It’s world youth day. Every stage in life has its perks and challenges. Poverty and unemployment is the scourge of youth. On the plus side, the youth generally enjoy good health. One Dr. Jordan Peterson remarked that it is better to be young and poor than to be old and poor. For most of us, we will have to pick one.
Let’s swallow some hard pills. Times have changed. Each generation has had good things and bad things. In ancient times, jobs were not a big issue because people probably just farmed. Schooling wasn’t trending either. It just wasn’t necessary. They didn’t have the benefits of electricity and TVs though. A potato disease made people starve to death. And catching a cold could be a death sentence.
In the sixties, education was not easy to get. It wasn’t even valued that much by some. But those who got educated were guaranteed jobs. The shift to blue and white collar jobs was happening, slowly but surely. Still, cars drove like crap, math was done using tables, google was unknown and smartphones… were the stuff of science fiction novels. And oh yeah, HIV came later on and plundered the population.
Enter the 2000s. We don’t all have to be farmers to eat. We have got a handle on most crop diseases so starvation is not the danger it once was. HIV has a drug too! The internet is in the palm of our hands and cars are safer and drive better. Education is rampant. Medicine has advanced considerably. Seemingly the problems that the previous generations had have been solved.
But we all know this is earth. Each generation will have its own problems to contend with. Nobody gets a free pass. So we had better get in line and wait for our problems. In fact, I think it is already manifesting itself.
Education is seemingly not enough anymore. People get educated and still remain jobless. The rate of job creation cannot cope with the rate of graduation. Previously, getting graduates to fill job positions was the problem. It seems we have reached an equilibrium. Demand and supply have shaken hands, and we are starting to tilt towards oversupply.
What we haven’t run out of are good old problems. That is why I think the next frontier for the youth might be solving problems that people face. In most cases, people are willing to pay to have their problems solved. Convenience has never run out of fashion.
Education is good and is almost a requirement to navigate this world, but it is not the poverty conquerer it once was. The sands of time are wearing it down. It is not out yet, but it is not the all -encompassing solution to unemployment that it once was.
We find ourselves in a world shaped to employ the educated. But the world has never been static. Things change. So if the job market has changed we shouldn’t be surprised. Like those who have come before us, we should apply ourselves and think of solutions to the problems that face this generation .
What would be surprising would be if we quit. No generation before us has quit. People have had it worse and still they didn’t quit. Slavery, being orphaned by TB and HIV, crop diseases wiping out food rations for a whole season, long distance trading under perilous circumstances, communicating with smoke signals and throwing stones on people’s roofs to serenade ladies… but they didn’t quit. Maybe some did, but if everyone had quit then we wouldn’t be here. As the world shifts its attention to the youth today, we should remember that failure is not having a problem, failure is not attempting to solve the problem.
Dr Dennis Were