Create a present that you want to impose on future generations. You will be complaining about the kids today before you know it - make a world worth complaining about losing.
I was planning to use this space to repeat Aristotle’s observation that “people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connection: e.g….’Nothing is more foolish than to be the parent of children’.” In other words, this was initially going to be another version of “kids today, am I right?”
I’m still going to do that. But I want to put it in the context of generational loneliness and disconnection, and also suggest you may be the victims of our nostalgia for a time we remember through gauze and mood lighting.
I am also going to make an improbable request - I would like your thoughts on all of this. Part of my job is preparing young people intellectually, emotionally, and professionally for a world beyond the confines of the George Washington University. I need you to help me do that better.
The Loneliest Age
According to a lot of research, a lot of you feel lonely and disconnected. A recent piece in Inside Higher Ed asked if college should feel this lonely. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. According to one recent study, young people spend less time talking to their neighbors than ever before. In a piece for The Atlantic last January, Derek Thompson wrote, “Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965.“ Thompson cites Bureau of Labor Statistics data that reported the age group with the largest decline in face-to-face socializing between 2003 - 2023 was 15 - to 24-year-olds. Gallup reported that in 2023-24, one in four American men between the ages of 15 - 34 felt lonely (nearly one in five young women felt the same). NYU just launched an “IRL Initiative” to bring students together and decrease loneliness. The list goes on.
There are a lot of reasons feelings of loneliness and disconnection are terrible. One reason is that communities and connections allow you to take and share risks. Being part of a community makes it easier to try out ideas and risk failing because you know one mistake doesn't make you a failure. If you are alone it can be tough to take risks, have fun, find joy, take responsibility, and do all the other things that people do when they're together. If you are part of a group that gives you grace, forgives mistakes, or doesn't judge at all, you are more likely to be brave.
Should You Lament My Loss?
A friend in Democratic politics who hires a lot of young staff said the class of 2025 and 2026 are better than their slightly older counterparts, he disagrees with the disdain tossed your way. His take is that slightly older staff remember President Obama, they have seen what politics can be. You on the other hand were 10 or 11 when Trump rode down the escalator and went from reality TV host to reality TV president. This is all you’ve known, so you don’t know to be disillusioned.
This view reinforces a concern I’ve heard from colleagues and others, that we are projecting our anxieties onto you, and are then surprised that you’re so anxious. A lot of what I’ve worked on over my career has been dismantled or destroyed. Over the past 30+ years, I helped run the US Institute of Peace, worked on the Affordable Care Act, was a senior advisor to the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, helped pass a piece of Dodd-Frank banking reform, and helped reign in the death penalty nationally. Of course I’m distressed about politics, the politics I grew up in and the policies I worked on are buried under piles of used diapers in a dump somewhere. It can sound like one moment we’re shouting that everything is awful and that you’ll never be able to afford the lives we’ve had, and the next moment shouting that if you don’t work harder you’ll never have the lives we’ve had. We define the future as out of reach, and are shocked when you‘re ambivalent about reaching for it.
You spent high school being told not to see your friends and to avoid groups (for very good reasons) and we're now alarmed that you don't have a lot of friends and don't like being in groups. We want a reset to a past we romanticize, but you have nothing to which to reset. We want you to return to a past that was never your present, we want you to go back to a place you never were. We are projecting how we would feel if we were you, knowing what we know now. That’s unfair and counterproductive.
Kids Today
Rants like this one have been around for a while. I was the worst example of the worst stereotypes of college students in the 1980s. When professors and employers complained about my generation, they meant me. And yet, it feels Aristotle was onto something when he complained about the kids today in the fourth century BCE.
Pundits, professors, and would-be employers I talk to agree that college students and recent graduates - you - are somehow flawed in new and newly frustrating ways. Everyone has an anecdote ready or can tell you about that thing they saw on Facebook or maybe LinkedIn or maybe it was Instagram. The student who turned in a paper three weeks late because he was busy when it was due, the job candidate who brought their mom to the interview, the assumptions of raises and promotions. We are told that social media, a COVID hangover, doomcycles of news, the economy, epidemics of loneliness, and more have broken you possibly beyond repair.
I am told that current and recent college graduates lack pace, initiative, judgement, and curiosity (not just about what, but also about why). You don’t hold yourselves accountable or expect others to hold you accountable, and you don’t follow through to fix your mistakes. You demand and assume rather than work and ask. You aren’t comfortable making decisions with imperfect information and uncertainty, and you constantly try to de-risk things. You don’t read and as a result can’t write. You’re not problem solvers. Your expectations - about grades, income, titles, work conditions, and more - are unmoored from how the world outside of home and school works.
Not flattering, and not entirely true. Not all of it applies to you all of the time (and some of it applies to most people some of the time, regardless of how old they are).
That’s some of what I’ve heard about you. Here is some of what I’ve heard from you.
Everything is portrayed as a high-stakes hustle to the next thing, which is another high-stakes hustle to the next thing. You’ve lived your lives in a toxic smoothie of COVID, school shootings, a looming climate crisis, constantly chaotic politics, inflation and an uncertain economy, a list of problems for which no solution seems close to being adequate. Social media has killed attention spans and turned everyone into creations of their own algorithm, more than one person has quipped ‘do you know who you are if your algorithm doesn’t tell you?’ Cheating is easy and there are no consequences for bad behavior. AI is coming for your job and eating the planet. At the same time, things associated with success like buying a house and having a steady job with a reasonable income seem out of reach. There is no upside to hustle and pace, there’s no downside to mediocrity, and everything has always been chaotic, so why strive? Learning is pitched as a means to an end that’s always just out of reach and joy has been commodified. Of course a lot of young people seem nihilistic and lazy, there’s no good reason not to be.
Specific To Dos
If all, or any, of this is right, what do you do about it? This is pitched as something of a commencement speech, so what should you commence?
Betray your stereotype. Prove me and future employers wrong.
Show up.
Listen, ask, repeat.
Anticipate, act, suggest, learn, repeat.
Try, take responsibility, try again, repeat.
Hustle.
Be brave. Go places where you don't know people. Invite people into a conversation without judgment. Don't be afraid of difference or disagreement. Change your mind. Repeat.
Put your phone down. Talk to people in places.
Create a present that you want to impose on future generations. You will be complaining about the kids today before you know it - make a world worth complaining about losing.
Accomplishing that world will require you to build communities, work hard, and risk failing. You need to think beyond what now to what next and then what. You will have to put your phones down. The best way to prove the pundits, professors, and would-be employers wrong is to bring your world to the table, and make that a world worth lamenting when you complain about the kids today.
Question
My question to you is whether or not this makes any sense. What in this argument rings true, and what seems like predictable oldster ranting about the kids today? What am I missing? How can your professors help better prepare you for whatever comes next?
Peter Loge
Director, School of Media and Public Affairs