Does increased proportion of young adults pose a threat to society?
By: Aemilius Damiano
Tags: Future, Young, Creative, Adulthood, Sociology

If this question happened to surface approximately 40 to 50 years ago, the most common and immediate answer would be a resounding NO. Hypothetically, it makes complete sense because the young population of a society used to be reckoned the most precious asset of any nation for some proven reasons. First, it is suggested that youngsters are the main source of creativity and innovativeness and can lead to myriads of breakthroughs which each is capable of shifting the whole landscape of the future by blazing trails for the world.

According to the researches conducted by the prominent socio-psychologists depicts that human’s creativity peaks around at the ages of 17 to 40 and plummets down steadily as an individual grows up. To briefly elucidate this, let’s take a look at the most influential figures of all time. Albert Einstein was in his mid-twenties when he formulated the theory of relativity. Einstein was a precocious child, and contrary to the mainstream myth, He was just a teenager when he started to debunk the most common and long-standing beliefs. The same story applies to Maria Sklodowska Curie. Even though she was mercilessly challenged by lots of her male counterparts, she accomplished remarkable feats and invented groundbreaking elements. Marie was most prolific when she was young, which later on resulted in winning a Nobel Prize by making her first woman in the history who awarded with such a prize to this date. Many other stories can be added to the list just to disprove the deep-rooted lure, which constantly dictates wisdom and originality as virtues solely belong to the elderly people. What I mean by that, it was the young Einsteins and Maries who changed the future, not the old ones.

In addition, young members of society displayed significantly much better performance in terms of working under certain circumstances require switching between two or more tasks and strenuous effort than their older counterparts. These direct correlations suggest compelling evidence that if we have a relatively more revolutionary and better functioning population, humankind will experience blissfully incredible destiny. We already happen to witness young self-made billionaires and pioneering scientists. But what if I told you that the future we are heading for will be tremendously miserable and pathetic, would you believe in that? If so, here's why that is the case.

As a part of our optimist nature, we have a tendency to only ruminate about positive aspects, which therefore makes us blind to the negative sides. We both consciously or unconsciously fail to see the whole picture by evading the evil. However, evading the evil does not erase the evil. Toxic optimism will not save us, so it is the exact time to feel some apprehension on the changes about the happen.

First thing first, the more young people we will have, the more problems we will face. Social problems will skyrocket.

The increasing scope of unemployment and crime rates tend to goes hand in hand while the gross amount of young adults climbs over. It is essential to discern that young people are a novice to the highly competitive labour market, therefore most employers are prone to hire or recruit people who meet the extremely harsh criteria such as having 4 to 6 years work experience, which is almost unfathomable for a quintessential newly graduated student.

Then a phenomenon which I call "rat race" kicks in.

This kind of atmosphere propels young people to be sneaky and the pressure it exerts on them ridiculously irrational and excessive. To put it simply, the whole system is exclusively tailor-made for people who pay the extremely high personal cost. Nowadays, the Measure of success is quantified by how much money you make and how many people know your name. Mental health and depression have become widely prevalent among students and legitimately, they have become pretty vocal about it. This eventually leaves more and more young people unemployed and discouraged before they step onto the real world.

On top of that, another elephant in the room is crime rates. Criminology and sociology reiterate that propensity towards crime commences peaking at the adolescence or early adulthood and decline with age. There are major contributory elements affecting the causation of criminal behaviour.

Initially, the causes of crime seem to be rooted in the ineffectiveness of groups including both informal such

as the family and friends, and the formal institutions in the large societies.

There are arguments clustered around the idea that crime is largely a function



of the inability of the individual to achieve by legitimate means



the goals inculcated by society, coupled with an erosion of the



restraining forces of social norms. By Gresham M. Sykes

All of these lay beautifully detrimental pitfall for young people to fall into and push them to the crime. If we are to pinpoint a culprit, no need to blame youngsters but a society which makes them susceptible to all the scourges of the contemporary world. In conclusion, I buy into the concept that young people will become the perfect asset to our world when it comes to brightness, however, it does not suffice to compensate for the drawbacks which it brings with, by doing irreversible damage to the core of society.

Even though we are not fully sure of what will happen in the future, the current situation still allows us to have some ideas about what will the life look like in immediate or distant future. I want to conclude the article with the following statement:

“A sociologist is just a man in a crow’s nest who knows no more of this sea than his fellows, but from his position, he will catch sight of coming dangers-shoals, sunken rocks, derelicts, cross-currents-before they are



seen by those on deck.,

By Edward Ross

Photo by Christina Ambalavanar

https://unsplash.com/@christinaamba

While writing this article, I was inspired by the book called THE FUTURE OF CRIME by ,Gresham M. Sykes Ph. D.



Department of Sociology



University of Virginia