Here’s a contrast worth sitting with.
If you had been a teenager in 1985, the stupid things you said, the embarrassing photos you were in, the arguments you got into, the half-formed opinions you tried out — almost all of it would have quietly disappeared. A few photos might survive in family albums. A few stories might be remembered by friends. The rest would simply evaporate. Your teenage self would become, for the rest of your life, a figure you alone really remembered, slowly edited by memory into whichever version of yourself you wanted to carry forward.
If you’re a teenager now, the situation is different. Substantially different. The things you post, the messages you send, the photos you take, the comments you leave — most of it is stored somewhere, probably permanently, by companies whose core business is to keep that data for as long as it might be valuable. The argument you had online at fourteen may be findable, by anyone who cares to look, when you’re forty. The photo from a party you’d rather forget may be hosted on a server long after the moment has lost any meaning to you.
The question of how this should change behaviour — yours and your generation’s — has been surprisingly undertaught. What follows isn’t a scolding about being careful online. That advice is ubiquitous and mostly unhelpful. The more interesting question is what it actually does to a person to have their teenage self permanently available, and what the research suggests about how to hold that situation honestly.
The right to be forgotten
In 2014, the European Court of Justice issued a ruling that acknowledged what has since been called the right to be forgotten. The ruling, in a case involving a Spanish man whose name still produced old foreclosure records when searched online, established that in certain circumstances, European citizens could require search engines to remove links to personal information that was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”
The ruling was narrow — it didn’t remove the underlying information, only its findability through search — and it has produced decades of legal and practical argument about how to implement it. But it established, in European law, a principle that’s almost entirely absent elsewhere: that people have some legitimate interest in not being permanently defined by old information about themselves.
Outside Europe, the concept has very limited legal force. In most of the world, including Australia, the United States, and most of Asia, whatever exists online about you is largely yours to deal with, without recourse to any institutional mechanism for having it forgotten. The information persists. Your ability to move past it depends on its gradual displacement by newer information, not on any right to require its removal.
This is a genuinely new situation, and the legal and cultural frameworks for it haven’t caught up.
The research on possible selves
The relevance of this to teenage life is clearer when you understand a specific line of psychological research on what the American social psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius called possible selves.
Markus and Nurius’s 1986 paper argued that a significant part of human identity consists not of who we currently are, but of who we imagine we might become. We carry, in our minds, images of the future selves we could grow into — the successful professional, the loving parent, the person who finally got past their early anxieties. We also carry images of the feared selves — the failed person, the lonely person, the version of ourselves we’re trying to avoid becoming.
These possible selves, the research found, are psychologically important. They motivate behaviour. They shape identity. And crucially, they require room to develop — the freedom to try things, including things that might not work out, as part of the experimentation by which a possible self becomes an actual self.
What the permanence of the online record has quietly removed is some of that room. A teenager trying on an identity — a political stance, a subcultural membership, a tentative professional aspiration — could, in previous generations, quietly drop that identity when it stopped fitting, and move on to the next one. In the current environment, the previous identity persists. The feminist phase is still searchable. The libertarian phase is still searchable. The failed YouTube channel, the abandoned blog, the earnest teenage content still exists, waiting to be found by anyone who wants to contextualise a later version of you.
This creates, subtly, a different kind of pressure. Every public statement becomes, in some sense, committed — not easily dropped, not easily reversed, potentially available for use against a future version of you who has moved on from it. The research on identity formation we looked at in an earlier article — Marcia, Arnett, the developmental importance of genuine exploration — suggests this is a real problem. The healthy identity formation process requires room to try and discard. The current environment compresses that room.
The cases that made this visible
Several high-profile incidents over the last decade have shown what permanence of teenage records can produce.
In 2019, a recent high school graduate named Kyle Kashuv had his admission to Harvard revoked after racist messages he had sent at sixteen resurfaced. The messages were genuinely offensive. Kashuv had since become a public advocate on other issues and claimed to have changed his views. Harvard’s decision prompted a significant public argument about whether what someone says at sixteen should follow them indefinitely, and about who gets to decide when someone has sufficiently changed.
This case is well-known. Many others aren’t. The much larger category consists of people whose careers have been quietly damaged by earlier content — a job offer withdrawn after a background check turned up an old tweet, a promotion denied after someone surfaced an archived blog post, a relationship ended when earlier online behaviour came to light. These cases don’t make the news, but they happen constantly, and they represent the ordinary application of what used to be an extraordinary principle.
The point isn’t that all such consequences are unjust. Some are appropriate. Someone who genuinely held and acted on harmful views, and has shown no evidence of change, probably should face some social consequence. The question is how to draw the line between appropriate accountability and the disproportionate punishment of someone for who they were, sincerely, at sixteen — and whether the infrastructure for making that distinction even exists.
What the research would recommend
Taking the developmental and privacy research together, a few working principles emerge that make sense for teenagers and young adults navigating this new terrain.
