What I have noticed in my decades of work-life as a team leader is that there are 3 self limiting challenges of today's young generation of professionals:
(1) Intellectual courage: they are not intellectually courageous enough to take a contrarian stance from the herd mentality (eg the ready acceptance of narratives like the pandemic origins)
(2) Power of influence: they underestimate their ability to influence and impact their clients/audience.
(3) Perspective: their passion/energy levels are admirable but they are not inquisitive enough to form a more relevant, more meaningful and more truthful perspective of the world they wish to influence constructively. (their typical response to this is that everyone's values are subjective. But before they come to that conclusion, have they done enough researching or is the response a matter of convenience?)
As a consequence of a much more dynamic and asymetrically changing world in the millennium, these three mental obstacles are being tested severely, and young professionals are pressured to make the right decisions fast.
To some extent, I empathise with them because in my generation and my parents' generation, we had a more stable, conducive economic- social environment for young minds to learn and gradually form their own world perspective/value systems from which they can work out their calling in life.
In contrast, today's generation has to contend with a corporatised, politically biased news media (controlled by big tech companies) and social media that promotes instant distractions and 24/7 entertainment.
As for the intellectually inquisitive, the answers to modern history's most tragic events (WW2, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, genocide, wars, corruption, evil) are clinically diluted into superficial terms (eg concepts packaged into ism and popular sound bites) that divert young minds from exploring further the truth of the matter.
Powerful governments, agencies and media have prioritised issues such as climate change, gender multi-diversity and ESG as if moral and spiritual solutions are peripheral in resolving society's root problems. The solution is always man-centred as if human individuals can determine their success or failure as a society through just enlightened policies, social engineering or new ecosystems.
With the advent of AI throughout all aspects of society, we are heading into a world where perspectives depend more on what we wish the world to look like rather than what it actually is. It is a strange mix of the t.v. series Black Mirror, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World.
So going back to the challenges facing young people, can they see clearly the path that the 21st century world is taking them?
As a visual metaphor, I view the dilemma of the current and future young generation as a new myth of Sisyphus.
In Albert Camus's book, he advocates that we accept the absurdity of life (i.e. the boulder that Sisyphus was condemned to roll up the hill only to have it roll back down and for him to haul it up again repeatedly) and find happiness in our own self-discovery.
In the new myth of Sisyphus, the boulder for the young generation gets heavier every time it rolls back down the hill. Like the illustration below, the solution is to choose a less steep hill to roll it. That requires removing the thick outer layers of cognitive biases and convenient preconceptions that make the task heavier.
The longer they accept their fate and not cut through the fake concepts and facile ideologies, the more world events will make the load heavier and eventually crush them.
At the end of the day, their barriers to the truth (deeper insights into human nature and the world) is self-inflicted. And this means they have to climb a steeper, more frustrating learning curve while at the same time pushing up the rock of world challenges (in their jobs and social lives) that stretches their critical thinking skills.
At the intellectual breaking point when these young people give up original thinking altogether, they may either revert to traditional solutions or outsource their decisions to AI.
Soon, it is
very likely that AI will be so advanced that they become indispensable assistant-cum-mentors
to all generations, young and old. So I see this process of giving in —both
intellectually and morally — as a slow and insidious immersion like a frog in boiling
water.
