Everything indicates that it is not that young people are more pessimistic and that those who have lived longer are more optimistic, but that the problem lies in the lack of expectations of those who have more life ahead of them.
REVIEW | Do young people have difficulties? Well, in my time…, by Isaac Rosa
The data from the latest CEI “barometer” highlight some biases in the perception of the youngest (between 18 and 34 years old) with regard to the country’s problems and their personal perception of them. Beyond the particular importance that they have for what they consider to be a lack of support and opportunities for young people, I would highlight the emphasis they give to economic problems and access to housing (in particular compared to other age groups). In the more specific questions on the country’s economic situation and on your personal situation, it is also these groups that concentrate the highest percentages of responses classified as “bad” or “very bad”. And, on the other hand, to the specific question on their degree of concern about climate change, it is these age groups that concentrate the highest percentages in the responses “little” or “nothing”. The older we get, the less negative our perception of the country’s economic situation, and in particular personal, is, while concern about climate change increases. Some remember well what Spain was like in the 60s and 70s and value what they have gained, others were already born into the climate emergency and have only seen the promises that everything would improve fade away.
As we well know, the social perception of what is happening does not always correspond to the data that help us determine, in a supposedly objective and comparative way, the economic situation of each country. Despite the errors in the GDP growth percentages that have been calculated, everything indicates that Spain occupies a leading position in Europe, while the level of employment is also at its maximum level, despite the fact that a significant percentage of unemployment continues to persist.
The combination of the two elements tells us several things. From the GDP, directly, no one eats or rents an apartment at a reasonable price. Young people are the most affected by the loss of quality of jobs and are the most affected by the combination of the lack of affordable rental housing, the effects of increased tourism and seasonal rentals, and the impacts of longevity that reduce the circular availability of housing. The idea of the future, of the prospect of improvement, of the hope of increasing their standard of living, has been widely questioned. And there, if we look again at the polls, the search for the culprits is directed, on the one hand, towards the political order (crisis of the promises of democracy), on the other hand, towards the newcomers and all this leads to a feeling of impasse. A scenario that the exchange and communication platforms continue to feed with their algorithms that favor echo chambers and increasingly polarized caricatures.
Everything indicates that it is not that young people are more pessimistic and that those who have lived longer are more optimistic, but that the problem lies in the lack of expectations of those who have more life ahead of them. The loss of hope. What characterizes hope is not a lack of fear or an excess of courage, but rather that hope gives meaning to what one does (whether it is studying, starting to work in low-paid and precarious jobs, imagining going to live away from home). parents…). And this lack of hope is not a problem of opinion, but of judgment. Of conviction. We do not know if what we are doing makes sense, if it will help us get where we want to go. And in this scenario, the problem is not that one is more optimistic than the other, nor that we wonder whether a certain percentage of unemployment or growth is more or less relevant, but in the end, what is significant is that we believe that an improvement is possible. This is where the system and all the institutions and entities that represent it probably fail. There is no horizon of hope for those who lack the heritage, the relationships and the resources necessary for this hope to be, so to speak, guaranteed.
Therein lies the problem. What worked for us for many years no longer works. “If you try hard, you will succeed.” “Work hard and eventually you will be able to have your own life.” They do not care much about climate change since they have heard nothing else since they were born. Persistent inequality (Spain ranks 20th out of 27 countries in the European Union in the inequality index measured by the Gini coefficient) is also part of the landscape. Nor can they be very condescending about the problems of democracy if they have known nothing other than this imperfect democracy. In the end, all that is left is to imagine that someone will come and fix it. And there are many sellers of smoke and mirrors and outdated and obsolete fantasies, but they are capable of promising what they do not have.
We need to change our perspective and rebuild a project of hope. To do this, we need to get out of the kind of leaden realism that constantly warns us that there is no alternative to what we are currently experiencing, that no one is capable of thinking in the long term or that “stop the nonsense and let’s each their own.” Terry Eagleton said in his book “Hope without Optimism” that waiting means projecting ourselves with our imagination into a future that we consider possible and, therefore, in a dark sense, we already make it present. If we do not remedy the lack of perspectives and collective horizons of hope with concrete measures and projects on key issues (housing, quality of employment, aid so that those who do not have assets can start up…), we will have no choice but to accept that what we are experiencing is a slow democratic decline.
