What we show, They see

Sameer Rekhi

rekhi7sameer@gmail.com

Children notice more than adults imagine.

They hear the conversations at home. They see what is admired, what is criticised and what is quietly accepted. They notice the difference between what people say in public and what they do when the audience has gone.

The generation growing up today has seen all this from a very young age.

Much of what young people see of the world now comes through a screen. Other people's success and riches are displayed there every day. A new car, a foreign degree, an expensive watch, a large house or a successful career can appear on a phone before breakfast. So do failure, loss, incompetence and corruption.There is little distance between seeing and wanting.

The young have also become more questioning. They are less willing to accept a statement merely because it comes from age or authority. They ask why. They want reasons. They are quick to notice hypocrisy. That is a strength. But they are growing up in an environment where the distinction between real achievement and appearance is not always clear.

A person with millions of followers can be more visible than a person with years of work behind him. A young entrepreneur can become a celebrity before he has actually built a successful business. Visibility nowadays arrives much earlier than achievement.

The young cannot be blamed for noticing these things. They are simply living in the world available to them.

There is another change. Earlier generations had to wait. For news. For letters. For photographs. For appointments. For careers to take shape. Young people today live with immediate responses. A message is expected to be answered fast. Opinions are formed and displayed quickly. Patience has acquired a different tone. It is conditional.

This does not make them less capable of patience. They have simply come to expect quicker responses from the world around them. They also have a stronger sense of their rights and of what the state owes them. They are less willing to accept a gap between words and conduct.

A parent who speaks about honesty but behaves differently at home is likely to be called out. An institution that speaks of fairness but treats people differently is questioned. A professor who colours his lectures with his political views can be challenged within minutes.There is something healthy in that scepticism.

But scepticism has its own danger. If every institution is seen as inefficient, every authority as dishonest and every new project as unlikely to succeed, trust becomes difficult even when it is deserved.

The young therefore inherit a difficult combination. They have more information than any generation before them. They have greater freedom to question. They can see hypocrisy almost instantly. Yet they are also flooded with conflicting information. Deciding what is real and what is worthy of trust is not always easy.

Young people also watch how adults deal with failure. They see whether a mistake is admitted or hidden, whether an apology is offered, whether losing is accepted with some grace or not. They are watching us more closely than we sometimes realise.

All this shapes the way they look at the world and at themselves. Ambition, too, has become more visible than it once was. There is nothing wrong with ambition. It gives direction to effort and can take a young person far. But when success is constantly displayed, it can become difficult to tell the difference between doing well and appearing to do well.

A young person may know the price of a phone, a car or a DSLR camera long before knowing what it takes to earn them. That is not a criticism of the young. It is simply the environment in which they are growing up.

At the same time, many young people are asking questions that earlier generations seldom asked. They want to know why a rule exists. They question authority. They have little patience with delay. They want results, and they want them quickly.

This can be uncomfortable for parents, teachers and institutions. At the same time, it can also be useful. A society needs people who are willing to ask whether an old practice still makes sense. Certain practices and beliefs need to change with time.

What matters is what emerges from this meeting of generations.

If everything is doubted, authority is diluted. If everything is accepted, nothing changes. The difficult position lies somewhere between the two: to question without becoming cynical, and to respect without becoming unquestioning.

That balance is not easy to teach. It is easier to demonstrate.

Perhaps this is where the responsibility of the older generation becomes unavoidable.

We cannot tell the young to value honesty while showing them that dishonesty is often rewarded. We cannot speak of simplicity or austerity while leading a luxurious life. We cannot lament unemployment while clinging to a chair long after retirement.

We cannot ask them to respect conviction when we change our own positions whenever circumstances change. And we cannot complain that they have lost faith in institutions without asking what they have seen those institutions do, or fail to do.

Children do not inherit values through lectures. They inherit them through example. A young person watching a parent return an excess payment learns something without being taught. A young person watching a parent obtain an illegal electricity connection learns something else.

Both lessons remain.

The generation coming of age now will make its own choices. It will reject some of what it has inherited and carry some of it forward. That is how every generation changes a society.