We over sixty are better off than our parents. Our children are better off than us. But will our grandchildren be better off than them?
By Dr. Leahcim Semaj
For most of my adult life I have carried a quiet confidence about the future — not a naive optimism, but something grounded in observable reality. Each generation, as far as I could see, was doing better than the one before. My parents came up with fewer resources, fewer options, and a ceiling that was often imposed from outside rather than chosen from within. My generation broke through a great many of those ceilings. Through education, hard work, migration when necessary, and the slow but real expansion of opportunity across the Caribbean and beyond, we achieved levels of material wellbeing and social mobility that our parents could barely imagine.
Our children, in turn, have inherited technologies, healthcare advances, and a globalised information environment that simply did not exist for us. A young Jamaican today can access, from a single device in the palm of their hand, more knowledge than entire national libraries held fifty years ago.
The arrow, it seemed, pointed reliably in one direction. Forward. Upward. Better.
And then, quietly at first and more insistently now, a different question began to form in my mind.
Are we approaching a moment when that assumption can no longer be taken for granted?
That is not a comfortable question for someone who has spent a career helping people anchor their lives in hope. But I believe it is an honest one — and honest questions, faithfully examined, are the beginning of wisdom.
What the evidence tells us
The broad historical record is genuinely impressive. Life expectancy has risen dramatically across the globe. Child mortality has fallen to levels that would have seemed miraculous to any previous generation. Extreme poverty, by virtually every standard measure, has contracted. Democratic governance, however imperfect, has spread. The sheer volume of human knowledge doubles at intervals that were once inconceivable.
And yet. Beneath these headline gains, a more complicated picture is emerging — one that deserves our serious attention rather than our dismissal.
In country after country, including our own Caribbean societies, young adults are finding it increasingly difficult to own a home. Housing prices in many economies have risen far faster than wages over the past two decades, and many young people are postponing marriage, childbearing, and family formation not because they are indifferent to those things, but because economic uncertainty has made the traditional markers of adult life feel out of reach.
Student debt has become, in many developed nations, a kind of second mortgage taken out before a young person has even entered the workforce. They begin adult life carrying financial obligations that no previous generation faced at that stage of the journey.
Perhaps most quietly alarming is what is happening to mental health. Despite unprecedented digital connectivity — or perhaps in some measure because of it — rates of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and social isolation have risen sharply among younger populations worldwide. We have never been more electronically linked, and in some communities never more emotionally adrift.
Demographically, birth rates are falling across much of the world. Jamaica, like many nations in our region, is experiencing population shifts that will reshape everything from pension systems and healthcare to labour markets and national identity. These are not distant abstractions. They are already arriving.
And then there is artificial intelligence — perhaps the most transformative force since the Industrial Revolution, and the one that my generation is least equipped to fully comprehend. AI promises extraordinary gains in productivity, creativity, and the democratisation of expertise. It may also displace millions from the kinds of work that gave their lives structure and meaning. The future that AI is helping to build may generate immense wealth while simultaneously hollowing out the conditions under which ordinary people find dignity in their daily labour. That is not a trivial tension.
Why this moment feels different
Every generation faces disruption. Our parents lived through wars, economic collapses, political instability, and the particular indignities of colonial and post-colonial societies. They were not soft, and they were not strangers to hardship.
What feels qualitatively different about the present moment is not the presence of challenge — it is the simultaneity of multiple, interacting disruptions. Demographic decline and climate uncertainty and technological displacement and institutional distrust and economic inequality and information overload are not occurring in sequence, with time between them for societies to adapt. They are occurring together, compounding one another, producing effects that no single disruption would generate on its own.
Social scientists use the phrase inflection point to describe the moment when a curve that has been heading in one direction begins decisively to head in another. Historians recognise such moments not always while they are happening, but unmistakably in retrospect. I am not willing to claim certainty that we have arrived at such a moment. But I think we would be unwise to assume that we have not.
An inflection point is not a verdict
Here is what I want to be clear about, because it matters enormously: an inflection point is not a sentence. It is a threshold. And how societies move through a threshold depends enormously on the choices made by the people living inside it.
