Allowing youth to fail
In the face of widespread ideologization, societal tribalization, and an increasingly rigid friend-or-foe mentality, it is perhaps the perpetual generational conflict that holds more potential for insight than ever before. Moreover, isn't the relationship between adolescents and adults itself currently undergoing a fundamental transformation?
By Benjamin Johann
By Benjamin Johann
The generation gap is a recurring, cyclical phenomenon. Each generation grapples anew with its parents' generation, with their ideas, ideals, and convictions. This happens more or less consciously, through active rejection or passive adoption. Cinema, art, and pop culture offer a vast archive of prototypical narratives and recurring motifs. Childhood as an idealized state of innocence, childhood as martyrdom, youth as rebellion, as emancipation, as a social problem, as a process of self-discovery and identity formation, as a phase of initiation experiences, first love, first sexual experiences, first encounters with social inequality and death, confrontations with authorities, institutions, and societal rigidities.
Of course, this conflict also takes place from the perspective of adults. We all know the phrases our parents used, the platitudes our teachers used. Yes, they too dreamed, they too had ideals, weighed their hopes, reveled in the intoxication, they too didn't believe their parents--after all, they, like all of us, were once young. But all those dreams and hopes proved to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. Today they know better, so believe and trust them; they only want the best for you, want to spare you disappointment and protect you from pain. Stranded on the shores of ordinary life, they appeal to all-powerful experience, pointing to the richness of their knowledge and the authority of their insight. The philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940, once wrote that experience is the expressionless mask of adulthood. Behind a mask, one can hide; with it, one can conceal one thing and feign another. It is an artificial shell, a costume, impenetrable, indifferent, anonymous. No matter what idea or project it encounters, the mask remains unresponsive, or rather, its response is the same unchanging inaction.
It is not uncommon for adults, in retrospect, to romanticize their own youth in a fit of sentimentality that smooths over any hardships of growing up. Or perhaps they reveal their bitterness by denying the "inexperienced" the very process of experience they themselves had to undergo. What is it, Benjamin asks, that frightens and provokes them so? The innocence of youth? Their willingness to take risks? Their openness and curiosity? The memory of having once been young themselves? Must they therefore idealize, ward off, and fight against youth? Aren't the doubts of adolescents often also the doubts of adults projected onto them and internalized?
Life's a bitch and then you die. Resignation, disillusionment, meaninglessness and desolation--life doesn't offer much more than that. Benjamin criticizes the attitude that turns experience into an instrument for the premature devaluation of everything that attracts and moves youth. Every dream is dismissed in advance as mere reverie, and every experience as leading to error and disillusionment, because the adult has already experienced it all. They have lived it, and they know: it was all an illusion. The sweet intoxication The illusion of youth will give way to the long, sobering reality of serious life. The well-meaning say: enjoy it, for it will be over faster than you think. The embittered don't even grant youth this illusion. The effect is the same in both cases: adults devalue the brief years we call youth in advance. Which is more insidious--a realism that has banished all imagination, or one that still carries disillusionment within it as a necessary experience of growing up?
An exemplary anecdote illustrates this: Climate change is "a matter for professionals." With this statement in 2019, the then-FDP chairman Christian Lindner attempted not only to relativize the concerns formulated by Fridays for Future and thus an entire protest movement, but also, in particular, to question the legitimacy of young people. On the one hand, according to Lindner, children and young people cannot yet grasp the complexity of the issue, since there are, after all, scientists, experts, and politicians precisely for that purpose. While he generally welcomes a critical, politically engaged youth, if demonstrations are to be held, then please outside of school hours. Quite apart from his specific approach to the issue of climate change, Lindner's stance reveals much about the general relationship between adults and young people. His former role as a professional politician makes the perfidy of his paternalism all the more apparent. It's the way insinuating patronage and authority cloak themselves in benevolence. The intrusive, even condescending, disenfranchisement of young people by adults who rely on their knowledge, their expertise, etc.Lindner's rhetorical reference to compulsory education in the aforementioned context unequivocally demonstrates the importance he attaches to the political awareness of young people, their worries, needs, desires, and hopes.
A polemical sketch of the present: young people increasingly exhibit an almost obsessive hyper-rationalism, while older generations feel compelled to remind the youth of what they supposedly consider essential: optimism about progress and a healthy dose of irrationality. At the same time, there are Boomers, for whom Berlin is synonymous with a collection of perpetual youth who absolutize hedonism and glorify their escapist pursuit of pleasure as self-realization. How, however, do these "older generations" explain the growing enthusiasm for traditional and conservative lifestyles among "young people"? Aren't adolescents themselves torn between the promises of maximizing individual happiness and the struggle for moral integrity and responsibility?
Against this backdrop, the findings of the SINUS youth study "How Do Young People Tick?" from 2024 are interesting: Young people's awareness of problems is more pronounced than ever in light of the multitude of crises and issues; however, despite their concerns, the majority maintain a realistic optimism about the future; the decline of the once defining hedonism of youth continues, increasingly replaced by an orientation towards classic bourgeois virtues; while political awareness among young people tends to be short-lived, there is a high level of general sensitivity and attention to social inequality, injustice, diversity, and discrimination; young people feel politically alienated due to a perceived lack of influence and excluded from social participation because of a lack of respect shown to them by adults; a life without social media is unimaginable for most young people, even though they reflect critically and with growing unease on the effects of this use; it is essential to note that social media is by far the most important source of information for the majority of young people.
