Times, customs and customs pass. The world moves on, and yet there is something that resists being buried under the rubble that the passage of time leaves behind: the inevitable tendency to label generations of young people as the most consistently contemporary story. Those born between 1946 and 1964 belong to the large baby boomer community. Then along came the magnetic Generation X, disillusioned and individualistic, and they were followed by the so-called Millennials, so gregarious, so creative, so multi-tasking… that they immediately gave way to the Centenials, known as Generation Z. Enterprising and born with a digital device under their arm.
It seems necessary to label the different generations of young people, regardless of their lifetime, with adjectives that almost always have something in common in terms of insecurity, dissatisfaction or lack of understanding of their elders.
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And that’s where we were when the final definitions (so far) emerged: the glass generation: women and men between the ages of 15 and 29 who, according to philosopher Montserrat Nebrera, author of the concept, represent an archetype of emotional weakness, largely due to parental overprotection is due. “They are made of glass because of their emotional fragility, because of their existential vulnerability, the result of their parents’ ultra protection. Not surprisingly, their first unnatural cause of death is suicide,” says Nebrera himself. “But they’re also made of glass because of their transparency, which gives them an impressive ability to pick up and process all kinds of stimuli,” he adds.
In this sense, the Bilbao psychologist Luis de la Herrán, a specialist in youth care for more than 25 years, is clear: “I would not speak of the crystal generation. Rather, I would say that the adults who take care of them are and are a cotton-handed generation because they try to avoid feelings of frustration and boredom as much as possible, and that’s a big mistake,” says Herrán. “If we get our youth used to a certain level of frustration and boredom, we make them stronger.”
Why are they made of glass? Why do they break so quickly?
Ana Howe is 26 years old and has just made her debut as a secondary school music teacher. Together with other young people of different ages, he has served on the advisory board of the Crystal Generation Study. Más Allá de las Etiquetas carried out by the SM Foundation to clarify the extent to which the denomination corresponds to reality. “Because of my family circumstances, I spent part of my youth alone; I’ve gotten used to taking care of myself sometimes, so I don’t feel overprotected, let alone weak,” says Howe.
His opinion coincides with some of the conclusions of the above survey, in which not only Spanish but also Mexican, Brazilian or Chilean young people took part and which shows, for example, that 66% of young people and post-adolescent respondents believe that the Term crystal production is wrongly used to criticize them. “It’s clearly a pejorative label, but I want to return the question: why are we made of glass? Why are we considered weak? Why are we breaking so fast? If the definition is used only to criticize the consequences and not to analyze the causes, it will only serve to generate controversy,” said Begoña González, a 21-year-old psychology student and Howe’s partner on the advisory board.
The SM Foundation study also provides other results, for example that 74% of young people think that adults blame them for lack of effort in their studies, work or life in general; or that 62% believe that previous generations had an easier time making progress than today’s youth. “It’s true that there is a developmental point in adolescence where traits of uncertainty about the future and adult misunderstandings come together,” González admits. And this is exactly where the question arises: Is the crystal generation really that different from previous generations?
Empathy-Oriented Fragility
On October 29, 1965, British band The Who released one of their most emblematic songs, My Generation, the translated lyrics of which said something like: “People try to pull us down / Just because we move / Everything they do is terribly cold / I hope I die before I grow old / I speak of my generation”. In this first stanza alone, which was written a whopping 57 years ago, some of the commandments that characterize the Crystal generation today are fulfilled: renunciation of effort and distance from adults, criticism of their way of thinking…
“All generations questioned the models established at the time,” says Ariana Pérez Coutado (34), youth researcher and head of the Fundación SM study. “This group of those born and born after the year 2000, for example, is reluctant to hear that working conditions were precarious even for older people at the beginning of their working lives, and questions whether this is the first way to optimally adapt to the labor market represent time, time,” he concludes. And here the story of fragility, always oriented towards justification, begins to gain importance.
“At the beginning of the century, the young population was much more conformist, but after 2008, when everything was blown up, things started to change,” Pérez Coutado continues. “Currently, for example, 46% of young people belong to an environmental organization and 28% belong to more than one. It’s an existential question; In the specific case of the weather, they know the damage will surely hit them, but the same thing happens when we talk about LGTBI, social issues or mental health, for example. Maybe the difference is that we now have the vocabulary to name the things that happen to us. In this respect, we recognize ourselves as fragile, but within a fragility geared towards empathy.”
Ana Howe goes even further: “We were raised to be emotionally intelligent, that it’s okay to show fragility, and what gives us back when we do that is that we’re ‘soft.’ Young people are nothing but a reflection of certain choices society has made. To this equation, in which one of the variables is the emotional formation mentioned by Howe, we must undoubtedly add everything related to digital and the pandemic, real differentiators of this generation compared to its predecessors. .
“For me, the limitation caught me in the first race. Just when it was a year old, in the second quarter of 2021, the feeling shared by most of the class was one of tremendous physical and emotional exhaustion, and no one knew where it came from,” González recalled. “Half of my college life that was supposed to be crazy years was restricted. And that inevitably takes its toll.” Irene Hernansáiz, secondary and baccalaureate teacher, agrees: “You have made a tremendous effort; They’ve been asked to stay home, they’ve stopped having experiences that are critical to development… It’s deeply unfair to lump this entire breadth of youth together.”
According to Montserrat Nebrera, “However, they have emerged from the pandemic with greater isolation, only digitally connected, with identity confusion and a certain underlying despair, knowing that it is up to them to live in a time like theirs Grandparents, it’s claudicant”. And he ends on an omen of encouragement, to say the least: “Out of their pain, because of the fractures they are bound to suffer, will come genius, brighter as the light penetrates them.”
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