Is anyone telling young people they will be ok?

A couple of weeks ago, I was in New York, celebrating the launch of Blomma, a new AI-powered career coach developed by a friend and mentor, Silvia Oviedo Lopez, and her team.

As part of the experience, I was invited to sit in on a half-day workshop with leadership experts, creators, entrepreneurs, and others helping to shape the experience. At the core of the conversation sat a compelling insight: coaching, like so much else, has been often reserved for the most successful people. For the rest of us, asking for help can feel like admitting a weakness. Of course, the truth is that “needing help” is a reality that transcends age. The older I get, the more I realize that having a support system in work and in life is one of the most important precursors to success. Anyone who claims to have achieved on their own is either a liar, or perhaps worse, ignorant to reality. Either way, these folks also tend to be a bit boring. I much prefer spending time with people who (like the rest of us) have been through the proverbial ringer and come out the other side. Frayed, worn, but now made of a tougher material than before.

One of the participants in the workshop was a young intern, a college student entering her senior year and preparing for the future. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the current state of affairs. How will AI impact the job market, especially for young people?

I recalled graduating myself in 2010, during what was still the “Great Recession.” I applied to more than 50 jobs then before securing a post-graduate internship (it was the only thing I could find). My generation, Millennials, were dubbed lazy, entitled, and unfit for the modern workforce - sound familiar?

In the room, many of the folks told this smart young person some version of “we’ve seen this before, yes AI is a unique wrinkle but you’re going to be ok.” And her response was: “No one has told me that before.”

It turns out, many of the people teaching young folks, espousing industry trends, and leading the companies of the future, are neglecting to remind young people that there is an exciting world for them to participate in and indeed, to help build toward.

Am I missing something? Is our prognostication of the direction we are heading so bleak that we are boxing out smart, young people from being a part of it?

Hope is not a strategy, but we need more of it.

You may have read the book Hope Is Not a Strategy by Rick Page, or at least heard the quote which has been popular in a number of contexts. Essentially, it means that simply hoping for a positive outcome is not a guarantee to achieve it. And this is true. But hope is not an empty platitude either. It is a necessary motivator for any individual, group, or society facing down some kind of hardship. We as people need to believe there is a positive future to be had. And history has consistently proven hope to be - over the long run - the correct approach.

In the always-on, social media-driven, AI-slop era, where we are constantly inundated by negativity and news that makes us sad, it can be easy to forget that there has never been a better time to be alive. Across almost every metric: from extreme poverty, to expected lifespan, to access to education and population literacy, we have never been in a better position. Consider this, as recently as 1950, more than 25% of all newborns died in childhood. Over the past few years, on average, every day more than 30,000 people worldwide moved out of extreme poverty. These are stunning statistical and societal achievements.

And of course, it does not mean we should ignore the perils we face today - war, famine, lack of access to healthcare and food insecurity, etc., are all very real challenges we must continue to fight. But to believe all hope is lost, and that there is no path to the future, would not just be a defeatist attitude - it would be an attitude with limited evidentiary support.

Human beings are the most resilient machines in existence.

Have you ever flown on an airplane, and looked out the window to see the wings bouncing up and down? It might be disconcerting as a passenger, but in fact it is exactly how the plane is designed to function. Rather than to fight the airflow, the wings are meant to flex with the jet stream they are given. It’s a form of resilience.

Surely, the ability of machines to prove resilient in the face of terribly challenging conditions is impressive. And yet, any of these examples would pale in comparison to the resiliency of the Earth’s most impressive engineering feat: human beings. Think of the history of upheaval and suffering that people have collectively overcome. From plagues that wiped out half of Europe’s population, to world wars that reshaped populations and borders, to everything in between. We overcome. Every peril, every evil, every paradigm shift that gets in our way. It’s what we’re programmed to do.

I spoke recently in Madrid to a group of senior leaders - the kind that still, if I’m honest, intimidates me a bit. And as I wrote following, as much as we all discuss the future in those kinds of forums, I find it more compelling to consult the past. Specifically, to ask each of those leaders to examine why they got into the business of creativity in the first place? Because I would doubt it was about maximizing profits, or optimizing customer acquisition costs, etc.

If the most successful people honestly look back and consider the start of their own journey in their career, they may remember that they benefited from a bit of hope. Yes, also a bit of ignorance, maybe hubris, maybe dumb luck. But also, the belief that they would find a way to figure it out. And they did.

—

This weekend, I found myself at a friend’s barbecue. And at one point, I sat with a couple of their kids, out in the back yard as we all enjoyed a cold seltzer. I don’t have kids of my own so I only know to talk to them like adults, which probably has some pros and some cons. But at one point they were talking about the latest game they were playing on their phone and I said to them, “listen kids, you can have fun with your games, but don’t make the mistake all of us adults made - don’t get so sucked in to the phone that you stop hanging out with your friends in the yard having a seltzer.”

I don’t know if the advice landed, but I enjoyed the conversation at least.

Today’s young people need to know that they will be ok. Yes, the challenges we face are real, and perhaps AI represents an existential threat. But it’s not the first existential threat humans have stared down, and it won’t be the last.

The more I think about it, maybe adults need to be reminded that we will all be ok, too.

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash.