Alternative Editorial: It's Hard To Be Young

When are the Youth not young? When they are the only adults in the room. 

We’ve been mourning all week, in the wake of the news that 45% of young people the world over are suffering from climate anxiety. Not just like a dim threat—somewhere on the horizon of a future that never comes. But the kind that affects their daily life and ability to function. This report was not extrapolated from a casual street test, but taken from surveying 10,000 16-25 year olds across 10 countries, analysed by academics from the UK and US, now under peer review by the Lancet.

According to the same report, an even higher number of young people (75%) feel ‘fear of the future’ and 64%  do not believe their governments are doing enough. They feel betrayed.

We use the word mourning carefully. It’s not for the end of the planet specifically – although that lurks constantly. But more for the loss of a kind of childhood and youth most of us will recall nostalgically – even if we didn’t actually experience it that way. An idea of the carefree and irresponsible years in which young people could simply submit themselves to what was understood to be a formal education while also getting on the roller coaster of social self-development. 

Adolescence in reality, is a trial for everyone: if it wasn’t, we couldn’t become adults as a result. But looking back (for anyone premillennial), it seems so easy compared to what young people have to cope with today. 

Due to their connection with the internet, their education is coming from innumerable directions, the inputs often contradicting each other. What their teachers say in the classroom probably takes up much less of their proper attention – and hence development – than what they read on social media generally. In addition, their many forms of peer to peer learning, from WhatsApp to Discord will give them the sort of advanced information bubble their parents could not have imagined ‘back in the day’.

At the same time, we might envy them. How many of us felt trapped by the old system even as children? How rigidly were we held in vertical pathways to adulthood? Often we were obliged to accept measures of merit that belied multiple forms of intelligence never acknowledged by teachers or parents. Where the ability to hold numbers and facts in our memory counted for more than the ability to make sense of complex realities.. Where emotional intelligence was seen as ‘soft’ (meaning insubstantial) before soft skills became the must have capacity of the more recent past. And the kinds of skills that make for good entrepreneurship – creativity, imagination, courage – were relegated to arts and sports, regarded as non-cognitive development.

In many ways millennials onwards have benefitted enormously from the internet enhancing their curiosity, playfulness and ability to perform without old-style grading. To make friends and allies with people they might never meet in the classroom. In other ways, their existential safety has been massively compromised. From porn to fake news, their mental health is under constant attack. 

Even so this report shows us they can see more clearly than generations before. As Tom Burke from the think tank e3g told BBC News: "It's rational for young people to be anxious. They're not just reading about climate change in the media - they're watching it unfold in front of their own eyes."

It would surely be wrong to characterise this anxiety as something wrong, needing to be fixed, any more than hoping a child would stop worrying about a car coming straight at them on a busy road. We have to help them respond well, become response-able.

Of course climate change is not a car moving at speed towards you… even if it feels like it. Simply getting out of the way is not enough. We need the kind of longer term strategies that, extending the metaphor, mean stopping the traffic altogether or giving the pedestrian alternative ways to be on their journey. In any case, we need to be able to equip that individual who faces oncoming danger—able to hold their nerve and be creative in a moment of crisis. 

Instead, too many young people are reacting by shutting down their own expectations of life. Four out of ten are reporting hesitancy to have children. They’re partly believing the future depends on population control: they partly don’t want to bring their own next generation into a further deteriorated environment. Again, their logic is rational, but tragic. What does it do to their physical health to be looking at the future with constant dread? 

Looking at the context within which these young people can become response-able, the mainstream narrative and policy environment is not encouraging. As we head for COP26, none of the G20 governments are meeting the targets they set in Paris in 2017. Yet the government and its soft power machine want you to believe they have your back. 

In his now much acknowledged style Boris Johnson wants Britain to be the leader in the climate challenge. Not by actually doing anything useful to warrant that position. The UK recently re-opened a coal mine to meet energy urgency. It continues with accelerating road and airport plans that defy the carbon counters. 

Possibly Johnson’s worst action this week has been to link up with Joe Biden and Scott Morrison to create a new anti-China security deal with the US and Australia, which commits billions to nuclear submarine development. On top of the increased danger to global safety this creates, this crude attempt to lead the world has decreased the international sphere’s ability to work together in the face of climate urgency. 

Not only is Europe’s integrity deeply challenged, but our hope of working well with China may be fatally compromised. This at a time when China has put its heavy weight behind real time climate progress: read the evidence. 

Instead of leading us out of danger, Johnson has becomes the leader of narrative manipulation. This week he made new cabinet appointments that reveal a commitment to the culture wars: Liz Truss in the Foreign Office and Nadine Dorries as the Minister of Culture, both self-identifying as ‘anti-woke’. For those who don’t know much about this essentially fake polarisation of attitudes towards social justice, it plays out in the media as being ‘at war’ with young people concerned with the climate, racism and gender difference. 

At the extreme you see GB News with ‘Woke Watch’ (whose anchor, Andrew Neil, has since resigned). Or The Sun carrying news about Ricky Gervais, whose new TV show goes to whole new levels to shock the ‘snowflakes’ – meaning those who melt easily in the heat of this moment. Some political pundits equate this behaviour with populism, or right wing politics – further polarising the public and confusing many progressives who themselves fall foul of the worst aspects of ‘wokism’, such as cancel culture. It’s an adolescent mess of adult making. No wonder the youth feel lost and betrayed.

Is there an alternative? Yes: look away from that mainstream narrative and draw attention to more hopeful signs of the future for our young. It starts with a shift in perspective: one that defies the notion that a difficult path is, de facto, an undesirable one. We all thrive on heroes journeys which uniformly see challenge as the condition within which strength is forged. Many of us are already looking back at the days of beautiful summer vacations and headless consumerism as simply deluded and the reason we have such a learned helplessness around emergency. Not that everything has changed since then, but we were so unaware of the reality – like smokers, looking cool with the right brand of poison. A reality incidentally, that always relied upon massive inequality to keep it going.

As the research shows, today’s youth is generally more savvy. Not all are capable of responding in creative ways, but they are more ripe for transformation. The work of Greta Thunberg and Fridays for the Future has politicised millennials – including those who disagree with her recipe for action. 

Not all is protest: some are very capable of tackling problems within their power to change – meaning at the narrative and educational level. Check this youth education project, designed by youth YouthxYouth that has become a movement of young people resourcing their own learning journey. More on them in a future blog.

In our experience, what is noticeable about the young people who have the capacity to actively build is that they invite collaboration and support from the elders. Specifically those elders who are willing to acknowledge their generation as having a different – unique – set of conditions in which to operate. Not only are these youth facing a future we never had to face, but they have tools we never had at their disposal. They will be able to imagine and manifest futures their parents cannot. For that reason, their intelligence is invaluable to everyone in the climate battle. 

At A/UK, we call this generation of response-ables RegenA. And we get behind them with all our resources. This means taking part, for example, in Ubiquity University’s launch of a master degree in Regenerative Action which they intend to help emerge a Global Regeneration Corps – in the manner of John Kennedy’s Global Peace Corps of the past. This is not simply a top-down teaching programme, but an established platform enabling young people to set their own pace, frame their own journey and take the lead for the future. See also, Force of Nature, helping young people to “turn eco-anxiety into agency”.

Of course, it’s early days for this kind of belief and investment in young people to be the norm – or is it? Given their ability to generate fractal change – engaging and replicating with viral possibility – who knows how fast it can grow.? On a good day, we might even be excited.