The Hidden Cost of Playing It Safe

Is it because somewhere along the way, they learned that showing themselves to the world was not safe?

And then a second question followed. Is that even entirely true? Is it always fear? Or do some people simply not want to be seen, choosing this kind of life deliberately, on their own terms?

Both things are true. And the difference between them matters more than we tend to acknowledge.

What I do know is that 20 years ago, staying invisible was a workable strategy. You could keep your head down, study hard, do solid work, build a decent life, and no one questioned it. The system had enough structure to carry you along if you let it, and the majority of people successfully got through with this formula. But now the world has changed entirely. And we need to talk about it.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Total federal student loan debt stands at $1.696 trillion as of December 2025, a record high, with the average federal student loan balance at $39,633 per borrower. That figure has more than tripled since 2006. And perhaps the most telling number of all: 51% of those who took out student loans regret borrowing money to go to college, and 43% regret going to college altogether.

These are the numbers of a generation that was told the path was straightforward, but Millennials and Gen Z were not lucky enough to get the full taste of that kind of life. Instead, they discovered that the promise did not hold the way it once did. And now, before they have even finished paying off what that promise cost them, a second disruption has arrived. Artificial intelligence is restructuring entire industries, eliminating entry-level roles that once served as the first rung on the ladder, and making it genuinely unclear what a stable career looks like for the next ten years. The path that was already expensive is now also uncertain. And no one has a clean answer for what comes next.

When COVID hit, social media became the place where an entire world processed its frustration, connected with people who understood it, and began to build things from scratch. Something changed in how we think about visibility and what a career can look like. With just 465.7 million users in 2020, TikTok has grown to around 2.14 billion total users globally as of 2025.

The platform gave ordinary people without connections, without family money, without a clear professional route a way to be seen and, for some, a way to build something real.

Forbes' 2025 Top Creators List estimated that the top 50 content creators earned nearly $853 million cumulatively, up 18.5% from 2024, with a combined following of more than 3.37 billion people. MrBeast, who has topped the Forbes list for four consecutive years, earned $85 million in 2025 alone. Erika Kullberg, a lawyer turned personal finance creator, made the list for the first time. So did Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer who creates educational videos for 80 million followers and runs an entire subscription business from it, the comedy duo Rhett & Link, who have hosted Good Mythical Morning on YouTube for over fifteen years, and many other people who built entire businesses from a phone and an idea.

These are not anomalies. They are signals.

The Question That Has No Clean Answer

I am not saying everyone should become a content creator. I am not saying that visibility and success are the same thing, or that showing up online is the same as building something meaningful. I am genuinely unsure about all of it. I still believe you cannot replace a decent education. And we do not know whether this wave will continue or burst the way the dot-com bubble did in 2000.

What I am saying is that the question of whether to be seen—and how, and where, and on whose terms—has become one of the most consequential questions a person can ask right now. And most of us are asking it without much guidance, in a landscape that changes faster than anyone can map it.

I think about this constantly as a mother.

From time to time I find myself passing on the old message to my daughter, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without realising it. Learn something practical first. Be sensible. Be yourself later, once the foundations are in place. I do it because I am afraid for her financial future, and because the world I came up in taught me that following the path everyone follows was the only safe one. Whether I want it or not, she is already watching a world that does not reward that calculation the way it once did.

She sees people her age on YouTube. She asks when she will get her own phone. She wants to be part of it. And I find myself navigating something I had not anticipated: how to raise a child who can handle digital life without being consumed by it. How to encourage her to develop a real life without handing her over to platforms where I give up the care and the context. How to show her that being seen is not the same as being liked.

There are no clean lines here. And I think pretending otherwise is part of the problem.

This edition of The EcoLeader looks at what it costs to stay hidden. In work, in life, and in the long, unremarkable erosion that happens when you keep telling yourself the right moment is still coming. It looks at what the courts have now confirmed about the platforms our children are using. And it addresses something most people never say out loud. The tiredness that comes not from doing too much, but from spending years being less than you actually are.

I wrote one of the pieces in this edition because I had no other way to say what I needed to say. It took me a long time to get there. I hope it finds you somewhere useful.