“I want to be famous. Like, on YouTube.” “Like, an influencer?” “Yeah, kinda, like a famous person on YouTube who is rich from doing cool stuff.”

This is a conversation I’ve had, and apparently too many of my friends have had - some version of, at least - with kids and teens in the past few years.

The jokingly older person refrain is, “They don’t know how this works,” and the honest answer in the form of question inevitably is, “but I don’t know what to do about that, either?”

I don’t think it’s all that different from wanting to be a professional athlete or a rock star when I was a kid, though.

I wanted to be something I thought was cool. Money for nothing and your kicks for free. Throw in some free chicks too and - sounded pretty great to young Matt.

You don’t realize how hard that is until you start trying to do all the things that would get you there though.

You sit down with the guitar and nothing happens that’s anything like what’s happening on MTV.

So you practice, grind out some magazine tabs in private, then play them for friends or family to light encouragement and shoulder shrugs.

And you gradually learn the difference between a person who is something and a person who does something.

I go back to the John Boyd question all of the time: “Do you want to be someone? Or do you want to do something?”

Maturity comes with asking it. Role models matter, tremendously. But, role models at the celebrity level aren’t the be all end all.

They can tell us what’s possible, but then we have to walk into the wall of what’s achievable on our own, and then the role models who actually matter in our lives hopefully are present or accessible in some way.

Which, the last part is the most important bit, as I write this down.

You don’t want to wish you could, pardon the expression, get your money for nothing and your chicks for free, then find out you can’t, and somehow end up in the manosphere, alone in a basement on a computer, angry at the world and fueled by people making money off of your angered attention.

That’s a REAL thing. That’s a big difference from me not getting to be an athlete or a ballplayer or a rock star. More on that in a second.

For everyone concerned about kids who just want to grow up to be YouTubers: you know that’s (probably) not going to happen. Your job is to encourage them to try. Your job is to let them potentially succeed, or more likely, fail, either in the most boring and quiet ways, or spectacularly.

Then, after the frustration and pain starts to subside, you have to welcome them back in.

You can’t outsource that part. Ahem. It’s on us - and everybody who laughs about what we do with the kids who want to be YouTubers and whatever else.

The goal here is not to let them get sucked into the new places that pray on dejection and failure.

The antidote is for us adults to be respectably boring humans who are engaged in healthy micro-communities of our own who celebrate the youngins who take big swings and give them a social safety net to return to, so we can tell them about our attempted shots too.

I wanted to be a baseball player, at a time John Kruk was saying, “Lady, I’m not an athlete, I’m a ballplayer,” and by the time Little League was ending I realized I had nothing on some more talented kids so my focus shifted to music, until it shifted again in my 20s, and thank the gods there were real people all along the way, so that I didn’t end up in some weird sub-reddit sub-universe without real life friends.

Celebrate people who are something.

Celebrate people who did something and now are something else.

Celebrate the doing, and the trying and failing and missing that comes alongside the celebrity-level execution, and remember - it’s our shared humanity at the bookends that keeps us humans, human.

Do something. Become someone. Do something else.

Normalize humanity in all the ways and don’t let strangers on the internet do that for you.

Pretty please.