Manu Joseph: The young are everyone’s hope—but has youth become the world’s most overvalued asset?

Not for the first time, the thought occurred to me: spare me the young, why should they matter for everything? They have no money, no clout. Even if it was true that they won’t read a magazine, which I don’t believe is true, why should that decide the survival of a product?

I notice this fixation with the young in several businesses. It is as though there aren’t other kinds of people on this planet. That is odd when those businesses survive on other kinds of people. In cinema, television, dining, apparel, hospitality, social media and just about any business except hospitals and old-age homes, people at the helm worry a bit too much about the young—how to get them, or how to keep them.

Entire nations are obsessed with the young. That insufferable buzzword, ‘demographic dividend,’ is all about this phenomenon. The value of the young is not only their fertility rate anymore, as the average age at which people become parents has been increasing. Their value is said to lie in their contribution to society, which I believe is overblown. They are merely loveable, and society is coming up with excuses to disguise its love for an adorable segment as a wise investment of time and money.

I am not saying the young have no value to a business; I am just saying that their allure is overvalued. Of course, some businesses are mostly for the young. Gassy sugar drinks that are called colas, some kinds of apparel, some superhero films that infantilize men with full beards, for instance.

But some businesses that appear to be for the young are not exactly, or at least not exclusively, for the young. Consider social media, especially the mother of all of them—Facebook. Meta now worries that the young are abandoning Facebook for newer things, at least one of which the company itself owns. Why does the indifference of a new generation cause so much pain if a prosperous but ageing population still backs a product?

Any product that fails to attract the young is quickly declared to be in decline. The usual explanations are familiar: habits form early, young users promise longer lifetimes and advertisers covet youth. But none of these claims is as economically decisive as it sounds.

The young do form habits, but they are also fickle. So, yes, they may live longer than middle-aged customers, but there is no guarantee that they’ll stick on for their whole lives.

Religion, in this light, is particularly revealing.The old sustain it, but most of its resources are spent chasing the young. Christianity in the West, for instance, has claimed to be in crisis for decades. Every generation feared that its beautiful churches, filled only with old women, would perish as the young had stopped going.

To woo them, churches do many things, including dumbing down liturgy and promoting Christian rock music filled with morals, as though the lure of rock music is only in its music and not its words.

But churches always survive, not because their ploys work, but because the young eventually become ‘old women’ and some of them go to church. Religion takes its regulars for granted and spends time and money wooing those who are not yet in its fold.

This is similar to what TV platforms are doing today in the name of capturing the youth—dumbing things down for the distracted, or trying to speak in youth lingo. But in my experience, the young are not dumb, while those who do the ‘dumbing down’ for them usually are. When I was in my early 20s, the magazine where I worked introduced some pages for ‘the young.’ The section editor’s idea of a youthful segment was adding a ‘yay’ or a ‘whoa’ every now and then.

I think many people and businesses mistake their own incompetence for rejection by the young. Magazines, for instance, lost readers not because the young, despite having the ascetic focus required to pass a dreary accountancy exam, miraculously lost the ability to read. Magazines faded because most of them deserved to; they were terribly dull.

Part of the overvaluation of the young, though presented as respectable business analysis, could be explained by the behaviour of seasoned executives. They don’t want to be seen as making something for the old; they wish to be relevant to the young. The charm of the youth is also a force in how companies hire.

Of course, the young bring a lot of vitality. And in the naturally gifted among them, their intuition is uncorrupted by experience. The less experienced one is, the more they trust their own gut. But then I don’t think that is entirely the reason why they are hired—to create business revolutions. Their recruitment is cheap. And there is something else.

I am reminded of one of the worst cricket arguments—about the greatness of Sourav Ganguly as captain, that he brought young blood into the team. This was called a great leadership tactic. But, in my view, this is what happened: his performance was the weakest link among seniors and he wanted to fill the team with those who’d look up to him.

For senior corporate managers, who must often jostle for survival, the young are safe hires. But they are presented as hope, as the future. Yet, it is them AI is replacing first. Because what AI can do very well right now is wing it.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’