The future of the forgotten young people: a clash between personal value and work efficiency. Is the pursuit of one's dreams now a utopian goal?
Article written by Sara Schirru for The Young Economist.
What a beautiful youth
that flees nevertheless!
Whoever wants to be happy, either,
there is no certainty about tomorrow.
-Song of Bacchus, Lorenzo de Medici
"I'm afraid. In the morning I wake up and fear rises with me, in the evening I go to sleep and the fear is there, waiting for me under the covers: I'm afraid for my future" quotes a young girl between the pages of Umberto Galimberti's book "The word to young people: dialogue with the generation of active nihilism" (Feltrinelli, 2018)
Fear is a primordial emotion, necessary for our survival, which we can suddenly feel due to an unexpected or imminent danger.
Which fear do young people encounter? The fear of not feeling up to par? Fear of falling behind their peers? Fear of choosing a job solely for your livelihood? Fear of having to give up your dreams for a more profitable job?
Young people today have the same frailties and perhaps the same fears as their predecessors, but they are fighting a completely different battle, set in two different worlds; the social one, which already existed during our predecessors’ time; and the digital one, a new reality of our generation.
Technological evolution, which materialized in the joint achievement of social closeness and distance, has laid the foundations for the struggle between the conquest of a social and digital identity, leading to a vague distinction between reality and imagination.
More and more frequent, even among the youngest generations, the negative emotion known as FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, is already present. To experience FOMO is to feel anxious and excluded from pleasant experiences that peers are living. In this sense, young people with FOMO, have the need of being constantly present in social media. This feeling of discomfort tries to be overcome through the constant use and control of social networks.
According to research carried out by the Scientific Observatory of the non-profit Digital Ethical Movement, 79% of children between 11 and 18 years:
- use social networks for at least 4 hours a day (two months total in a year)
- they unlock the phone 120 times a day
They are thus immersed in another dimension, where each step taken is traced and known in order to be controlled. And you know, when you have control over something, you also have power over it.
According to art. 4 of EU Regulation 679/2016 - GDPR, personal data is any information concerning a natural person, whose identifiers largely coincide with one or more characteristic elements of the identity - physical, physiological, psychic, economic, cultural, and social- of a person.
Companies, therefore, analyze and collect information on profiles, preferences, and contacts which will then be transmitted to other companies for commercial and marketing purposes. Even if all this can be achieved only in compliance with the privacy regulations and by means of the consent given by the user himself (profiling cookies), it is undeniable that the product is the same user. He pays a much higher price than the purchase or use of any other good or service: the sale of his own "fragment" of identity. So, it shouldn't be surprising how a simple electronic device can know a young person more than their own parents.
However, the world they have left to the new generations is not only the digital one but also that of standards, where everything must fit into one measure and one time: all served in a good dish of economic, political, and environmental instability. There are many reasons for concern for the life of the new generations, including the possibility that the achievement of sustainable development (what allows the current generation to meet their needs without jeopardizing the satisfaction of future generations) may still be far away. Just think of the public debt. The public debt of some European countries is very high, in the list of top ten countries with the most national debt, 50% of these is represented by Europe: in 2nd place Greece (€ 332.6 billion ($ 379 billion US)), 3rd was Portugal (€ 232 billion ($ 264 billion US), 4th Italy (€ 2.17 trillion ($ 2.48 trillion US)), 7th Belgium: € 2.17 trillion ($ 2.48 trillion US)), 9th ° Spain (€ 1.09 trillion ($ 1.24 USD)).
The director of the ESM, Klaus Regling (during the annual conference of the European Investment Bank) remarks that the price of the increase in public debt (which will weigh on the next generations) can only be offset and repaid if used in an efficient and conscious way and not with projects with low sustainability and profitability.
But the huge public debt is not the only wavering element.
And if on the one hand, the speed with the connected production efficiency and the technology with the consequent interconnection has guaranteed the progress of the economy, work is no longer just a means of economic and personal realization of the individual, but the means for the realization of the ends of the economic system itself.
The fate of this situation could be destined to change. Since the pandemic, the importance of the combination of private life and working life has been highlighted, developing the renowned phenomenon of the great resignation which developed in America but has also spread to Europe. Voluntary youth resignations are the effect of the non-coincidence between the aims of contemporary economics and the aims of personal self-fulfilment. And so, while the Middle Ages were trapped by the will of God and the power of the Church, the Contemporary World is by the will of the rich and the power of money.
To cope with this, many young people repudiate economic efficiency to safeguard their quality of existence, making the noble, albeit highly risky, choice of pursuing their dreams. After all, as Mattia Marangon, founder of Legolize states, "mental well-being is worth much more than a permanent contract".
And the young man - albeit troubled and confused in finding meaning and making sense of his future - does not give up, this is perhaps due to the maximum physical strength and creative potential that for biological reasons cannot be had in any other period of his own life.
There are many young people who decide to fight for their future, reaching little big goals.
This is the case of the young Winnie Karanja, CEO and founder of Represented Collective:
"At REPRESENTEDCOLLECTIVE, our initiatives focus on showcasing the contributions by women and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPoC) to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fi \ elds and increasing accessibility and inclusivity of STEM learning through thoughtfully -designed products and campaign ".
In retail Lindon Gao, Ahmed Beshry, Yilin Huang and York Yang, cofounders of Caper ("the future of shopping is here") built the world's first shopping cart based on artificial intelligence.
In healthcare, there is Jessica Schleider, as reported by Forbes, her research focuses on the treatment of mental health disorders such as depression in children and adolescents with the aim of making mental health care more accessible.
Finally, Davide Dattoli, CEO and founder of Talent Garden, the leading platform in Europe for the digital technology business community.
If, on the one hand, successful young people are emerging, on the other, a way is also being sought to combat the increasingly worrying phenomenon of NEETs (Not -engaged- in Education, Employment or Training), that is "young people actively seeking employment who do not they still work, young people who do not seek and are not available to work and young people who have definitively given up looking for a job ”(Treccani, 2013).
In this regard, the "GIOVANI2030 (G2030)" initiative, created by the Department for Youth Policies and the Universal Civil Service, is interesting, created to guide the choices of the future in the field of training, volunteering, work, initiatives international and cultural, throughout the Italian national territory.
However considerable and useful this initiative may be, it is necessary that alongside the national and international intervention, there is that of small businesses coming mainly from individual companies.
Because if “Young people need examples more than criticism” (Joseph Antoine René Joubert), then they will need to be guided and not to be commanded.
They require listening, but they also require more time: more time to build a less opportunistic future and more time to afford to make mistakes once again.
This is well known by Jack Ma, who failed the university entrance exam twice, failing with two companies, but who was able to give life to Alibabà, one of the most important e-commerce companies in the world.
But Walt Disney also knows that when he started drawing comics for a newspaper, he was fired for "lack of ideas and imagination".
There are countless examples of those who have not put their trust in those young people who have become successful people over time. They came from different realities and cultures, they had different desires but were bearers of one element in common: the awareness that to be meant to be part of the greatest in history it was necessary to fight to obtain and dream in order to achieve.