Upfront #1: The Idealism of Youth
Upfront is a new series where I go candid. We talk about my personal views on various things that I have been observing in the culture or around me. I rant about things that I feel strongly about, and try to initiate a conversation or at least make all those who read think about certain things which I feel need to be talked about.
I am sitting in my room, after a week of meeting more people than I might have met in the last two years at once. In the last four days, I have went around the city visiting countless relatives of all age, wondering how incredibly diverse the range of opinions we hold about the world and life can be, within a similar socio-economic strata of society. I am twenty three years old, which makes me old enough to advise my younger cousins about the “right” way to live life, and young enough to weigh in on adult matters and be told that I still have a lot of life to experience. And this is what I wanted to talk about today—the Idealism of Youth, the idea that the opinions held by young people can be invalidated because they have no practical experience or knowledge of the way the world actually works, and that most opinions are borne out of naïve half baked ideologies, none of which have a true replica in the real world. I believe that this over arching argument does have substance to it, and might not be as hollow as a lot of young people make it seem. However, at the same time the glaring contradictions when older people bring up the pithy aphorism of experience, needs to be evaluated too, on the very same grounds that it is built on.
I often wonder where this concept of idealism of the youth comes from. There must be a transition from naivety to idealism, from meaningless chatter of a little kid to incompetency due to lack of experience. It must also mean that your contribution starts being meaningful, but is unrealistic, because it fails to fulfil a certain adherence to reality. Over the years, I have seen the optimism dwindle in my own conversations with my friends. Growing up, the reality and the irrationality of the systems we inhabit does catch up. The limited nature of our endeavours, the absence of privilege in varying proportions and serving and existing within the same systems that we despise, owing to the slow nature of any meaningful changes does hold a very significant value to how we perceive the world. So sometimes, when a younger person comes up with the information they learnt from a ten slider Instagram post on how capitalism needs to be dismantled (a very narrow example, which can be extrapolated to multiple other points of dissonance between generations, like mental health, drug abuse, religious values, etc), I understand the frustration that comes with being virtue signaled by a young person who probably has less responsibilities than you, and who fails to understand the complexities of the broader systems that govern or rather force individual choices. However, as much as this frustration is understandable, I have never truly understood how invalidating a viewpoint, that isn’t fully developed, helps in effective discourse. The youth is idealistic. In fact, we all were, when we were teenagers. Some of us still are. In fact, I do not think idealism is a thing one needs to grow out of, but rather one that one needs to update and reform with more information and real world experiences, the same experience which one has to live through and which can’t be taught or pre-empted. In fact, I would rather have idealistic albeit naïve young people, than cynical and numb ones.
However, before I jump the gun, I truly want to explore why generation after generation, despite all the talk around effective discourse and validating all experiences, do we repeat the same patterns. Obviously the caveat here is that when I talk of older people as a monolith, it is not a monolith. It is a complex entity in itself with people who might not exhibit any sort of behaviours that I mention, and the same holds for younger people. I have met younger people who are more orthodox and obtuse than any older person. However, for simplicity’s sake, we will talk in vague “ideal” monoliths here.
A lot of discourse that looks like invalidating a young person’s opinion might also look like a genuine attempt to course correct the youth, to provide a certain advice based on one’s own experience. Often, when I think of my teenage years, I remember those long hours of my parents trying to micro manage my every action, and how I often looked at it as an infringement on my freedom. It was and it was not. Having grown a little older, I do realise how a lot of that advice did make me a better person, but at the same time, a lot of it was also orthodoxy, things which had no explanations but were rules that had to be followed. A lot of it comes down to protectionism. Close affinities, both biologically and culturally, through either sharing of genes (families) or sharing of ideas or memes (ideological groups, cults, nations, companies, etc.) come with an identity of a tribe, and with a tribal makeup, comes the idea of territories (both literal and metaphorical) and with territories comes the idea of protectionism, and when we are trying to protect something, we deal in counterfactuals. A counterfactual is when you think about something which has not occurred, and the multiple possibilities to it, like when you get humiliated in a group, you return and think of all the great comebacks you could have used. You did not use those comebacks, but you anticipate that if you had, you might have not been humiliated. How this helps us, is that the next time, the same joke is cracked, you have updated your information resources to deal with that situation. In close affinity groups, information is a resource which is shared for protecting the entire group. So what an older person is trying to do is basically use their own experience and knowledge to protect the young.
However, to quote Hume, “You cannot derive an ought from an is.” which simply means that just because something exists a certain way or has developed a certain way due to the conditions that existed in a particular time, does not mean that it is the way it ought to be. In a world where everyone’s experience is extremely limited and is mediated by socio-economic divides that one rarely trespasses, in a world that is dynamic to an extent that all information has to be constantly updated to remain relevant, what significance does past experience hold? Honestly, I do not have an answer. I know that it is still relevant. To say that it is irrelevant would to be as orthodox and certain in my views as probably some older people are, and I do believe that certain truths are learnt with age and experience, but at the same time, it opens the door for novelty and creativity, and new ideas as one has never seen before.
