“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Charles Dickens wrote those words about revolutionary Paris and London more than a century and a half ago, yet they might as well describe the young person doomscrolling on their phone at 3 a.m., caught between the glow of infinite possibility and the ache of infinite comparisons. To be young today is to live inside a contradiction so total it feels less like a stage of life and more like permanent whiplash.
Never has a generation had more information at its fingertips. A young person with a smartphone can access more knowledge than the great libraries of antiquity. Today’s youth are more socially conscious and emotionally literate than any generation before them, fluent in conversations about mental health, identity and justice that their parents never had the vocabulary for. Yet this same access has produced a peculiar foolishness: a flood so overwhelming that discernment drowns in it. Misinformation spreads faster than correction, and attention, the mind’s most valuable currency, is auctioned off in fifteen-second increments to algorithms loyal to nothing but engagement. Where wisdom requires depth but the age demands speed, many young people know a little about everything and are rarely given the stillness to know anything deeply.
Young people believe fiercely too, in causes, in climate futures, in the possibility of a fairer world. Movements led by the young have toppled assumptions older generations treated as permanent. But that faith sits beside a corrosive incredulity. Trust in institutions, governments, and the very idea of a stable career has been eroded, because many systems built by their elders were not built with them in mind. This is a generation asked to have faith in structures that have often failed to provide them jobs, housing, or a livable planet.
There is genuine light in this generation: unprecedented creativity, entrepreneurship born of necessity, art that processes pain into something communal and beautiful, friendships forged across borders that would once have been impossible. Young people are building innovations, businesses, movements and communities with a resourcefulness their circumstances demand.
But the darkness is not metaphorical. Anxiety and depression among young people have risen sharply worldwide. Loneliness has been called an epidemic, striking hardest among the most “connected” people in human history. Economic precarity, conflict, displacement and climate anxiety weigh on a generation expected to smile through it all, to be “resilient”, a word that has quietly become a euphemism for being left to cope alone.
This is perhaps the cruellest of Dickens’ pairings and the truest for youth today: everything before them and nothing before them, both at once. In theory, a young person anywhere can learn a skill, start a venture and reach any audience; after all, the tools of transformation are more accessible than ever. In practice, systems remain unequal, and opportunity is still shaped heavily by geography, privilege at birth and who you know.
Across the youthful African and Arab region, the demographic dividend that should be an economic engine risks becoming a demographic time bomb: a vast, capable, ambitious population without enough doors open to it. Everything and nothing, both true, depending only on which young person, and where, and with what resources, you happen to be asking.
Development practitioners rightly call youth the world’s greatest asset, the ones who will inherit and hopefully repair what has been broken. Peace, unity and development, the very language used by various youth movements across continents and the road to Heaven, in Dickens’ language. But the other way is just as real. Radicalisation preys on disillusioned young people who feel unseen. Disengagement and despair claim others. Conflict recruits the youth disproportionately, because they are the most idealistic and the most exploitable. The same energy that could build a nation can, without support and without opportunity, be turned toward its unravelling.
Dickens was not describing a contradiction to be resolved but a condition to be reckoned with. His insight that “noisiest authorities” always insist their own era is uniquely superlative, uniquely best or worst, is itself a caution against both despair and complacency. Every generation believes it stands at history’s hinge; what matters is not whether today truly is the best or the worst of times, but what is done with the young people living through it.
The plight of youth today is not a single crisis but a convergence: economic precarity meeting digital overload meeting eroding trust meeting genuine, stubborn hope. Addressing it seriously means building the structures the youth actually need instead of flattening it into a single narrative, either “young people these days” pessimism or the hollow “leaders of tomorrow” cheerleading. Create mental health support systems that meet them where they are, education for the world as it is becoming rather than as it was, real economic pathways rather than precarious gig work, and a seat at the tables where decisions about their future are made today, not tomorrow.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It still is. The question every generation before us has had to answer, and the one this generation must answer too, is which way its noisiest authorities will choose to build.
The author works with the Afro-Arab Youth Council (AAYC)
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