The young, the restless and the unthinking

I speak to young people all the time. In university auditoriums, and during conferences in arenas and coliseums. This is the pro-bono side of what I do. It’s an honor for me. At the same time, I feel the weight of the responsibility that comes with speaking before them. Because every time I do, I know I stand and speak to tomorrow’s leaders.

What kind of leaders will our youth turn out to be? That is an important question. As leaders, they will determine the kind of world we’ll live in in the future.

In my business seminars, I remind my participants that the young people of today shouldn’t be seen as mere consumers, but also as creators. Armed with technology, many of them can create businesses that digital immigrants like me wouldn’t be able to think of.

But while these young people are good with technology, they seem to be unable to reason and engage themselves in critical thinking. And they are restless and impatient. Many HR chiefs have told me how young people today expect, even demand, for promotion after working for a company for a mere two years.

Young people today suffer from screen burn. With their phones, tablets, movies on tiny screens, the way they think has become more image-based rather than text-based. Only a few of them sit down on a chair to read books.

I used to read a lot of biographies. This is why my heroes and stars were war heroes, missionaries and people of achievements. Today’s young people’s heroes are robots, sons of thunder, green angry monsters and guys with batteries implanted on their chest.

The media has influenced – instructed even – the way our young people think and behave, and the outcome is not a very pretty sight. Ask them to define the meaning of life, the truth about life, sexuality – you’ll find a plethora of definitions that totally lack substance. How do we expect meaning in sound bites anyway? How would they (or even us) understand the truth, when the “truth” comes from “gurus” whose first words, when interviewed, are “I think…”

Many of the young people today are lost. They don’t know who they are, and they don’t know where they’re going. This becomes a cause for concern when we consider that they’re the ones who are going to define our future, whether we like it or not.

Someone came up with this brilliant observation:

“In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term – generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was a decade of protests – church, state and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected and nothing ever replaced it. 

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image. Self-esteem. Self-assertion… It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids have lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation has stopped believing in the future…”

And then kids lost their capacity to reason.

Lost in the world of the digital economy, they’re now able to relate more to images and ideas than to people. This is the generation of the young.

But there is still hope. The young just need to hear the right message.

Let those right messages begin in the home, with fathers mentoring kids and modeling a Christ-like life. We should not be so busy building up our business that we forget to build up the family. Let the parents be the kids’ heroes, and let God be at the center of their lives. Then we’ll have a better future.

(Spend two whole days with Francis Kong developing your leadership skills this August 22-23 at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel as he facilitates the well-acclaimed Dr. John C. Maxwell Program “Developing The Leader Within You.” For further inquiries, contact GM Binky Ocaya +639178330723, or call 632-6872614 for details.)