Hope in Our Anxious Generation

Being born after the year 1995 brought with it an obstacle that was at once innate and externally imposed: belonging to the “Anxious Generation.” This concept carries certain assumed afflictions within it: emotional fragility, high sensitivity, and, at the same time, a low tolerance for frustration. Global studies are conducted, and it turns out that 74% of the ten thousand young people aged sixteen to twenty-five across ten different countries believe that “the future is frightening,” whilst 55% of them feel they will have fewer opportunities in life than their parents, according to The Lancet Planetary Health (2021).

In the corridors of our university, the anxiety of budget cuts to major International Organisations hangs in the air, and a sense of anguish runs through the classrooms, one born of having migrated to an unfamiliar context and finding oneself faced with the certainty that it may be harder than we thought to find our professional place in the world.

As Marcos, a Human Rights student, expressed: “we are living a tumultuous moment in which it is difficult to see a bright horizon. We are entering the crisis at the turning point of our lives.” Eduardo, a MINT student, speaks of uncertainty as something that “has always been there, ever since we have lived in society. What is going to happen is unpredictable.” But he also notes that something has changed: according to him, it is “the channels through which the narrative of uncertainty spreads, and the way in which our generation manages the impact of the unpredictable on our personal lives.” Eduardo believes, as does Shannon, another Human Rights student at the Institute, that social media plays a central role. According to her, “extremes are exacerbated in the digital sphere, where we live in an era of constant exposure to information, and the consequence is for people to disengage completely.”

At times, social media seems to encompass everything, bringing with it certain totalising discourses that portray the world as a hostile, corrupt, dangerous, or doomed place. At times, it feels as though many professionals from previous generations have given up, and are depositing upon us the enormous burden of going out to fix problems we did not cause, in environments that have stopped believing in us.

And yet, in a university setting such as the Geneva Graduate Institute, a different atmosphere begins to emerge. Paulo Freire spoke of hope as an ontological necessity, a vital tool for social change. The power of education is, amongst so many other wonderful things, to combat fatalism and to create a dialogue in which professors and students alike can dream of a more just future. But hope alone is not sufficient to combat fatalism: agency, on the other hand, is essential for hope to become a historical reality. At the Institute, this idea rests in the space that exists within a classroom, where we can unveil the possibility of a better future, regardless of what the obstacles may be.

“Things never change radically, but that does not mean they do not change, and they change when there is agency,” Dr. Yanina Welp, a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute, noted. In times of speed, where life seems to accelerate and the dynamics of socialisation to shift, Dr. Welp decided to reframe her course in a different way: “I did not seek for it to be about the way in which I see democracy, but rather to discuss about things that can provoke us to think.” In this way, she continually seeks to ponder through practical solutions with her students, whilst also questioning certain totalising narratives and myths that flood the newspapers.

According to Eduardo, Marcos, and Shannon, the most omnipresent news stories inhabiting newspapers and social media shape the way in which we perceive our reality. It would come as no surprise, then, that our generation might be more fearful, more anxious, or more sensitive (or even more apathetic) to the suffering of others, if the stories that find us, even when we try to distance ourselves from them, are narratives of war, violence, corruption, and cynicism. When speaking to Marcos, he confirmed that “good news can be found, but you have to seek them out. I read them and share them because I make an effort to do so.” Shannon shared this experience, whilst also noting that “the data from these accounts is not truly backed up and some claims are very general. I do not entirely trust the sources.”

Confronted with these stories, Marcos asserts that in the educational sphere “the role of the university is for us to understand those critiques, but doing so pragmatically, with a broad and deep vision. We have to understand the problem, but also the things that are going well.” According to education critic Robert Pondiscio, “optimism is an essential civic virtue” in the field of education. Dr. Welp fully believes this, and is deeply convinced, guided by the resounding defeat of Orbán in Hungary, that “the exhaustion will generate windows of opportunity for other kinds of political projects and constructions, where there are people who continue to sustain collective spaces, and where debate can generate greater reconstruction of public spaces.”

Dr. Dormeier Freire, who is a senior lecturer at the Institute, goes further: he invites us to immerse ourselves in the reality of our current situation not in order to fall into those narratives, but to understand how the world works and the asymmetrical relations between social groups that characterise our societies. Like Dr. Welp, Dr. Dormeier Freire enjoys using a teaching method that pushes students to think differently, and to be exposed to certain discomfort to learn from it and to stand before the world in a new way.

With the intention of adapting to current times, Dr. Dormeier Freire has changed his approach to assessment: his examinations now focus on the evaluation of concrete cases in which students must dare to imagine practical pathways for solving problems. In this balance between questioning an uncomfortable reality and implementing innovative and creative solutions to concrete contexts, the lecturer invites his students to “place themselves in the position of actors: not merely passive listeners, but also people who, in the end, engage actively in society.”

One ought not to underestimate the power that history holds in our search for hope and the construction of the future. As Eduardo recounts: “What I have learnt most at the Institute is about the past. I came to understand that we are not living through a unique situation in the history of humanity. That the problems we are experiencing, the narratives we hear from politicians, the divisions we observe in the population, are events that we have already lived through. Understanding the past is knowing that today’s problems are not the end of the world, and that mistakes serve to prevent us from making them again, and to keep us hopeful.” Marcos echoes this feeling, sharing that “we have to truly analyse where we stand historically. In six thousand years of human civilisation, at no point has there existed a universal human rights regime. It is imperfect, but it is the first one we have, and it exists and it functions. The global expectation, despite the great inequality and the fact that it is not the same reality for everyone, is no longer merely to survive, but to live, and to understand that in these last forty years, the human race has lived through its finest period of improvement in wellbeing.” According to Dr. Welp, “it is difficult to say that we are in a tremendous, dark time”, inviting us to be conscious of the history that precedes us. Finally, Dr. Dormeier Freire adds: “there is a pendulum in human history that swings from one extreme to another. Nobody knows what the world will look like in two years’ time. Nobody thought that Orbán could lose the elections in Hungary, and yet he lost by a wide margin. It is equally possible that in two years we will have an entirely different world.”

As Shannon stated, in our lives “change is the only constant,” and developing resilience, whatever stage of life we find ourselves in, is an essential skill we must learn. Not long ago I read someone say that as we grow up, we may introduce some small detail into our lives, but the broad strokes are what we have already lived, what has already been done, as if our destiny were already written. “To grow old is to discover that you will no longer be someone else,” they said. I believe that we, the “Anxious Generation,” have much yet to discover. We continue to learn that remaining in anger, in intolerance, in weariness, does not work. Perhaps for us, growing up is discovering that beyond fragility and forgetting, the margin for change is far greater than we have ever believed.

Francesca Polano