I am 21, which is a strange age to write about age.
I am not old enough to complain about the next generation. I am not far enough from childhood to romanticize it properly. But I am old enough to feel something shift.
I remember the sound more than the solve.
The old DaYan ZhanChi hitting the table. The hollow plastic turn. The timer stopping. My eyes going straight to the number.
Twenty seconds.
Not world-class, obviously. Not even close. But impressive enough that you could feel yourself crossing some invisible line. You could scramble the cube, start the timer, and for those few seconds convince yourself that you had touched something rare.
I was 12 or 13 then, obsessed with speedcubing: solving the Rubik’s Cube not as a puzzle, but as a race against your own hands. I remember sitting with a scrambled cube and believing that speed was hidden somewhere inside repetition. You learned an algorithm, forgot it, relearned it, forced your fingers through movements they did not understand yet.
And every once in a while, almost by accident, a solve would feel clean. The turns stopped being separate decisions. The cube blurred. The timer stopped.
You felt faster than yourself.
That feeling stayed with me.
Which is why it feels strange now to see children younger than I was then doing things that make my small miracle look prehistoric.
Not people my age. Not adults who spent decades sharpening their hands. Kids.
Actual kids.
That is what bothers me. Not because I thought I was special. I never thought I was going to be world-class. But because the thing that once made me feel ahead of my age now belongs to people who are not even at the age where I discovered it.
It is strange to be 21 and already have your idea of “young” outdated.
Once I noticed it in speedcubing, I started seeing it everywhere.
In Formula 1, the teenager no longer feels like an intruder on the grid. He feels less like a miracle and more like a project.
Drivers still need talent, obsession, nerve, money, luck. All of it. You cannot spreadsheet your way into Max Verstappen. But by the time a young driver looks sudden to the public, the system has usually been watching him for years.
Karting ladders. Junior academies. Simulators. Telemetry. Onboard footage. Driver coaches. Media training. Fitness programs. Years of being watched before the world knows their names.
Max Verstappen was once so young that his age became part of the shock. After him, the sport literally changed its rules. The prodigy had arrived early enough that the institution had to redraw the line.
The prodigy became a project.
You see the same thing in chess. An 18-year-old world champion still feels extraordinary, but not impossible. He belongs to a generation that did not have to search for the ghosts of old masters in books alone. Those ghosts were evaluated, archived, engine-checked, and waiting on a screen.
In cricket, someone like Vaibhav Sooryavanshi feels like another signal. Even sports we associate with patience and maturity are not immune to this compression.
The old version of young greatness was easier to understand.
There was one boy. One exception. Someone who arrived too early and made everyone else look late.
Sachin was that. Max was that. Magnus was that. Felix was that.
Their age was part of the myth. They were not just great. They were great before they were supposed to be.
But now the feeling is different. It does not feel like one impossible child walking through the door. It feels like the door itself has been moved closer to childhood.
That is what I cannot stop thinking about.
Why are they becoming ready so early?
Access is the easy answer, and it is not wrong. More internet. More coaching. More exposure. Better equipment. Better competition. Better everything.
But access alone does not explain the feeling. Children have always started early in these worlds. F1 drivers have always been in karts before most of us knew what ambition was. Chess prodigies existed long before engines. Even when I was learning speedcubing, there were already tutorials, algorithms, forums, and people much faster than me.
So maybe the question is not: why are children starting earlier?
Maybe the question is: why are they becoming ready earlier?
I think the answer is that the apprenticeship has been compressed.
Earlier generations had to discover more of the path themselves. They had to find the method, test the method, fail with it, improve it, and then maybe pass it down. A lot of greatness was hidden inside people. Inside coaches. Inside local scenes. Inside private conversations. Inside instinct.
Now the path is visible before you even know how rare it is.
A driver grows through telemetry and simulation, not only laps. A chess player inherits engine-approved history, not only old games. A speedcuber enters reconstructions, finger tricks, example solves, rankings, tutorials. Not a puzzle anymore, but an ecosystem.
The child has not secretly become older. The apprenticeship has become shorter.
Maybe that is what progress does. It turns genius into curriculum.
Felix’s lookahead becomes someone else’s warm-up drill. Magnus’s endgame squeeze becomes someone else’s ChessBase file. Verstappen’s impossibility becomes someone else’s career plan.
There is something beautiful about that. Knowledge survives. The best parts of one generation get named, recorded, slowed down, and handed forward.
But there is something sad about it too, because we like to imagine greatness as a private fire. A divine spark. A child born different.
But modern greatness is not only inside the person anymore.
The modern prodigy is surrounded by the accumulated memory of his field. The mistakes have already been made. The methods have been named. The footage is slowed down. The positions are evaluated. The solves are reconstructed.
Earlier, greatness had to find its teachers.
Now the teachers are everywhere.
That is why age barriers fall fastest in fields where feedback is immediate and truth is measurable.
In these worlds, the romance has to survive contact with measurement.
A solve is not “promising.” It is 4.2 seconds. A move is not “interesting.” It loses half a pawn. A lap is not “aggressive.” It is three tenths slower.
The world tells you very quickly whether something works.
But life is not always that kind.
Some fields still resist youth: science, politics, leadership, literature, certain forms of cricketing greatness. These still require accumulation. Not just skill, but judgment. Not just reaction, but memory. Not just performance, but interpretation.
Calculation can be taught earlier. Technique can be drilled earlier. Tactics can be fed into a child before they even understand the history of the game.
But taste is stranger. Judgment is stranger. Wisdom does not announce itself on a timer.
Even in fields that worship youth, the truth can arrive late. A young entrepreneur can look like a genius in year three and a cautionary tale in year seven. Some success is visible instantly. Some success has to survive before it becomes greatness.
That is why I do not think children are simply “better now.” That feels too shallow.
Maybe certain fields have just become better at transferring themselves into children.
The age barrier falls when the miracle becomes a method.
The prodigy used to feel like a miracle because the path was hidden. Now the path is increasingly visible. That does not make the achievement smaller. If anything, it makes the race more brutal.
More children can see the summit now, and more of them are pushed toward it already knowing exactly how far away they are.
A child today is not merely practising. He is ranked, timed, evaluated, compared, clipped, corrected, and measured. The map helps him climb, but it also removes the innocence of not knowing where he stands.
Maybe that is what makes this era strange.
We have not defeated age.
We have optimized childhood.
And I do not know whether to admire that or be afraid of it.
At 21, I am not old. That is the strange part. I am barely out of childhood myself. But I am already old enough to have my idea of “young” outdated.
When I was 12, a 20-second solve felt fast because I did not yet know the full shape of the mountain. I knew the sound more than the scale of it. The cube hitting the table. The timer stopping. The small, stupid joy of thinking my hands had caught up with my ambition.
Now somewhere, a child younger than that version of me has already made that number look slow.
Maybe that is the age barrier now.
Not a wall that one genius breaks through.
The wall did not fall.
It became a syllabus.
Thanks to Harshal Suralkar, Rutik Jadhav, Samarth Narladkar, Remya George and Kiran RY for comments/corrections/discussion