There was a time when life was full of running fast, driving fast, going to bed late, getting up early, drinking, and eating whatever was available*. And there was never enough time to do it all. School and work wasted so many hours. It was a time of adventures, mistakes, missteps, too many beers, not enough money, and occasional involuntary vomiting.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” somebody ** wrote in 1859. Is it different for young people in this century? In the 1960s and 70s there was a sense of uncertainty, unease, and nuclear doom. American cities were burning, young people were dying in Viet Nam and on college campus, and Richard Nixon was supposed to be our president. The uncertainty and unease led to an undefined certainty the world was not going to last much longer, prompting my generation to wonder if we’d make it past the age of 30. It was a time, and you can understand how it skewed our decision making about the future.

America in 2025 is reminiscent of that 20^th century era.

While young people naturally thrive on chaos, they prefer it be of their own making, not from the governments who stockpile weapons so powerful if they all exploded at once we’d rocket to Mars…in pieces.  A young person’s rough day should be because they burned the candle at both hands, working hard in the day and playing hard at night, until they outgrew their own stupidity. But these days working and playing have been replaced by worrying, by an unlabeled anxiety used as inspiration for inaction (sic) of any kind. Unlike my father, who viewed and judged my generational cohorts as “troublemakers”, I see lethargy, inactivity, profound sorrow, and aimlessness in the current young generation. Especially in young men. It should be noted an old man does not have much contact with the young of any kind, anymore, but the driveway, backyard, and road games of our historical youth have now been replaced by the bright, colorful, toxic seductions of video games and on-line adolescent experimenting. The bullying of older students over younger students, historically performed and endured in real life by generations ***, is now an online phenomenon with markedly different and dangerous possibilities. Worse, when we played those “road games” like stickball, parents knew where we were and knew the risk: cars running us over and abrasions severe enough to need shorts and gauze for most of the year. The new youth can hide in the physical safety of their basement, their bedrooms, and even in the backseat of the car and enter unhealthy worlds and relationships without parents ever knowing, sometimes with emotional and bodily consequences too hideous to contemplate even with proof of the carnage.

It may be the senior fondness for a re-painted Golden Age, but when the robots come, what next? Will the next generation of youth ever be young like we remember young? Or will they be…

As we, all adults, fight and scrap over macro terms like democracy, fascism, and preferred pronouns, the youth of this and succeeding generations will be watching and responding, looking for clues on how to live life and be happy. Is it even possible we can set an example?

*Yes. All before high school graduation. Parents trusted kids more, back then. Ironic?

**Made you look. I know who, but Ai wants me to put a semicolon after the first “times”. Was Dickens wrong to use a comma? I’m stickin’ with Dickens.

***I was both bullied and bully, as were most of us, except for the exceptional young people who had sense enough—and were lucky enough not to not get drawn into either. Those people became lawyers. Doctors, and politicians.