In fact, one of my major concerns when I hear older people use experience as a tool to reason or invalidate something is that a lot of experiences are exclusive to the young. In a conversation I had recently around depression in the youth due to social media, a lot of older people quoted their own experiences and the cognitive dissonance that social media induces in them. They talked about how one should just uninstall all social media and live a life off the grid. I believe that their experiences are legitimate and need to be shared, but they are in no way, a substitute to the experience of the teenagers growing on social media. The generation that I am a part of, still lived a significant part of their formative years off this voyeuristic prison, and a person using social media at an older age might not have any idea what a teenager does on social media (the same way our experience differs from our parents) and if we use our experiences as a way to carry forward this conversation with the young, without giving them the space to tell their own stories, we will alienate them the same way a lot of us cannot understand what our parents do on social media, and vice versa. In such a dynamic world, using experience as the sole crutch to guide all the sheep will make a leader who guides the whole herd to failure.
This also brings me to the hierarchy and gradations of suffering and the ill-understood interpretations of privilege. The age old Indian family tale of a father who would cross multiple hurdles to make a life for himself in an India which was slowly becoming globalised, from the wake of extreme poverty is a household staple. Barring the details, the major outline is always the same. It is a tale of struggle, perseverance and the ultimate victory. The virtues to take back are to be cognizant of one’s privilege, be grateful for having enough to eat and to respect your elders, all of which are essential things to know and be cognizant of. However, the context in which these stories are told is what makes me wonder if we are telling these stories as a positive fable to inculcate good habits in the young children, or as tools of fear that there is a certain weight of suffering and gratitude that you have to carry and live up to, that any suffering that falls short of crossing a river to reach your school (an exaggerated example) is invalid. My problem is not with the story, as with the context in which it is told. Privilege is a nuanced subject, and cancelling all forms of actions that are the outcomes of any sort of privilege will lead to no discourse at all. Privilege has to be recognized, not as a concept of shame that one needs to be guilty about throughout their life, but as an awareness at an empathetic level to know that you owe a piece of the pie to the ones who were not as advantaged as you. Even outside this particular context, I believe guilt for privilege is non-productive, and one would rather do something worthwhile to show the cognizance of privilege than just feel guilty about it all the time, not doing anything. However, just because someone has faced intense suffering, does not mean they have faced all forms of suffering. Grief is qualitative, not quantitative. To tell the young children, that they should talk to you about their problems and to invalidate all suffering that falls below a certain standard is paradoxical. However, this also does not mean that all forms of grief require the same sort of intervention. Me feeling listless might not be as pertinent as someone going through a major depressive bout, and one of the things that I often hear from older people is that we need to enable the young children to face life, its tribulations and not have them break down at every little challenge. I partially resonate with that sentiment, because it is a fact that incomplete mental health awareness does lead to harmful effects of people self-diagnosing themselves, increase in suicide rates1, amplifying one’s own alienation2, etc. and one of the problems with unverified social media mental health awareness is that it often propagates harmful dogmas around the same. However, I do not think that the old school toughening them up, by asking them to suck their emotions in and carry on, is the answer too. There is an acute mental health crisis3, and it is not because young people have decided to play act depression. It is because of large market forces, that profit off this crisis, that pay our wages, that are such an integral part of our systemic reality that one will have to lay the whole system bare to understand where to enact change from. The ultimate solution is far away, but the short term solution has to be to listen to young people, to educate our own selves and to also understand our own limitations when it comes to helping people.
Human life is complex. There is no mirror through which we can reflect our lives and have the same image replicated. Every human experience is unique and we can only begin to decipher the narrative complexity of it once we begin to listen, no matter how naïve and idiotic it seems. There is always some takeaway. The youthful idealism has a lot to teach us. It is impulsive and risky, but those are also the traits needed for innovation and creativity. It is important to pay attention because it is the fresh ideas that come out of idealism and the knowledge that the older people have, that often combines to form something truly transformative and long lasting. Having hated the young teenagers post about things they knew nothing about for a long time, I have come to appreciate its innocence, its curiosity, the strive to learn and bring change and mostly, the hope that never wavers.
So for all the older sensible people, let the youth thrive in their idealism. It is only the curious who come up with magic.
For the young idealists, do not ever let anyone tell you that your idealism and hope is vanity.
These are purely personal views and are not meant to be prescriptive. I attempt to cite sources wherever I mention things I do not have an expertise in.
Sources:
J. A. Motto, “Suicide and Suggestibility—The Role of the Press,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 124 (1967)
D. P. Phillips, “The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological Review
D. L. Altheide, “Airplane Accidents, Murder, and the Mass Media: Comments on Phillips,” Social Forces
K. A. Bollen and D. P. Phillips, “Imitative Suicides: A National Study of the Effects of Television News Stories,” American Sociological Review
M.
Wasserman, “Imitation and Suicide: A Reexamination of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological Review
B. P. Fowler, “Emotional Crisis Imitating Television,” Lancet
A. L. Berman, “Fictional Depiction of Suicide in Television Films and Imitation Effects,” American Journal of Psychiatry
Centers for Disease Control: P. W. O’Carroll and L. B. Potter, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Suicide Contagion and the Reporting of Suicide: Recommendations from a National Workshop,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Record
The burden of mental disorders across the states of India: the Global Burden of Disease Study 1990–2017, Lancet