by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-07 17:04:30+00:00
> But the majority of young adults are rightfully asking hard questions.

As young adults always had, since the dawn of time.

And as they've received and comprehended the answers, most quickly stopped asking.

That is part of what becoming an adult, without the "young" bit, means. It's not like these things are unknowable, or that the "system of things" is secretive. It's all rather obvious - it just takes a little time and experience to figure out the questions and notice the answers.

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> Why should they suffer the consequences of political and corporate mismanagement?

Because that's how it works. It's not that different from asking, why should they suffer the consequences of a tree falling on them and crushing them? Because they happened to stand under it at the time, duh!

Society and civilization aren't fixtures created by nature/God - they're built out of human interactions. People pursuing all kinds of interests, alone or in groups, navigating around each other, cooperating, convincing or coercing each other. It's all abstract systems created and maintained by strangers. And the unfortunate reality is, someone screws up somewhere badly enough, everyone downstream of it suffers.

The sad irony is, the consequences they ask about come from mismanagement of systems that were created in the past to shield people from consequences of failure of earlier versions of the same or similar systems! That's what civilization is, in a way - stacking systemic solutions to problems of previous systems!

The silver lining is in hoping that every iteration makes less people suffer consequences and to a lesser degree.

> Why is accountability rarely invoked when it comes to people in power?

It is invoked much more often than they think, but they're not able to recognize it - it looks different than with people not in power. And it needs to be different, because the situation is different too.

> Why is it OK for old disgruntled people to yell at them for things they have nothing to do with?

Why is it OK for them to yell at old disgruntled people for things they have nothing to do with? Yelling is easy. Understanding that almost no one individually has much influence on how things are, that can unfortunately take a lifetime.

> Why should they take us seriously if we don't take them seriously?

Because that's how life works. It was the same for us when we were young, and for our parents when they were young, etc. Young people don't know shit about life, and don't even realize that yet. Over time, they acquire knowledge, experience and relationships, and various kinds of power - and along the way, they are treated more and more seriously, until they themselves become the people "running things" and start hearing the same questions they used to ask from the next generation of kids.

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To be clear: I'm not saying that things are all ideal, or even perfectly fine. I'm just saying that the answers to those questions aren't mysterious, and figuring them out is exactly what growing up to be an adult in a society looks like. It always has, which is why you can see the exact same complaints about "kids these days" and "old farts" showing up in every period in history, all the way back to ancient Greece and earlier.