When I roll out into the city, there’s always that buzz in the air—screens lighting up with breaking news, conversations dripping with anxiety, people asking one another the same exhausted question: “Where are we going to end up?”
You’ve probably felt it too. Wars are multiplying, democracies are teetering, artificial intelligence unsettles our jobs, and the climate crisis hangs over us like smoke.
And then comes the chorus of clichés. Some insist young people are too fragile, that if they just toughened up, everything would be fine. Others claim despair is inevitable, a natural consequence of history’s violent rhythm. Still others—usually older, comfortably distant from the struggles of youth—shrug and say: “This is just progress, you’ll get used to it.”
But deep down, I don’t believe any of that. Because the truth I’ve seen, in classrooms, community centres, and even across my own life, is this: despair isn’t destiny. Hope is. But only if we treat it not as a feeling, but as a skill.
When the Curve Flipped
Until recently, happiness had a rhythm. It dipped in middle age, then rose again later in life. But since 2020, something broke. In North America, Europe, even parts of Africa and Latin America, young people became the least happy group. The pandemic cracked open isolation, social media rewired attention, but the roots go deeper: uncertain futures, fragile jobs, political polarisation, climate collapse.
As a result, we now see an epidemic of loneliness and rising suicide among young adults. And that should terrify us—not only because of the suffering itself, but because hope is the lifeblood of progress. Without it, education stalls, innovation dies, and communities fracture.
I’ve met teenagers who look at the future the way you stare into a foggy window—straining to see something, anything, on the other side. But I’ve also seen the spark reignite when someone steps in, someone who believes in them.
Take Jose Santana, the Bronx high schooler who once had no plans for college. Then came a programme, Youthful Savings, where he learned financial literacy, life skills, and—most importantly—received mentorship from Somya Munjal, a young entrepreneur who had fought her own battles for education. Jose now dreams of building businesses himself.
One student, one mentor, one flame in the darkness. It matters.
My Wheelchair, My Window
Let me pause here. Some of you know I navigate the world in a wheelchair. And when you’re seated, looking up, life teaches you perspective early. People underestimate you, overlook you, sometimes pity you. If you let those gazes define you, despair creeps in quietly, like mould in the walls.
But here’s the thing: every mentor I’ve had, every teacher or friend who treated me not as fragile but as capable, watered a seed of hope inside me. That’s how I became president of FreeAstroScience, how I started writing, how I sit here now talking to you.
Hope wasn’t handed to me like a gift. It was trained into me through mentorship, through people who said, “You’re not just surviving—you can lead, you can teach, you can move worlds even without moving legs.”
That’s why I know mentorship isn’t charity. It’s rebellion. It’s how we resist the quiet tyranny of despair.
Against the Religion of Complaint
But let’s not pretend despair belongs only to the young. Michele Serra, in his biting essay, skewers the rest of us for perfecting the art of complaint. Adults love to sigh about leaders, wars, artificial intelligence, billionaires buying Mars. We widen our eyes, throw up our arms, and mumble: “Signora mia, where will this end?”
But as Serra points out, whining is cheap resistance. If the end of the world comes—and it may—it’s better to meet it upright, alive, even smiling. Not prostrate, not collapsed, but in good shape, ready.
That landed like a slap for me. Because yes, there’s guilt too. How dare we feel joy when Gaza burns, when refugees drown, when the climate cracks open? Yet guilt doesn’t build a better world—it freezes us. Joy, responsibility, action: these are survival tools.
Mentorship as Collective Medicine
So here’s the connection. Both youth despair and adult complaint come from the same wound: a sense that the future is something done to us instead of something we co-create.
Mentorship repairs that wound. When a student hears from a mentor—whether it’s a teacher, a coach, a neighbour—“I see you, and you can do this,” they gain not just optimism, but agency. The fog shifts.
We need education systems that teach not just algebra and essays, but financial literacy, communication, creativity. We need debating clubs, like those revived in Chicago, where kids learn to argue with reason instead of rage. We need community colleges like Macomb in Detroit, where low-income students get mentors and pathways to real degrees.
Most of all, we need a culture where adults model courage instead of complaint. Where we live as though hope is contagious—because it is.
Choosing to Smile at the Apocalypse
Serra suggests that if the end is inevitable, we should at least meet it with good posture, in decent humour. I think he’s right. Because despair shrinks our lives, while hope enlarges them, even in dark times.
The task isn’t to deny suffering. It’s to insist, stubbornly, that despair is not the only truth. That’s what young people need to see in us—not our sighs, but our smiles, our responsibility, our willingness to fight for a future worth living in.
So I ask you: what would happen if we treated hope like a discipline? If every adult made it their responsibility to mentor one young person, to cultivate joy without guilt, to resist the siren song of complaint?
Maybe then the next generation wouldn’t inherit despair. They’d inherit agency.
A Final Reflection
From my wheelchair, I see the world differently. Literally lower, yes, but sometimes clearer. When I look at young faces clouded by fear, I remember what saved me: mentors, friends, science, stories, small communities that said: “We need you.”
Hope, in that sense, isn’t abstract. It’s intimate. It’s one hand extended, one voice steadying another, one laugh shared when the news says everything’s on fire.
And maybe, just maybe, when the world really does begin to collapse, we’ll remember Serra’s provocation: if we can’t stop the storm, let’s at least meet it alive, smiling, and in good company.
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