Youth Culture: Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow

As I write this short article, I have the great privilege to be on the other side of the wall to my daughter's room.  What makes it significant is that there are seven teenagers, ages 15 to 18, in her room right now enjoying the living presence of Youth Culture: music, conversation, and the things a teenager might do to enhance music and conversation… especially since school is out in a week and a half.  For the moment this will address the youth culture of today.

            As for the youth culture of yesteryear, (anywhere from 500 BC to my own youth in the 60s), I will tell a story.  One day in humanities class during my freshman year of college, the professor was reading an essay written by a mature adult writer “of the time” written about the current youth culture “of the time”.  You must remember that this was in the mid 60s, and the youth culture of that era was smoking pot, protesting the Vietnam War, dressing like flower-children, and rebelling against anything of the established, prescribed order.  Music and free expression were far more important than grades and deciding upon your life’s profession or career.

            The essay was quite critical of the then current youth culture, stating that the younger generation was lazy; had no clear vision of the future, nor sense of responsibility to society; was hedonistic, seeking only pleasure; and so on.  Obviously we all knew that this was the work of some conservative writer describing our own era’s youth culture.  The professor then revealed who wrote the essay and when it had been written.  The entire class was shocked: it had been written by Socrates around 500 BC., and was describing the youth of Athens, Greece in that time.   So, when it comes to the older generation’s judgment of their younger contemporaries, not much has changed in twenty-five hundred years.

            Now, I would like to address a much greater and more comprehensive idea about the psycho-socio-cultural evolution of the life phase that we remember as the transition from youth into adulthood.  At that age, we are full of life and energy.  Under the spell of testosterone and estrogen, we think we know it all (especially testosterone).  We vaguely remember our childhood and the innocence that came with it, recalling, for instance, the ability to cry and express our emotional frustration freely.  In some respects, we are caught between two worlds, on one hand the world of our childhood, filled with innocence and wonder; on the other, the world of adult life that beckons to us from the future.

            Personally, I tend to see the period from teenage life into young adulthood as one of great experimentation, a testing ground of will, when the ego self-identifies with sex and social status.  It is also a time when the young adult is compelled, by their very nature, to push against parents, teachers, and other authority, to rebel against old ideas, and to explore all forms of expression.  There will be some young people who will be focused, disciplined, and dedicated, who will excel and achieve, engaging in behaviors which are highly reinforced by our left-brain dominated, materialistic society.  There will be others who will rebel against authority, experiment with reality, often going against the grain and defying the expected norm.  Many of these human beings grow up to become innovators, artists, freethinkers, risk takers, and are, most likely, right brain dominant, since they have a tendency to resist school and formal education in their youth.

            Neither style of life expression is right or wrong or better than the other.  The healthy society needs human beings expressing the full spectrum of human experience.  We need both people who are by nature disciplined, serious, focused, and mature, and those people who are radically experimental in their approach to life and culture.  The extremes may not understand each other, but they are both necessary.

            Another viewpoint that I have in relationship to youthful, rebellious and iconoclastic behavior is the theory that the young often times are expressing the level of hypocrisy that exists in the adult world.  In a complex society such as America today, as well as in the rest of the industrialized world, I often feel that young people perceive on some level that the adult world beckoning them is a con.  In actuality, young people sense that they are being asked to give up the freedom and innocence of childhood for the responsibility and burden of adult life.

            I believe that every generation of human beings incarnates with the proper blueprints and downloads in order to adapt well and survive in the world in which they find themselves.  The youth of today will be in the fullness of their adult life in the middle of the 21st Century.  One would have to employ their imagination creatively to envision a world as technologically advanced as what is to come and we might not be able to understand its true meaning or significance.  But is this not the way it always is?  A generation of humanity exists for its period of time, in its particular époque of civilization: the individual soul embodiment is just passing through.  It really helps to keep this in mind, especially when things seem difficult in the world.  We are just passing through, so lighten up; a Renaissance could be just around the corner.

            If one steps back and reserves judgment of any kind about young people, their styles of dress, modes of self-expression, their music, their vernacular, and so on, you may be able to, for a brief second, get a glimpse of the magic of “eternal youthful spirit” and how it is this energy, this spiritual force, that renews and revives the world of cultural expression from the beginning of time to the end of time.  Long live youth!!!

            Read the fine print: sometimes we must be careful not to confuse innovative ideas, creative self-expression, and stylistic freedom with wisdom.  And it is also very wise not to judge youth, but, instead, to observe and study it carefully, incorporating its fundamental innovative ideas into the tapestry woven by the hand of experience and knowledge.  Every generation stands on the shoulders of that which came before.  The wisdom lies in building, and sometimes building means destroying that which already exists to make room so that something dramatically different, something more compelling for this particular time, this particular now, can come into existence.

            In some ways we are a culture that worships youth.  This can be very dangerous to a culture, because it denies the inherent wisdom and beauty of that which has already been established by the previous youth culture that just grew up.  Often times the youth of a particular period feels disenfranchised, frustrated, and discouraged, yet it is this substrate of angst that becomes an engine of creative rebellion, innovation, and expression.  It brings forth within the human consciousness the desire to create a better and more functional world.  Long live youth!!!

-James Hyman

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