People are always talking about "the problem of youth". If there is one -- which I take leave to doubt -- then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings -- people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.
When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain -- that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast to us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill - mannered, presumptuous or fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary clichés about respect for elders -- as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.
This is what I have learned from my own youth. And I have found that the world is in general agreement with my view of youth. At least, when talking about the young, most people will say that they are hope of the world, and that it is necessary to guide them in the right way. But then, they hope that the young will listen to them, and they believe that they are wiser than the young, which is why they are always talking about "the problem of youth".