The hole that adults dig

I was running on the treadmill at the gym trying not to think about anything, but the scene prevented me: to the right, a man was struggling to walk uphill while a TikTok one after another, and laughed heartily; to the left, a retired woman smiled dreamily at the screen of the treadmill, on which Santi Millán was presenting Factor XIn both our eyes, it was a kind of hypnosis. I remembered then the last lunch I'd shared with people, and how it was the older folks who checked their phones when notifications popped up or answered calls by getting up from the table, as if nothing were amiss. I remembered the last few trips on the subway, on the blue line that takes me home, and that army of tired people, all adults, going home like me, amazed by the most vulgar videos created by artificial intelligence or getting their news from fake news websites. Who would have thought it, right? We'd like them all to be ill-mannered youngsters, bewildered and rude teenagers, uncivilized youths, but it turns out they were older people, some with gray hair, people who looked serious and respectable. Who would have thought it, really.

I've been thinking for a while about this tendency to blame young people for the world's ills. A historical tendency, certainly, and older than walking itself. I understand it: we've learned that youth is rebellion, rebelliousness, and audacity, but also renewal, energy, and vitality; maturity is about conduct, education, and formality, but also prudence, knowledge, and awareness. Young people have always been accused of corrupting what works, disrupting what's good, and making a lot of noise about nothing. Poor dreamers, naive souls who don't know enough. It's also true that in recent years this gap has widened: new technologies, the internet, screens, and algorithmic language have further distanced the world of young people from that of adults, who are now connected by a fragile and precarious thread of understanding. Sometimes it seems we inhabit two parallel realities, which has emboldened the accusations against young people of perverting the humanist and peaceful world that our elders founded. Good heavens, how can everything be falling apart so fast?!

But while running on the treadmill, while trying to keep calm during lunch, or while walking home surrounded by adults glued to their phones, I thought about all the times that blaming young people for degrading the values of an orderly world has served to mask the decadence that older generations unwittingly promote. This is the hypothesis. And the example of screens illustrates it perfectly. In fact, it's not just my feeling, a young person (not so young anymore) enraged at being the target of everyone's criticism, but a few months ago the newspaper The Economist published an article entitled Meet the real screen addicts: the elderlyIn it, she explained that recent studies show older people are increasingly living their lives through their phones, and that free time, isolation, and immobility are the key recipe for a growing addiction. This is compounded by the fact that they have fewer social barriers preventing them from spending time on screens (perhaps "parental controls" should be created for adults?) and a lack of awareness of their addiction (young people talk about brain rotting to refer to brain rot after hours of doing scrollWe have words to name what happens to us; older people, on the other hand, don't. The market knows all this well and invents AirPods These devices function as hearing aids or systems that connect phones to emergency services. Their decline has also come to an end.

This is just one example, yes. Just a year ago I wrote about the far right and the adult worldAfter months of feeling like the news was constantly focusing on the radicalization of young people, as if they were the only ones responsible for Vox's rise to power in Spain or for Aliança Catalana becoming the third-largest party in the Catalan Parliament. As if Trump's open war against the world, Putin's constant threat, and the ever-growing spiral of fear were solely the responsibility of young people. Regardless of the reason or the issue at hand, there's a tendency to use young people as scapegoats for the world's ills. However, studies point in other directions. This is what I ask of 2026: that it be the year we hold our elders accountable for the hole we're digging, the hole they've left so wide open for future generations. Let's see how they defend themselves.