This Young Generation Has Seen Too Many Crises. Time To Raise Its Hopes

The youth of today have come of age amid a pandemic, climate change and geopolitical chaos. They need a reason to believe.

- Mubin Saadat

For those who arrived in this world just before Lehman Brothers left it, you're probably in the middle of your third or fourth "once-in-a-lifetime" crisis, all before adulthood. What followed a decade of relative calm after the 2008 global financial crisis has defied even the most fevered imaginations.

The Covid-19 pandemic froze the world in place. Artificial intelligence barged in, threatening to upend education, employment and entire industries. Innocent lives have been lost in ongoing wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, with fears over another conflict looming in South Asia. Inflation has surged, weighing heavily on households and stoking political fires in every corner of the globe.

As if on cue, geopolitics has joined the fray. US President Donald Trump continues to "tariffy" the world, as the phrase "collapse of the world order" graduated from think-tank panels to casual conversations. Through it all, warnings about the perils of climate change have hummed steadily on.

Singaporeans were constantly reminded of this spectre of a dangerous new world by politicians as we experienced weeks of election fever that culminated in the frenzy of rallies and Polling Day. The gravity of our global predicament was underscored.

The challenges for a small nation are all too real and there is every reason to flag them. But it is just as vital - perhaps more so - to ensure that messages of caution are eventually outweighed by those of hope and resolve.

Without the latter, we risk raising a generation fluent in fear but starved of purpose.

THE CRISIS GENERATION

The poet Randall Jarrell wrote of the young men who returned home from World War II as "the lost and dying". The phrase hinted not only at the lives ended, but also at those living and warped by trauma. A sense of futility marked their early adulthood as they endured shell shock and the burden of unemployment.