This article brings together literature and perspectives that have evolved during the last decade on issues of social and emotional aspects of learning in a digital age. This topic points to some core challenges and worries of contemporary social developments within digitalized societies, and ways of perceiving future developments of how we conceptualize learning and education within and beyond formal schooling to better provide for ways of engaging young learners. The aim is to address some emerging issues on the importance of digital social and emotional skills (D-SEL) relevant for our understanding of learning and education in contemporary and future societies. We use developments in selected countries (Norway, Czech Republic, USA and Japan) as examples to discuss how social and emotional skills have entered educational systems. The findings show that not only knowledge in a cognitive sense is important for human life, but also people's approach to life and their ability to adapt to changes as digital social and emotional ways of learning.