The kids are Not alright by Virginia Robertson

For millions of young people, the future has become an invoice. They graduate into economies that demand experience before offering employment, housing markets that regard a salary as an amusing suggestion, and universities that can leave them carrying debts for the privilege of becoming employable. They are told to be entrepreneurial, resilient and adaptable, as though insecurity were a character-building exercise rather than a political choice.

And then there is Donald Trump. Trump did not create youth unemployment, student debt or the cost of living. Nor did he invent the political habit of asking younger generations to accept less while older generations protect what they already have. But his politics has become a vivid expression of the impatience, grievance and nostalgia that flourish when a society cannot convincingly promise its young people a better tomorrow.

The great Trumpian bargain is emotional before it is economic: you may not be getting a secure future, but you can at least be told that someone else is to blame. Immigrants, elites, universities, bureaucrats, foreigners, liberal cities, globalisation, there is always another culprit waiting in the wings.

What is striking is how little this answers the young person's mundane questions. Can I afford rent? Can I repay my education? Can I find a job that does not require me to live permanently in my parents' spare room? Can I start a family without treating childcare as a luxury product? Can I imagine retirement when I have barely imagined next Tuesday?

These are not ideological questions. They are arithmetic. Across rich democracies, young adults have inherited a peculiar contradiction. They are more educated than many previous generations, more connected, more technologically capable and more culturally fluent. Yet the economic ladder beneath them has become slippery. A degree is no longer a ticket into the middle class; it can be merely the entrance fee. Home ownership increasingly resembles an inheritance strategy. Stable employment is treated as a perk. Even leisure has become something to optimise, monetize or postpone.

International Youth Day should therefore be less a celebration than an audit. Politicians love young voters when they are symbols. They love photographs of students, panels about innovation and speeches about tomorrow. What they dislike is the bill for making tomorrow possible.

That bill involves affordable housing, decent wages, accessible education, vocational training, public transport, childcare and a labour market in which automation and artificial intelligence create opportunity rather than simply another excuse to squeeze payrolls. It also involves something less tangible but more important: political imagination.

Young people do not need another sermon about resilience. They have already demonstrated plenty of it. They need institutions that stop confusing endurance with success.

The real generational scandal is not that the young are angry. It is that their anger is entirely rational. If International Youth Day means anything in the Trump era, it should be a warning. A generation priced out of its own future will eventually stop believing in the people who designed the present. And when that happens, nostalgia will not save the old order. Neither will another slogan.