Translator: Luna Ariana Serrano Reviewer: Zuzana Šplhová
I’m a mother of two adult children
and I would like to offer you this brief intergenerational reflection.
Before starting, I have to give a disclaimer
that I have no studies tha thave been verified
about this topic that I’m going to talk about.
I just offer you observations of my youngest colleagues,
my own children, their friends and friends of their friends,
beacuse apparently it’s not common
when I say we’ve brought up an amazing generation.
The fact is that I’ve heard from some of my friends
that they are sad about today’s young people.
But when I ask what’s wrong,
they usually don’t have an exact answer
and we end up with something like they are always staring at their phones.
They are spoiled, they’ve got everything, they want everything immediately.
When we were their age...
What about us in their age?
We compare them to ourselves or to some idealized version of our youth
and we forget to realize that the society they grew up in is completely different
than the society we grew up in.
Our beliefs are often based on the world that does not exist anymore.
Me.
I was born in August 1968.
Three days after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops.
Shortly after, Husák declared, that the border is not a corridor.
He fenced the country by barbed wire and I grew up in a cage.
When I look around this hall,
it seems, some of the people here
grew up in that cage with me.
Diligence and obedience was cherished.
So that we don’t stand out from the crowd and open our mouths.
So we didn’t put out what didn’t burn us
and for many of us it has remained like that.
We always know exactly what others should do to make us happy.
Like the society we live in is none of our business.
As if we were separated from it by some glass wall,
or a screen, if you want.
We are commentators on what is going on around us, very often just commentators.
But we can work hard.
We are perfectly trained for it.
I know, it’s been a long time, it’s been over 30 years.
We had the time to learn to live differently.
Trust me, I thought I had succeeded, but my wings
grew in that cage very little.
I can only see it when comparing to this generation.
Just look at them.
World is their playground.
They are educated, with great language skills,
insightful, open-minded and free.
Yes, educated despite the misery of the system
because they know they have to work hard.
They have opportunities to visit foreign universities.
The have great language skills because of their phones.
And everything they see there, no one ever translated to them.
They are knowledgeable because they travel
and traveling opens eyes and hearts.
They are pen, becasue we let them talk and here and there we listened to them.
And they are free.
I will explain you this.
It is the strongest emotion I get from our adult children.
They think about the world they want to live in and the way how to live.
They don’t divide life into private and the other one.
Their lives are naturally interconnected with other people’s lives
through volunteering or charity.
From a young age, they believe they can bend space in what they want to live.
Why to talk. I will give you an example.
Students from one unnamed Bratislava high school
painted a crosswal in front of their school.
The thing was...
The school is in the Old Town,
and across the street, since it’s in the Old Town,
some parking spaces have been painted, that couldn’t be removed,
so students were not able to arrange formally and officially
to have the crosswalk there.
We would have cursed,
maybe post some Facebook status,
to let others curse,
but the children did it completely differently.
They bought paint, made a stencil and organized an absolutely perfect event
and supposedly they had a cyclist to distract the police,
in case one showed up at night.
And in the morning, there was a new crosswalk
ending in a guardrail.
(laughter)
Of course, the city banned the crosswalk after a few days.
But if you go there now,
you can see the beautiful crosswalk there
and I’m not gonna say it’s because of that.
But I loved how the kids reminded us about them by this punk event.
But well, I will also tell you something that’s publishable and official.
Do you know the Teach for Slovakia project?
It is a project that aims to improve the state of the society via education.
It chooses smart students from good universities
and they put their careers on hold,
and go teach in excluded communities.
So they invest energy somewhere, where people are already running out of energy.
Or the Post Bellum project, where they map recent history of this country
through the memories of survivors.
Or I am from the IT sector,
and even in the IT industry, kids invest their energy into various hackatrons.
Yes, they do think about it.
In what kind of society they want to live and what they want to do
and whether the things they do are meaningful.
At the begining, I looked through my fingers as well
when I saw that, for example, so many people change major during their studies.
In my generation it was like this: Did you start? Finish.
In their generation:
when it doesn’t make sense now,
it won’t make sense even later and I am gonna do something that makes sense.
They have many opportunities for education, because they grew up
with digital technologies.
Digital technologies are turning the world into one global village
and they really care about global issues.
When I say global, then global warming.
I know that overall public opinion is becoming greener now,
but precisely in the generation of our youngest adults
you can find most of the vegetarians on scooters.
They look at the world and the future through the perspective of their lives.
And they are worried about climate change, dysfunctional pension systems
and absolutely the most about their own potential inadequacy.
Because when you have a lot of options and you can want a lot,
you may want even more than you can reach.
Definitely not everyone feels successful and not everyone feels like a winner.
There’s also a lot of frustration and maybe anger,
because they are in a world, that is very complex.
Everything is connected with everything,
hardly anything is private and the whole world is a competition.
You know what they say?
Find something you’re great at.
Invest a lot of time and energy in it,
and then there’s always some 15-year-old Chinese or 17-year-old Jacob
who is better at it.
Yes, digital technologies provide them opportunities for education,
but not only for education, also for fun and sometimes for idleness.
They have to decide by themselves,
how much time they spend in the virtual reality,
because it gives them a completely non-virtual emotion,
so they train their will and they Google, how to manage procrastination.
They are over 20.
They already know that there re no instructions for life
and they look hard for a template for theirs.
On their way they help themselves with research of neuroscientists,
motivational speakers and also absolute charlatans.
I wouldn’t worry about them, they’ll be fine.
You know?
When we have children, it is us, who explain the world to them.
They take on our values, listen to our music, and they believe us.
Up to age six.
And then they believe us only the majority of things.
Well then something happens and they start locking themselves in a room.
They cram home a bunch of weird videos,
sometimes books, opinions, music,
and when they come out of those rooms, it’s them who show us the world.
A world much more complex, partly in the virtual space.
Partly cynical.
It’s very easy to reject it,
because we are the ones who created it
and don’t want to be responsible for that.
It’s easy to reject them, but it’s nonsense because in their mental map
they have more current version of the world.
And are not afraid of use.
So let’s be inspired.
The same challenges await us, and it seems, they’re better prepared.
Thank you.