Is it control? Lack? Social media?
So, I sort of knew this before embarking on this journey… but my research and the conversations I have had, with 11 to19-year-olds, over the last few months have really brought this home and confirmed it.
It would appear we have a rising generation that feel controlled and that they are neither free nor trusted to make decisions about their own lives. The overwhelming majority cited power, control, influence and freedom when asked why they want to be billionaires (yes, in my day a mere million was the dream too).
Of course there is also the age old influencing factor in our attitudes towards money – the lack of it.
The lack of money brings a sense of powerlessness and shame that hopefully few of us have had to experience. While inequality has always existed, gone are the days that your peer group were your immediate circle of friends from very similar economic and social backgrounds. This generation are exposed to what they haven’t got every second of their day – the ‘must haves’ have become a whole lot more expensive, school trips are far more extravagant, the peer pressure that follows you into your home on a little screen (the quality of which is, in itself, a reminder that you may have less, be less), the apparent ease that one can become rich and famous (looking at you X Factor, BGT, etc…) – and here you are, 15 with a passed-down Android phone in your too-small bedroom that you have to share with your really irritating 10-year-old brother.
Blocking out your reality by staring into this shiny world you can’t seem to break into, interrupted only by the flurry of excited WhatsApps about the upcoming school trip you can’t go on and a link to the 13-year-old on Instagram showing off his birthday presents – the latest MacBook and iPhone, of course … The sense of inadequacy is deep; one day, you think… one day, I’ll be rich, I’ll put my pictures all up on Augmented Reality 50210 (or whatever the TikTok of the moment is). Then I can do whatever I like, I’ll go wherever I like, have whatever I like and they’ll all look at my pictures and want to be me… they’ll do whatever I say.
“What does this have to do with financial investment?”, I hear you ask. Where will this young man’s first pay cheque go? To Apple (other brands are available) or to that really boring man in a suit telling him he can have a really good phone when he’s 63 if he hands over 20% of his wages?
We could leave the conversation there and solely blame social media with its narrow lens into the lives of the rich and powerful, but it has to be (and is) much bigger and deeper than that.
I have spent over 20 years in the education industry and I have experienced the erosion of our children’s sense of autonomy, independence and intrinsic motivation through a system that rewards compliance over creativity and uniformity over diversity – all of which, I believe, go against our core nature as human beings. Young people are controlled to a level that is unprecedented, from the way they solve a maths problem to how they wear their hair. Even their ‘hobbies’ are immediately pounced upon and having fun in the park has largely been replaced with football/gym/tennis/running club with even more rules and expectations.
While we know that money does bring freedom, autonomy and choice they crave, we also know that it doesn’t happen overnight; for a generation busting to be free, anything other than right now is far too long to wait. That is why conversations about saving, pensions and investment are currently so hard; we have to listen, not teach, respond, not react and build a relationship of mutual respect and trust and go on a journey alongside our youth as they re-ignite their own inner wisdom and make the best choices.