Today, young people seem to think that social media is completely natural and self-evident a virtually warlike form of (non-)exchange, characterized by aggression, relentlessness, and high-speed condemnation, which, following the literary scholar Joseph Vogl, could aptly be described as "ballistic communication." The world is reduced to a collection of camps that either endlessly reinforce each other or are dedicated to the prompt annihilation of the opposing camp. This kind of communication has long been taking place offline as well. Everything is simplified, abbreviated, intensified, absolutized, and radicalized.
Today's youth, who, like everyone else, should be allowed to explore their own unique experiences, are confronted with an overabundance of identification options and an urgent appeal to define their sense of belonging. Ironically, those who are often carelessly assumed to have all paths open to them exhibit a heightened degree of existential insecurity. Assuming we define youth as a short, temporary phase of life, the question arises: how much time, how much space does the developing individual actually have to engage with the things supposedly reserved for youth--searching, making mistakes, getting lost, experimenting, trying things out, dreaming? After all, it is primarily the attention of young people that social media algorithms clamor for. It is not the space of possible experience that has opened up and expanded, but rather the apparent diversity of entertainment and distractions, including the spectrum of existing identities and increasingly particularized collectives, from which one simply has to choose. Why then take risks, exert effort, and endure the pain of error?
Youth is not just a matter of age, but above all a matter of attitude, a mental stance toward life. Certainly, experience can be sobering and painful; there is no doubt about that. The challenge, however, lies in not settling into an indifferent state of bitterness in the face of error. Those who have resigned themselves to the past know only the balance sheet and look back to yesterday, and it is for them that any openness and orientation towards the future and the unknown becomes a provocation, which is why they reject, fight against, and devalue it.
Resisting the powers that paralyze our imagination and fill it with their inferior substitutes, and freeing ourselves from them in order to create the conditions for genuine experience, becomes all the more important the more difficult it is for us to do so.d. Trusting young people and allowing them to fail is one task; remaining young at heart is another. Resisting the invasive seductive forces of communicative capitalism and actively creating spaces of non-communication so that experience becomes possible again is a challenge of a completely different order.
September 26, 2025
Benjamin Johann (born 1988) studied Theater and Media Studies, German Studies, and the Ethics of Textual Cultures. He worked at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg and is now a freelance writer, publishing in various forms and formats. He is also a co-host of the podcast "Projections - Cinema Conversations." His engagement with film, art, and culture is always also an exploration of society, philosophy, and politics--constantly searching for the ethical and aesthetic trajectories of our present. Since her birth, his daughter has reminded him of the vital power of fascination and the anarchic.
CLICK HERE FOR THE NEW BOOK
Of course, this conflict also takes place from the perspective of adults. We all know the phrases our parents used, the platitudes our teachers used. Yes, they too dreamed, they too had ideals, weighed their hopes, reveled in the intoxication, they too didn't believe their parents--after all, they, like all of us, were once young. But all those dreams and hopes proved to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. Today they know better, so believe and trust them; they only want the best for you, want to spare you disappointment and protect you from pain. Stranded on the shores of ordinary life, they appeal to all-powerful experience, pointing to the richness of their knowledge and the authority of their insight. The philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who died in 1940, once wrote that experience is the expressionless mask of adulthood. Behind a mask, one can hide; with it, one can conceal one thing and feign another. It is an artificial shell, a costume, impenetrable, indifferent, anonymous. No matter what idea or project it encounters, the mask remains unresponsive, or rather, its response is the same unchanging inaction.
It is not uncommon for adults, in retrospect, to romanticize their own youth in a fit of sentimentality that smooths over any hardships of growing up. Or perhaps they reveal their bitterness by denying the "inexperienced" the very process of experience they themselves had to undergo. What is it, Benjamin asks, that frightens and provokes them so? The innocence of youth? Their willingness to take risks? Their openness and curiosity? The memory of having once been young themselves? Must they therefore idealize, ward off, and fight against youth? Aren't the doubts of adolescents often also the doubts of adults projected onto them and internalized?
Life's a bitch and then you die. Resignation, disillusionment, meaninglessness and desolation--life doesn't offer much more than that. Benjamin criticizes the attitude that turns experience into an instrument for the premature devaluation of everything that attracts and moves youth. Every dream is dismissed in advance as mere reverie, and every experience as leading to error and disillusionment, because the adult has already experienced it all. They have lived it, and they know: it was all an illusion. The sweet intoxication The illusion of youth will give way to the long, sobering reality of serious life. The well-meaning say: enjoy it, for it will be over faster than you think. The embittered don't even grant youth this illusion. The effect is the same in both cases: adults devalue the brief years we call youth in advance. Which is more insidious--a realism that has banished all imagination, or one that still carries disillusionment within it as a necessary experience of growing up?