Human beings have repeatedly demonstrated a capacity for adaptation that exceeds even their own expectations. The same species that experienced the Black Death rebuilt European civilisation. The same Caribbean people who were brought across an ocean in chains created new languages, new music, new theologies, new identities, and new nations out of the ruins of one of history’s greatest crimes. We are not strangers to reinvention.
The future facing our grandchildren will be shaped, in ways both small and large, by decisions we are making right now — about education, about family formation, about how we govern emerging technologies, about the kind of communities we build and sustain, about what we teach young people to value beyond material accumulation.
The challenge is not predicting which future arrives. The challenge is preparing people to flourish regardless of which one does.
The capacities that will matter most
If I were designing a curriculum for the generation now entering the world, I would worry far less about the transfer of facts — machines have already surpassed us there — and far more about the development of capacities that remain stubbornly, irreducibly human.
The ability to learn continuously and to unlearn what is no longer serving you. The ability to adapt rapidly without losing a coherent sense of self. The capacity for critical thinking in an environment deliberately engineered to short-circuit it. The emotional intelligence to build relationships across difference. The inner resilience to create meaning when external circumstances offer little. The wisdom to work alongside intelligent machines without surrendering to them what makes us distinctly human.
In short: the future will belong not to those who memorised the most, but to those who are most fully, most deeply, most durably themselves.
What commencement speakers should be saying
I have delivered more than a few addresses to graduating classes over the years, and I have sat through many more. The traditional themes — follow your passion, pursue your purpose, reach for success — are not wrong. But they are no longer sufficient for the world these young people are actually entering.
If I were on a commencement platform today, I would tell graduates something like this:
You are entering a world that is changing faster than any generation in recorded history has had to navigate. The career you have trained for may look very different twenty years from now, or may not exist at all. The problems you will be called to solve have not yet been named. The tools you will use to solve them have not yet been built. Given all of that, your greatest asset will not be the credential in your hand today. It will be your capacity to keep learning, to keep adapting, to keep building genuine human connection, and to remain — in every circumstance — deeply and unapologetically human. The future will not reward those who resist change. It will reward those who have mastered the art of transformation.
The Semaj MindSpa perspective
I remain, after all of this, genuinely optimistic. Not because the evidence demands optimism, but because the alternative — passive acceptance that decline is inevitable — would be both psychologically and morally untenable.
My generation possessed a kind of physical and social resilience forged in conditions that demanded it. Our children have developed a technological fluency that still astonishes me. Our grandchildren may develop forms of intelligence, creativity, and spiritual depth that we cannot yet imagine — precisely because the world they are inheriting will demand it of them.
Every generation is called, in some sense, to plant trees whose shade it will never personally enjoy. That has always been the compact between the living and those who come after. Our responsibility is not merely to leave our grandchildren a wealthier world, though that matters. It is to leave them a wiser one — because wealth without wisdom has rarely survived the test of time.
The greatest inheritance any generation can pass to the next is not property, not money, not even technology. It is the capacity to flourish amid uncertainty. That may well become the defining human challenge of the twenty-first century.
And — as I have always believed, and continue to believe — it may also be its greatest opportunity.
The Best Is Yet To Come.
Semaj MindSpa Reflection Questions
1. In what concrete ways is your life better than your parents’ lives — and are there ways in which it is not?
2. Do you genuinely believe your children will be better off than you? What gives you confidence, or what gives you pause?
3. What concerns you most about the world your grandchildren will inherit — and what, if anything, are you doing about it?
4. What is one specific thing you could do in the next thirty days to improve the future of the next generation?
5. If you were delivering a commencement address in 2026, what would your central message be — and why?
I do not write to condemn, convert nor dictate; but to share ideas and stimulate thinking. The Semaj MindSpa is a space for inquiry, not instruction. Bring your ideas, your doubts, your contradictions. Just take what works for you and add your own thoughts — because where Mind, Spirit, and Science meet, there is always room for one more perspective. My 800K+ monthly viewers will be grateful for additional perspectives.
