This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on 28th May 2024.
While being young is not officially pronounced a crime, it is a criteria for numerous extreme judgments in society today. Contextualizing this discourse locally, there appears to be more negative things said about young people than the positives. If we do not challenge this mentality now, its roots will grow deeper.
From comments of politicians, leaders, influential persons, and media persons, all seem to observe and reprove the wrong things about young people (the youth). While some concerns are genuine, arising from new, unusual/unpopular as well as improper conduct of some young people, there is a whole lot of unjustifiable generalizations.
Sociologists and anthropologists have a concept for one of the major underlying causes of this, the ‘generational gap,’ which eventually makes people across generations to perceive realities and each other differently.
For the sake of knowledge, the generations have been categorized and named based on age as follows: Silent Generation (1928-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1980, Millennials (1981-1996), Generation Z (1997-2012), Alpha Generation (2013 – present).
This classification goes back a long way to the times of Douglas Coupland, a Canadian author who coined the term Generation X, in his book ‘Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Noel Howe and William Strauss who published the book ‘Generations’ in 1991 too, take credit for naming the Millennials.
In a wider African setting, based on sociopolitical circumstantial realities, which are fundamentally indispensable insofar as the African story is told, generations have been categorized into ‘The independence generation’ (lived through colonial rule and subsequent liberation 1945 – 1969), ‘The multiparty system generation,’ 1970-1990), and ‘The younger generation’ (which in recent years have led uprisings for change, 1991 to young adults today).
These generational categories are important in order to understand how change takes place in our society, so that we are not left behind stuck solely to our old ideas.
Among the realities we can acknowledge by informed consensus is that different generations (as categorized by popular consensus) look at life differently; evident in crucial aspects of life such as work, time, relationship, beliefs, culture, and the general worldview.
However, as such generations (as groups) coexist, another generation (in general sense) is unavoidably formed, in which all must coexist.
This generation now fits the definition of the French lexicographer Paul Emile Littré (1863) who defined a ‘generation’ as “All people living more or less in the same time.” As such, the younger as well as the older generations have a lot to accommodate and learn from each other.
This gets worse when it enters the areas of public interest where the young hear and feel the negativity of generations ahead of them in crucial discussions of social life, politics, policies, etc. The result of this is making young people look like they have nothing to offer and cannot be trusted.
While the older generations had been oriented to work hard, the younger generations are more and more being oriented to work smart by the digital transformations of their time. As such, it is not all instances of working smart that should be regarded as laziness or dislike of hard work.
Older generations need to slowly adjust to the diversified plethora of meanings of the words ‘work’ and ‘career’ as they are used today.
Equally, while most of the older generations have grown up fearing authorities, the younger generations respectfully dislike unnecessary use of power and authority. This is not enough to judge them as disrespectful.
There are many other things, such as preference of use of technology, as opposed to manual systems, preference of jobs with room for innovation and flexibility, and a desire to be recognized and appreciated. These cannot be eliminated as they are already deeply woven in the younger generations.
In the general life of the society, young people are particularly more open to the global society, they dislike violence and wars, and have sociopolitical opinions that express their deep desire for justice, progress and peace.
It is time for older generations to cancel the negativity towards young people, and to counsel genuinely as not everything young people do is wrong.
In the same way, to move with time we need to also transform our learning system to gradually accommodate the way the global society forms the young people through modern media and ease of global interconnectedness.
If we adamantly remain stuck in the ways of the past, while adjustment will cause us no harm, our young people will always be overtaken by their global peer competitors.
The latter soar higher because they have chances to explore their capacities innovatively and creatively and to contribute into the mainstream corporate and political world.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that every change that is stirred by younger generations should be accepted. There should of course be firm stands on matters of culture and morality, for the common good. But their opinions and ideas should be given life, especially when seeking to improve the status quo. No change begins on its own.