An exemplary anecdote illustrates this: Climate change is "a matter for professionals." With this statement in 2019, the then-FDP chairman Christian Lindner attempted not only to relativize the concerns formulated by Fridays for Future and thus an entire protest movement, but also, in particular, to question the legitimacy of young people. On the one hand, according to Lindner, children and young people cannot yet grasp the complexity of the issue, since there are, after all, scientists, experts, and politicians precisely for that purpose. While he generally welcomes a critical, politically engaged youth, if demonstrations are to be held, then please outside of school hours. Quite apart from his specific approach to the issue of climate change, Lindner's stance reveals much about the general relationship between adults and young people. His former role as a professional politician makes the perfidy of his paternalism all the more apparent. It's the way insinuating patronage and authority cloak themselves in benevolence. The intrusive, even condescending, disenfranchisement of young people by adults who rely on their knowledge, their expertise, etc.Lindner's rhetorical reference to compulsory education in the aforementioned context unequivocally demonstrates the importance he attaches to the political awareness of young people, their worries, needs, desires, and hopes.
A polemical sketch of the present: young people increasingly exhibit an almost obsessive hyper-rationalism, while older generations feel compelled to remind the youth of what they supposedly consider essential: optimism about progress and a healthy dose of irrationality. At the same time, there are Boomers, for whom Berlin is synonymous with a collection of perpetual youth who absolutize hedonism and glorify their escapist pursuit of pleasure as self-realization. How, however, do these "older generations" explain the growing enthusiasm for traditional and conservative lifestyles among "young people"? Aren't adolescents themselves torn between the promises of maximizing individual happiness and the struggle for moral integrity and responsibility?
Against this backdrop, the findings of the SINUS youth study "How Do Young People Tick?" from 2024 are interesting: Young people's awareness of problems is more pronounced than ever in light of the multitude of crises and issues; however, despite their concerns, the majority maintain a realistic optimism about the future; the decline of the once defining hedonism of youth continues, increasingly replaced by an orientation towards classic bourgeois virtues; while political awareness among young people tends to be short-lived, there is a high level of general sensitivity and attention to social inequality, injustice, diversity, and discrimination; young people feel politically alienated due to a perceived lack of influence and excluded from social participation because of a lack of respect shown to them by adults; a life without social media is unimaginable for most young people, even though they reflect critically and with growing unease on the effects of this use; it is essential to note that social media is by far the most important source of information for the majority of young people.
Today, young people seem to think that social media is completely natural and self-evident a virtually warlike form of (non-)exchange, characterized by aggression, relentlessness, and high-speed condemnation, which, following the literary scholar Joseph Vogl, could aptly be described as "ballistic communication." The world is reduced to a collection of camps that either endlessly reinforce each other or are dedicated to the prompt annihilation of the opposing camp. This kind of communication has long been taking place offline as well. Everything is simplified, abbreviated, intensified, absolutized, and radicalized.
Today's youth, who, like everyone else, should be allowed to explore their own unique experiences, are confronted with an overabundance of identification options and an urgent appeal to define their sense of belonging. Ironically, those who are often carelessly assumed to have all paths open to them exhibit a heightened degree of existential insecurity. Assuming we define youth as a short, temporary phase of life, the question arises: how much time, how much space does the developing individual actually have to engage with the things supposedly reserved for youth--searching, making mistakes, getting lost, experimenting, trying things out, dreaming? After all, it is primarily the attention of young people that social media algorithms clamor for. It is not the space of possible experience that has opened up and expanded, but rather the apparent diversity of entertainment and distractions, including the spectrum of existing identities and increasingly particularized collectives, from which one simply has to choose. Why then take risks, exert effort, and endure the pain of error?
Youth is not just a matter of age, but above all a matter of attitude, a mental stance toward life. Certainly, experience can be sobering and painful; there is no doubt about that. The challenge, however, lies in not settling into an indifferent state of bitterness in the face of error. Those who have resigned themselves to the past know only the balance sheet and look back to yesterday, and it is for them that any openness and orientation towards the future and the unknown becomes a provocation, which is why they reject, fight against, and devalue it.
Resisting the powers that paralyze our imagination and fill it with their inferior substitutes, and freeing ourselves from them in order to create the conditions for genuine experience, becomes all the more important the more difficult it is for us to do so.d. Trusting young people and allowing them to fail is one task; remaining young at heart is another. Resisting the invasive seductive forces of communicative capitalism and actively creating spaces of non-communication so that experience becomes possible again is a challenge of a completely different order.
September 26, 2025
Benjamin Johann (born 1988) studied Theater and Media Studies, German Studies, and the Ethics of Textual Cultures. He worked at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg and is now a freelance writer, publishing in various forms and formats. He is also a co-host of the podcast "Projections - Cinema Conversations." His engagement with film, art, and culture is always also an exploration of society, philosophy, and politics--constantly searching for the ethical and aesthetic trajectories of our present. Since her birth, his daughter has reminded him of the vital power of fascination and the anarchic.
CLICK HERE FOR THE NEW BOOK
Write a comment