Treat public posting as commitment, not exploration. The psychological work of exploring possible identities is necessary and healthy. But the public performance of those explorations is something else. The research on identity formation suggests you benefit from trying things privately — in journals, in small trusted groups, in drafts never posted — much more than from trying things publicly, where the trying becomes part of the permanent record.
Preserve some space for the unrecorded. A life where every notable experience is documented loses something specific. Memory itself becomes less necessary, and the parts of experience that don’t photograph well — quiet moments, private conversations, tentative half-formed thoughts — lose their share of your attention. There’s research, still early, suggesting that people who document their lives extensively remember the documented experiences less vividly than they would have otherwise. The camera does the remembering for them. Their actual memory of the event weakens.
Understand the asymmetry in permanence. Some platforms are more permanent than others. Ephemeral messaging services, when actually ephemeral, do what their name promises. Public posts on major platforms essentially never go away — they can be deleted from your profile, but archival services, screenshots, and the platforms’ own databases preserve them indefinitely. Understanding which kind of permanence you’re committing to, for any given piece of content, is worth the small effort it takes.
Don’t argue in permanent places. One of the clearest patterns of online mistakes is people saying things in heated arguments that they wouldn’t have said in reflective moments, and those things becoming part of their permanent record. The research on decision-making under emotional arousal is robust: people make worse decisions when angry, afraid, or sleep-deprived. Platforms that solicit quick responses in emotionally charged contexts — Twitter, comment sections, group chats during conflicts — produce exactly this pattern. The rule most older professionals eventually learn, often after expensive lessons, is: if you wouldn’t say it in a professional document with your name on it, don’t say it online.
The counter-thread worth hearing
Before concluding that permanence is purely a problem, it’s worth acknowledging what permanence also enables.
Accountability has genuine value. A society in which people could simply disappear from their past words would lose something important — the incentive to be careful about what you say, the capacity for victims to bring old harms to light, the mechanism by which public figures can be held to the record of what they actually did. The “right to be forgotten” is in tension with real public interests, and the cultural debate about where to draw the line is legitimately difficult.
Some of what gets called “cancellation” is actually accountability for genuine harm, not the punishment of silly teenage behaviour. People who have caused real harm often benefit from their past being less visible; victims often benefit from it being more visible. The framework of teenage mistakes should be forgotten has sometimes been used to protect behaviour that wasn’t a youthful error but a revelation of character.
And for public figures who seek power, influence or authority, the expectation that their past will be examined isn’t unreasonable. Someone running for office, seeking a leadership role, or claiming moral authority has invited a kind of scrutiny that private individuals haven’t.
So the honest framing is: the permanence of the digital record creates specific developmental and privacy problems, particularly for young people going through the normal process of identity exploration. It also creates specific accountability benefits, particularly for adults who have done things that deserve scrutiny. The challenge is that the current infrastructure applies the same permanence to both — to the fourteen-year-old trying out an edgy political stance and to the public figure who actually caused harm. Building the institutions that could distinguish these is work that hasn’t been done.
What to practise
For a teenager or young adult navigating this, a few specific habits probably help.
Keep serious thinking offline or in private. The journal, the long email to one trusted friend, the voice memo you don’t share — these are genuinely different from the public post. They allow identity exploration without commitment. Most important thinking probably belongs in these forms rather than in public.
Assume every public thing you say will be findable indefinitely. Not to become paranoid, but to match your public voice to a version of yourself you’ll be able to live with. The general test: write public material as if you’ll encounter it again at forty, in a context you can’t predict. The version of you that clears that test is probably the one to express publicly.
When you’ve said something you regret, acknowledge it rather than trying to delete it. The research on reputation recovery suggests that explicit acknowledgement and articulated change work better than silent attempts at erasure. The internet archives things; the internet also generally accepts changed minds, if the change is clearly expressed. What it doesn’t accept is the pretence that past positions didn’t exist.
Don’t mistake the medium for the communication. Texting a friend, messaging in a small group chat, and posting publicly are different kinds of activity, even though they can look similar on the surface. What would be appropriate in one can be inappropriate in another. Learning the difference is a real skill that some people acquire late or not at all.
The question that remains
The most important thing to understand about the permanence of the digital record is that it’s a genuinely new situation, and the norms for it are still being developed. Your generation is, in a literal sense, the first one for whom teenage mistakes will be permanently accessible. Previous generations’ mistakes were absorbed into the forgetfulness of analogue life. Yours won’t be.
This isn’t a reason for paralysis, but it is a reason for some care. The small habits of self-presentation — what you post, where you post it, how you handle moments of emotional heat — compound across a lifetime in ways they didn’t for your parents. The exploration you need to do developmentally can still be done. It mostly needs to be done in places that don’t make a permanent record.
The question to carry, especially if you’ve been building a visible online presence:
The version of you you’re going to become — not who you are now, but who you’ll grow into — would they want this written down?
Key research referenced: the 2014 European Court of Justice “right to be forgotten” ruling (Google Spain v AEPD); Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves” (American Psychologist, 1986); research on digital permanence and career consequences; identity-formation research from James Marcia and Jeffrey Arnett.