My Generation: Our peers and the older generations

My Generation: Our peers and the older generations.

A challenge we face also has to do with the views of our peers and older generations. This is usually in regards to the negative views and ideologies they have.

For instance they believed and think that certain things that people will/and have studied have no place in the society simply because they consider them to be a “white” people thing or only for the “first” word countries however in the world we live in today that is a very unintellectual way of reasoning. 

I know someone who was being hounded due to the fact that he wanted to study aeronautic engineering and by hounding I really do mean the whole nine yards where he was called words and being insulted for being stupid and a fool. Long story short he opted for something else as people usually do in such situations.

However I thought about it and thought about it this way, if he studied and graduated he could have easily gone back to his country (Tanzania) and taught others. There are military planes and other commercial and private airlines within the country that will need to be serviced and maintained. Let’s face it paying a foreign contractor to do the work will be very expensive. It is an untapped market that could easily flourish and bloom into something bigger and very profitable.

This is a story of one individual but in reality there are many youths who have all this discouragement around them which in turn will impede their personal growth but worse off this will be a deterrent to the progress of a society as a whole and it will cost us financially to outsource such these services.

A lot of African cultures if not all are of a collectivistic nature and although this has its merits when it comes to personal growth this is the worst system to have grown up in. Case and point I know people who have not gone to further their studies simply because they are older than their other cousins and the care of their siblings is left to them because the parents simply say they are old now and they did their part with the older siblings (not financial aspects). In truth a parent’s responsibilities to their own offspring is not supposed to end until that child is able to stand on their own two feet. People who won’t leave home because of they will be made to feel guilty about abandoning their family. Unfortunately this means that the person will never have self-growth. There comes a point and time in everyone’s life that your first priority is yourself, unluckily for us though, who have lived in our very collective family dynamics.

“An older person always knows best.” WRONG. This train of thought is why we can’t get hired or it ends up in us getting fired. It is note worth that a lot of the youth in Africa are starting up companies, own and manage companies but a majority of the companies and people you will deal with are a generation or more older and they think they know it all because they believe that they did something that worked or used a certain method then that will always work and be that way. The world is ever changing and something that worked yesterday won’t necessarily work today or tomorrow. Questioning someone older is considered rude and wrong but without doing so we will again never progress. There was a point and time people use to fish by throwing sticks of dynamite however why don’t we do that now? It’s outdated and we have found better ways to fish. People’s train of thought has to evolve and progress as well. Just because someone wants to do things differently or has ideas that are contrary to your own doesn’t make them less right or their methodology less accurate. Thinking that due to a person’s age and years of work under their belt they are always right is a mistake. If I was to ask one of my mother’s peers about the best way to advertise to my generation she will talk about billboards and things that worked in her generation. Tell them about social media and activations they will have a blank look on their face (tried and proved). Not saying that they are all like that but I’m sure we have all come acroos people like this.

 This kind of ideology “An older person always knows best.”  is another problem we have in our quest to better ourselves.

Jah Bless