“For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923)
Dear Gen Z and Gen Alpha: A Letter to You
My dears,
You are entering a changing world, and much of what you will grow up considering normal is anything but. I do not say this because I want you to fear the world or become suspicious of everyone in it. There is enormous goodness in people, and I hope your lives will be filled with friendship, laughter, discovery and love. But I have lived long enough to know that appearances can deceive, that accepted ideas are not necessarily true, and that a crowd can be confidently travelling in the wrong direction. Because I love the human family, I want to leave you with a few things that may help you find your way.
Learn first to love truth, even when truth is inconvenient. You will live among powerful forces competing for your attention and allegiance, and sometimes truth will be exchanged for power, money, influence or approval and such traits can even be cultivated in a family. Lies are not always ugly things that announce themselves as lies; some arrive beautifully dressed, repeated by intelligent people and made attractive by those who stand to benefit from them. When an idea is repeated often enough, it begins to feel familiar, and familiarity can easily be mistaken for truth. So, remain curious. Ask questions, examine motives and evidence, and never surrender your conscience merely because everyone around you appears to agree.
Learn to observe people in the same way, but without becoming cynical about them. Someone may tell you that they love you, and perhaps they sincerely believe they do, but words alone cannot tell you what love is. Watch how people behave when there is nothing to be gained, how they treat those who cannot advance them, whether they respect your boundaries, whether they tell the truth when truth costs them something, and whether they desire what is genuinely good for you rather than simply what they want from you. Love reveals itself gradually in conduct, patience, loyalty, sacrifice and kindness.
This becomes especially important when you begin to fall in love, because attraction has a wonderful ability to interfere with clear eyesight. The person who attracts us can appear almost perfect for a while, and feelings that are intense can easily be mistaken for feelings that are deep. Enjoy the beauty of falling in love, but allow time to reveal character. The wider culture will have much to say about sex and relationships, and films, television, advertising and entertainment will quietly present certain ways of living as ordinary and inevitable. Remember that repetition is not evidence of wisdom. Save sexual intimacy for the person you marry, not because sexuality is something shameful, but precisely because it is something precious. Your body has dignity, as does the body of the person you love. Never allow yourself to believe that you must give something intimate away in order to prove that you are mature, desirable or liberated. Learn the difference between being desired and being loved, because although the two can feel remarkably similar at first, time usually reveals which one you were offered.
Time is a good teacher in other areas of life too. I hope you receive an excellent education, read widely, remain curious and never become frightened of an honest question. But do not make the mistake of believing that education automatically produces wisdom. Knowledge can teach us how something works, while wisdom asks what we should do with that knowledge. It is true that a tomato is a fruit, but it is wise not to ad it into a fruit salad. A person may possess qualifications enough to cover a wall and still make a terrible ruin of his life, while someone with little formal education may possess an extraordinary understanding of human nature. Seek out older and wiser people whose lives have produced good fruit. Ask them about their successes, but ask them about their mistakes as well. There is a great deal of wisdom sitting quietly in elderly people whom the hurried world has simply stopped asking.
The same humility will protect you when it comes to money. There is an old saying that I hope will make you smile and, more importantly, that you will remember: if a naked man offers you a shirt, be suspicious. Behind the humour lies a serious principle. Before accepting advice, consider the condition and motives of the person giving it. When somebody offers you an extraordinary financial opportunity, ask what they stand to gain from your decision. When you are promised easy money, ask where that money is really coming from, and when somebody insists that you must act immediately, wonder why you are not being given time to think. Greed and urgency have made fools of many intelligent people. Learn to live within your means, be generous where you can, avoid unnecessary debt and remember that money can be a useful servant but makes a dreadful master.
All these things—truth, love, relationships, wisdom and money—lead me towards what I most want to leave with you, which is the importance of seeking friendship with God. Human beings are capable of astonishing goodness, courage and tenderness, so love them, enjoy them, forgive them and allow yourself to be loved by them. At the same time, do not ask another human being to carry the weight that belongs to God. Even the best people will sometimes disappoint you, just as you will sometimes disappoint those who love you. If your deepest foundation rests entirely upon another person, you are asking a fragile human being to bear something no human being was designed to carry.
Psalm 15 contains a beautiful picture of the person who can have intimacy with God and enjoy friendship with Him. What strikes me is that the description has nothing to do with wealth, intelligence, social position or achievement. It is about character: someone who walks with integrity, practises what is right, speaks truth from the heart, refuses to injure others with his words, keeps his promises even when doing so becomes costly, and will not exploit another person for financial advantage. There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about that picture. The world may measure you by what you possess, what you accomplish or how important you appear, but God looks at what kind of person you are becoming.
The world you inherit will undoubtedly be very different from the one in which I grew up. Technology will change beyond anything I can presently imagine, customs will change, and ideas considered unquestionable today may one day appear strange or even foolish. Your own generation will have its certainties too, and some of them may eventually prove equally mistaken. That is why I hope you will never build your life merely upon what happens to be fashionable around you. Build it instead upon things that endure, and when you are uncertain, ask whether something is true, whether it is loving and honourable, whether you are treating another person as you would wish to be treated, and whether you can do it with a clear conscience before God.
I do not expect you to think exactly as I think, nor would I want you merely to inherit my conclusions without examining them for yourselves. You will have your own questions, make discoveries I never made and undoubtedly make mistakes of your own. Some wisdom can be passed from one generation to another, but some has to be acquired through living. What I hope is that, wherever life takes you, you remain lovers of truth without becoming harsh, cautious without becoming cynical, strong without becoming hard, and humble enough to change your mind when you discover that you were wrong. Be kind to people who can do nothing for you, never mistake another person's weakness for an opportunity to exploit them, and whenever you can make somebody's burden a little lighter, do so.
Life passes more quickly than you can presently imagine. Perhaps one day you too will sit down to write to the children and youth of your world and wonder what you can possibly tell them about a world you will not live long enough to see. By then I hope you will have discovered for yourselves that a good life is not finally measured by what you accumulated, how impressive you appeared or how many people knew your name. Its deeper measure is found in what you loved, what you stood for, how you treated those who crossed your path, whether you remained faithful to truth when falsehood would have been easier, and whether your friendship with God shaped the person you became.
If you do, perhaps when your own grandchildren look at you many years from now, the most valuable inheritance you give them will not be something you possess at all. It will be the kind of person they saw you become.
With all my love,