Summary: Contemporary culture often mistakes despair for wisdom, teaching young people to view democracy, technology, climate, and the future itself through an apocalyptic lens. Although serious risks demand honesty, exaggerated pessimism can cultivate helplessness and discourage constructive action. Young people therefore need proportionate realism that acknowledges danger while affirming human agency and the possibility of progress.
Adults tell them that democracy is dying, capitalism is exploitation, technology is dehumanizing, climate change is collapse, Russia is at the door, and the next generation will be poorer, angrier, and less free. To question this doom script is to risk being accused of naivety, complacency, or moral failure. Then the same adults wonder why the young seem anxious about the future.
This is not seriousness. It is a culture teaching helplessness and calling it maturity.
None of that means young people should be fed cheerful propaganda. The world plainly has serious problems. Wars happen. Institutions fail. Technologies can be misused. Climate change is real. Families struggle. Many young people face housing costs, mental-health pressures, and a political arena that often feels both hysterical and strangely small.
Then again, hard problems do not become easier because we learn to describe them in the darkest possible language. A culture that turns every difficulty into apocalypse and every risk into proof of collapse should not be surprised when the young start to believe the future is something to fear rather than shape.
The strange part is that the lesson of darkness is being taught to the generation with more tools at its fingertips than any before it. A teenager with an internet connection can now reach lectures, books, markets, networks, design tools, translation systems, coding assistance, and increasingly powerful AI. Young people can learn, build, publish, trade, code, design, organize, and create in ways that would have sounded absurdly utopian a few decades ago.
AI matters here because it is not just another technology story. It is increasingly likely to reshape just about everything: science, medicine, education, energy, defense, productivity, and the nature of work itself. It also changes who gets to play. More young people can now move from reading about problems to working on them.
That is why Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine, his biography of Sir Demis Hassabis — the British AI researcher and entrepreneur, who co-founded Google DeepMind and now serves as its chairman and as Alphabet’s chief scientist — is useful. It is not a book of cheap optimism. It is full of danger, rivalry, and uncertainty. But it also reminds us of something our public culture too often forgets: the future is not simply something that happens to people. It is something people build.
Hassabis is a useful figure because his story is not really about gadgets or hype. It is about a habit of mind. Go, the ancient board game, was supposed to be too intuitive for machines. Protein folding was one of biology’s great unsolved problems. Both looked, to many people, like frontiers that might not move for a very long time. Both did move, because people stopped treating the frontier as an impregnable wall and started treating it as a problem to be attacked.
AlphaFold is the cleanest example. Protein folding was not solved by fatalism, committee rhetoric, or moralized despair. It was solved by imagination, computation, persistence, and institutional ambition — work for which Hassabis and his DeepMind colleague, John Jumper, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A decades-old scientific problem moved because better tools arrived — and because people knew what to do with them.
That is the habit of mind worth passing on to the young. Not that every problem is easy. Not that every technology is good. Not that progress is automatic. But that hard problems are not made easier by dressing up despair as wisdom. They are challenges to understand, test, and solve.
The contrast, which can also be found inside the younger generation, is already striking. Some young founders, engineers, and researchers are acting like doers: building tools, testing ideas, attacking problems, and drawing confidence from the fact that they can influence the world around them. Others have been taught to see the future mainly as a threat. Agency is not a cure for anxiety. But it is surely healthier than a public culture that keeps rehearsing helplessness.
It is worth remembering that public discourse does not merely describe reality. It changes how people behave inside it. It tells them what is possible, what is hopeless, what is shameful, and what is worth attempting. Pessimism is therefore never just a mood. Repeated often enough, it becomes an instruction — and then a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tell people long enough that democracy is dead, and they may stop behaving like citizens. Tell them capitalism is only exploitation, and they may miss the dignity of building a more prosperous future. Tell them technology is only a threat, and they may leave its development to worse people. Tell them the future is already lost, and the most talented among them may decide not to waste their gifts trying to improve it.
That is where our public culture has become so damaging. Alarm is rewarded. Proportion is treated as complacency. Refuse to panic and you are assumed not to understand the stakes. We have become so used to emergency that possibility now must apologize for itself.
Negativity is therefore not a mark of seriousness. Often it is the opposite. It strips people of the agency that serious action requires.
That is not a left-versus-right problem in any simple sense. The establishment version says: trust our institutions, committees, experts, regulations, and emergency powers, or the world falls apart. The anti-establishment version turns the same darkness inside out: every institution is captured, every expert bought, every compromise cowardice, every failure proof that the system must burn.
One side uses fear to preserve authority. The other uses fury to destroy trust. Both flatter the teller. Both feed the appetite for heroes and villains. Both leave the young smaller than they need to be.
That is what I call the consensus trap. Once pessimism starts to sound profound, doubt becomes expensive. Before long, the crowd has not merely reached a conclusion. It has built a moral identity around it. The more constructive voices — the Steven Pinkers, Matt Ridleys, and Hans Roslings of this world — are left homeless, too positive for the establishment and too practical for the rage of the insurgents.
The result is a culture that misprices risk, opportunity, and timing. It overreacts to dangers that are theatrical or ideologically useful. It underreacts to dangers that are slow, boring, or inconvenient. And it misses opportunities, because opportunity rarely arrives with the emotional force of a threat.
Humanity nonetheless has a remarkable record of solving problems once treated as permanent. Filthy cities became cleaner. Child mortality fell. Famine declined. Vaccines, sewers, electricity grids, antibiotics, trade, education, and technological learning changed the conditions of human life. Not by magic. Not without mistakes or new problems. But because human beings, often when under massive pressure, produced solutions.
Progress was not made by those who explained, with great sophistication, why nothing could be done. It was made by those who tried anyway. In the long contest between doers and cannot-doers, it is not hard to see which side has built the better world.
The burden of proof should therefore fall more often on the doom-mongers. Not because pessimists are always wrong. They are not. But because hysteria should not automatically pass for seriousness.
Young people do not need propaganda, sedation, or TED-talk optimism. They can see the risks. What they do not need is an adult world that turns every difficulty into apocalypse, helps cultivate anxiety, and then congratulates itself on being realistic.
Instead, young people — along with the rest of us — need proportion: a more honest account of both danger and human ingenuity.
The future is still open. Every generation has had its doom-mongers, convinced that decline was irreversible, technology would ruin us, morals were collapsing, and the next crisis would be the one from which we never recovered. Yet humanity kept adapting. Not because pessimists were always wrong about every danger. They were not. But because they so often underestimated the adaptability and inventiveness of human beings — and of society itself.
The task is not to promise each new generation that everything will be fine. It is to stop telling them, directly or indirectly, that nothing can be done. To teach the young to fear the future rather than shape it is not realism. It is betrayal.
