In these times it is normal to fall into speculation (more or less correct) about the situation of youth. I found very interesting this article published in El País . The sentence is great, but I have serious doubts that it is exactly depression the topic we are dealing with. Although I still have three festivals left, I’m including myself in the group, and I’m sharing with you my personal vision and reflection on the subject without any further pretensions.

A generation marked by unconcern

The generation of the happy childhood , the carefree adolescence , the studious youth . Living without many problems (I am generalizing), in an overprotected environment where the problems of the world were placed in a third world that seemed very far away. Even today we refer to Africa when we speak of poverty, understanding the continent we have at our doorstep as an entity in space, which only exists in the news. “The poor have no country”, someone said two centuries ago, maybe we should read more. Today’s youth grew up with a few dogmas that have turned out to be milongas: “study and you will work”, “what is mine”, “with effort everything will turn out well”…

Training (especially post-university training) is nothing more than a traditional business to make a profit at the expense of the hopes of a youth that has lost its time and the money that mom and dad (or students working in the afternoons/evenings) earned to pay for it.

Depression in the youth or the anaesthetised generation?

There’s no sadness. People are not depressed in a strict sense of the word. People are anaesthetised , which is different. An anaesthetised generation is born, not something else. There is a latent anxiety about the fear of a future that, already today, has normalized working for free, sharing a flat, not being able to leave the parents’ flat, not being able to plan to start a family or to continue bottling up (to say something less serious) until the age of 40. There will always be cantamañanas fans of volunteerism and other mamarrachadas who will say “if you want to, you can”. But if there are no conditions to be able to, you won’t be able to do shit.

Jordan Belfort, the yuppies, the big businessmen who did a lot of hours (of “work”, according to the legend that seeks to elevate people who have normalized speculation at the expense of anyone and the increase of capital gain at the expense of wages). Those were the examples of anxiety. With their coke, their amphetamines and their stuff. An anxiety about having, supposedly, a lot of work.

Not today. Today there is a youth anxious about not being able to do anything . Or for doing too many things and not being able to do them well.

Fear of the future. To a future that’s too close.

Winking at that great film that was Mondays in the Sun, we could say that we are spending the best part of our lives in the sun. But alluding to another great series of now, the worst thing is that winter is coming .