Born on the Seam: A Gen-Z reflection on Curiosity and Exploration
by Emma Hoyhtya | Founder, Mosaic Performing Arts
I was born in 2000, and I've always said I'm grateful for the timing. I rewound VHS tapes. I had a cassette player in my room. I watched my mom get her first smartphone and treated it like a minor miracle. Getting computer time at school was a novelty, and when Netflix and music streaming arrived, they felt like genuine gifts rather than utilities. Instagram showed up when I was 13 - and I have screenshots to prove it, braces and all.
I say all of this not to be nostalgic, but because I think something important happened to the kids who grew up right at that seam. We remember the before. We know what it felt like to not know something and just… sit with it.
Being a part of the Finnovation Fellowship has put me in rooms with people I deeply admire - people who interpret the world in ways that make me slow down and actually look at myself. One of the things I keep returning to is how much being the first generation truly raised on the internet has shaped the way I think, lead, and measure my own worth. Not in a doom-and-gloom way. But in a way I think is worth naming.
Here's the anecdote that's been sitting with me. I got my start in performing arts education as a middle school theater director - sophomore year of high school, which is a whole other story and one thing I always tell parents who are worried about their kid not getting the role they wanted is this: in a world where their child can Google anything they want to know, they cannot Google "does my director think I'm talented?" That gap, that space of not knowing, used to feel like an invitation. An opening. Now, for a lot of kids, it feels like a threat.
Not knowing has shifted from being exciting to feeling unsafe. And I don't think that's just a kid problem.
The skill I've been working hardest on - in my business, and honestly in the therapy room too - is changing my goal from nothing is wrong to nothing needs to change. The difference matters more than it sounds. One is about how things look on the outside. The other is about whether the foundation underneath me is solid enough that when things don't land perfectly, I'm still okay.
This is genuinely hard when you've been raised to document and share. Because doing things by your own playbook means running the risk that you can't post a perfect final product on Instagram. It means doing something in a "not quite optimized" way and letting it exist anyway. It means the process - the messy, unglamorous, nobody's-watching process - has to be enough.
And I think for a lot of us who grew up online, that's the frontier. Not hustle culture. Not burnout. Just learning to do good work in the quiet, without the metric telling us it mattered.
I'm still figuring it out. But being in this fellowship, surrounded by people who are asking the same questions with more wisdom than I have, makes me think we're asking the right ones.
About the Author
Emma Hoyhtya
Emma Hoyhtya is a mission-driven leader and social impact entrepreneur dedicated to stabilizing the creative economy by investing in the "whole person" behind the art. As the Founder and Executive Director of Mosaic Performing Arts, Emma leads a hybrid venture that provides elite technical instruction to students across the Twin Cities while professionalizing the career path for teaching artists. By creating a "fixed point" of financial dignity, Mosaic Performing Arts ensures the excellence of the art and the long-term health of the artist.
