«Though often they are not aware of it, the youths are not well, not because of the usual existential crisis that constellates the youth, but because a disquieting guest, nihilism, moves around them, penetrates their feelings, confuses their thoughts, cancels perspectives and horizons, weakens their souls, etiolates the passions making them drained”. The text L’ospite inquietante. Il nichilismo e i giovani, (The disquieting guest. The nihilism and the youths), by Umberto Galimberti, starts with this peremptory diagnosis. This book presents sufficient proofs that support the diffused uneasiness that generally characterises the actual condition of the youths.    

Therefore, we must say that the youths are not well. Obviously it is an ill-being  of the soul, because never as in the present epoch the economical, social, cultural and elementary conditions of life (health, food, amusements, access to secondary education, money) have been so much elevated  and at disposal of everybody as they are today. Galimberti is right also in indicating that the causes of this inedited situation, in which the youths happen to find themselves, are to be found in the very “culture that we breathe”.

What is society doing for the youths?

The resentment of the adults

The first thing that impresses us with this regard is the fact that never, neither at legislative level nor at operative decision level, the frequent and worried speaking about the youths corresponds to an authentic attention paid to them. Rarely they operate in such a way as to create effective conditions in which the youths may find a remedy to their ill-being. From the world of formation to that of work, from the politics for the family to those for the social providence, we almost never see any interest for the youths at the centre of debates and reforms to be handled.

Elementary data of facts are removed from the horizon of thought: without work and without a house, it is obvious that the date of engagement is endlessly postponed; without day-nursery and appropriate tax relief it is obvious that one thinks twice before bringing children to light; without changes in the representatives of institutions, it is obvious that disinterest for politics keeps on being spread; without an efficient justice obviously the sirens of illegality keep on resounding in a persuasive way.  

Where is the mere verbal interest for the youths being born from, when no real investment corresponds to their benefit? I think that there is no doubt in supporting the existence of a consistent resentment, which the world of adults nourishes against the youths. At a time and in a world where all desire to feel young, in soul an body, with effects that sometimes touch the ridiculous aspect, the mere presence of the youths reminds us that not all men and women are young, beautiful and attractive.  

Therefore, despite their unwillingness, the youths become like a mirror of the fear of the adults: the fear of growing old, the fear of death, the fear of composing a balance of their own choices, the fear of counting the wrinkles and the wounds that life inexorably impresses. Well, all this activates a powerful vicious circle among the generations: the adults keep the youths in the state of “minors”, parking them in the universities, favouring infinite engagements, cuddling them at home until they are forty years old, objectively reducing the possibility of giving birth to a beautiful family with an ample brood; in their turn, the youths become disinterested in politics, public administration, school and university reforms, which of course remain in the hands of te adults….

Thus, as we know, power makes “beautiful” also what is  ugly,  and makes “young” also the old people….

Obviously this thing has its cost. In a world where the adults want to be “young” and not adults, the youths cannot become adult, because a man is born young, but adult he “becomes” – through confrontation, clash, emancipation with and by other adults.

Thus, what is happening?

The “ magic” the fascination of the youths

At the depth and as the foundation of this situation we find a thing which we may define the “magic” of youth, which consists in taking time before deciding the type of person we want to become,  not defining oneself in a hurry. We need to call to mind another elementary truth: the youths have not existed always. Even in the recent past, the youth was a kind of an early decease, like “measles”; it was a rapid and sudden passage from childhood to adulthood. There was literally no time to be young.  There was work to be done.

All this today –thanking God- has been amply overcome: to be young is possible and it is obviously fascinating to have plenty of time at disposal to be young. The families can bear the charges of a prolonged intellectual and professional formation; many deceases have been defeated. In other words, there is sufficient food and good health for him who is young according to the registry. It is here that the extraordinary savour of the magic to be young starts from, due to the amplitude of possibilities that wide-open themselves before those who are in the phase of growth.

This magic “charms” everybody, for which we become of age, but not “adult”.

Looking for instructions

The ground on which this situation develops, however, is not simply that of an existential crisis in the world of the adults. To paraphrase Galimberti, we must say that also the adults are not well, though they are not aware of it. Theirs is an ill-being of the soul, deriving from the actual culture as well, whose characteristic is surely the acceleration of the technological progress.  According to a recent and wise critical re-construction proposed by Aldo Schiavone, in his text Storia e destino, in fact, men and women today are not offered the necessary temporal distance between a technological innovation and the other, a thing that would allow them to verify the effects and to reach a shared evaluations of them. Obviously, many technical interventions are about the central aspects  of human life, such as conception and birth of a new being, the genetic treatment of very serious deceases and the question of “how” to die. The boundary of possibilities in this world are no longer traceable in a univocal way and universally appreciated.

This state of things, together with a general refusal of a good slice of the traditional wisdom on what is human, makes people who should be adult untrimmed of adequate and shared “rules” for a happy exercise of one’s own freedom. The previous instructions are no longer in function, the new ones delay their arrival. Without them, however, there is no adult, without the adults the youths do not know what and on what to bet their existence.

We become adult

Our reflection on the condition of the youths, necessarily implies a general vision of the time we live in, a time which is configured like a change of epoch, more than like an epoch of changes. In this situation, disturbances and uneasiness are in the order of the day, because they are linked to the search of a new balance between what can technically be done and what is decided that it is good to be done; therefore the research of a “new alphabet of freedom”, which can stand the disappearance of what is “natural“ and of natural laws, substituted by what is “technically possible”. Therefore, it is a passing situation, a turning point of emptiness, the emptiness/nothing where the nihilism denounced by Galimberti derives from.

 However, every emptiness may turn into a space fecund in creativity and inventions. Everyday a stronger request comes just from the youths: it is the request of those who invoke a teaching of life, a teaching of freedom; the request that the adults may be adults.

It is ever more urgent to find a grammar of freedom, which may communicate shared interpretations on what promotes life and what deforms it, on what shows its destination and what degrades it.

Summing up: one is born youth, one becomes adult – through confrontation, clash, emancipation with and by other adults..                                             

Armando Matteo
Ecclesiastic National Assistant of the FUCI
c/o Casa Assistenti
Via F. Marchetta Selvaggiani, 22
00165 Rome.