Last week I had the opportunity to talk to two students with whom I shared my classes last semester, in a different environment than the classroom. In that space of closeness typical of a 4:00 in the afternoon, these two young women talked to me, among many other topics, about their goals, their difficulties to move forward with the projects they have been building and their family environments, sometimes quite difficult.

This productive conversation led me to think long and hard about how many things young people have to go through to make their dreams come true. This thought seems to me key and this contact very valuable, because we constantly encounter in everyday life with comments, jokes and complaints about this new generation that has been pejoratively labeled “crystal generation”.

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A generation that for many complains about everything; is good for nothing; has no tolerance for frustration; only wants to be involved in networks; only wants to party; doesn’t know how to work; doesn’t know how to work; doesn’t do well at work, etc.

But what is behind the discourse that many people promote every day about young people? How true is the fragility that supposedly characterizes them?

In the first place, I believe that we start from the error that all young people are the same. It is assumed that there is a generational mark that immediately places them in a certain place and attributes universal characteristics to them. This clearly does not correspond to reality because there are great differences between genders, rural and urban youth, social strata, countries and levels of education.

Secondly, generations continue to be compared without thinking about the historical, political and social moment of each one of them. And that is where the typical phrases of “when I was your age I had a better job; I had children; I had already married; I had bought a house; I knew how to cook…” come up.

Phrases that are said out of context, as if the young people of 20 years ago were the same as 50 years ago or the same as now and, mainly, as if the world had been suspended in time.

Thirdly, it is not understood that adulthood manifests itself in different ways in these times. Therefore, it is not recognized that the obligations that our parents or we ourselves imposed on ourselves a few years ago, such as supporting a house, today’s young people translate them, for example, into student loans or credit to set up a business that will allow them to survive. As a result, their personal decisions are often postponed under the pressure of onerous debts acquired at a very early age.

The fragility of glass is not exactly the characteristic of many young people in these times. The future that awaits them is not as promising as the one our parents dreamed of for us.

They are threatened by scarcity, fear, global warming, pandemics and, above all, the prejudices of those incapable of understanding that they are not a better or worse generation than those that have gone before, but simply a different generation with very complex challenges.

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