever-updating technology.

Perhaps because of the dazzling speed of technological progress, I decided to study computer engineering. With the arrival of the Bologna Process and its strictness regarding class attendance, poor students like me had few options for combining study and work. Like many of my classmates, I would defer modules to the September remedials to afford my tuition. When it came to job-hunting, I was always faced with the same questions and answers: “You don’t have experience,” “Are you a legal resident? ” “Spaniards first.” I was once paid €3/hour working in a factory where, before the crisis, I’d been earning €10.

Power became more fragmented, but the country was heading towards a more genuine democracy. Together with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Unidas Podemos formed the first coalition government in the democratic history of the country. The hopes and the anger stemming from the streets had finally reached the institutions. There was a renewed commitment to advancing the social rights once spearheaded by Zapatero and to dignifying work. The labour reform driven by Yolanda Díaz drastically reduced precarious, short-term contracts. It made permanent contracts the norm, while the steady rise of the Minimum Wage—reaching €1,134 in 2024—improved the lives of thousands. This new generation of political leaders, many of whom were former social activists, did not solve all structural problems. Still, they took a tangible step forward for younger and more precarious generations.

While it’s often said that being in government wears you down, it was the relentless media and judicial persecution that wore down many of the MPs and young progressive leaders who had entered the institutions. To top it all off, the entire population suddenly found itself in lockdown from one day to the next.

“Let Us Dream!” Collective Rage and the Digital Agoraa

After the 2008 financial crash, COVID lockdowns would constitute the second major event in recent history, forever marking global youth. A generation that had already normalised the idea of having to take care of itself as well as of its parents throughout the worst economic crisis in living memory was suddenly also faced with war, inflation, and a global pandemic.

Even before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, many youth were already using social media for more than just keeping in touch with friends or relatives, flirting, or posting pictures. They had begun to debate and share opinions in the digital agora. This generation had witnessed how social movements and collective anger had self-organised during the Occupy protests through Twitter, and was now attending to the emergence of new platforms: TikTok, BeReal… They were starting to lead public opinion, commenting on news stories and launching podcasts.

Big tech companies had been experimenting for years, gamifying content and studying behavioural patterns to foster greater addiction to their platforms. Being an influencer was already a legitimate job: some private universities even advertised master’s degrees with slogans such as “become an influencer,” selling a dream only truly accessible to a very privileged few.

In a parallel reality, young Sahrawis dealt with the outbreak of war in our homeland. The youth of my native continent faced the grim necessity of leaving everything behind and heading to the front lines. In my case, and in that of many others, we felt responsible for confronting the deafening media silence by speaking out on social media. These platforms not only brought us closer to our families, they were also our window to the world—one through which we could speak about what was happening in our country.

Unlike the Palestinian youth, Sahrawis were newcomers to the digital agoras. They had little experience and very few followers. This was partly because many were already consumed by the demands of the Spanish migration bureaucracy. But when a progressive government aligns with the very power occupying your land, normalising the violation of your human rights… that fury—the fury of thousands of Sahrawis in Spain and in the refugee camps—fuelled protests across the entire country. Still, unlike their parents, these young Saharawis didn’t know that no war is won in just five days. Months passed, and the euphoria faded.

Many stopped taking to the streets, becoming exclusively social media activists. But they weren’t producing ideas, or consistent podcasts, nor did they have easy access to mainstream media—which always preferred to hand the mic to a Spanish talking head. They were reduced to Twitter hooligans. And yet, I don’t blame them: it’s hard enough to go through migration, to study, to work—and on top of all that, to take responsibility for a conflict you’ve inherited. But their frustration reflects the broader reality of contemporary youth: a deep distrust of institutions, a lack of political leadership, and ever more precarious living conditions. The youth of this quarter-century cannot imagine a possible future; they are aged before their time, exhausted, and without a guiding light to follow.

Many young people have come to find refuge in social media—not only to create content, but to become role models, both for themselves and for their communities. They have managed to harness the potential of technology to build digital spaces for thought. And yet, what many still fail to realise is that technology, far from being neutral, always has someone behind it—designing it, controlling it, manipulating it.

Conclusions

In October 2022, Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, completed the $44 billion purchase of Twitter. This acquisition became one of the most talked-about episodes in recent digital platform history, not only because of Musk’s own contentiousness, but due to the political, social, and technological implications of the change in ownership.

From the outset, Musk insisted that his interest in Twitter was not financial, but ideological: he championed “freedom of expression” as a core principle, claiming that the previous Twitter had become a censorious platform. However, following the purchase, his decisions sparked widespread controversy: he fired thousands of employees, dismantled content moderation teams, reinstated accounts previously suspended for hate speech—such as Donald Trump’s—and altered key policies on verification and visibility.

Much like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it feels as though many of today’s young people were born in reverse: we began life with a maturity forced upon us, burdened with inherited responsibilities and the awareness that the world was not waiting with open arms—but with bills to pay, wars to denounce, and rights still to be won. We were born old—not because we wanted to be, but because there was no other option.

Because when you are born under occupation, as a refugee, in marginalised neighbourhoods or in households where love coexists with scarcity, childhood is rushed through and youth becomes a trench. The young generations of this quarter-century have lived in reverse: carrying emotional old age upon our backs, longing to return to something essential—play, community, tenderness—as a possible destiny to hope for. Yet, unlike that film’s protagonist, we cannot afford to unlearn the world: we must build a new one.

A world where being young does not mean surviving the algorithm or competing for the attention of a system that wants us isolated, fragmented, doomscrolling our lives away, far from any collective organisation. A world where one doesn’t have to be born an adult to be heard, where childhood and youth are protected, not sacrificed on the altar of capital or geopolitics.

To reach that future, dreaming alone is not enough; we must organise. We must abandon the nostalgia for lost time and build new ones, together. Because despite the exhaustion, the precarity, and the emotional exile, global youth still holds the seed of a new world. And perhaps there is still time to begin again and reverse this story—not by growing old, but by making our collective desires young again.

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