It is impossible to ignore the roars of the young around the world, as unemployment rates spin out of control and economical, environmental and political crises deepen. According to the ILO, an estimated 73.4 million young people worldwide (12.6%) are expected to be out of work in 2013. In Kairos Future’s new survey on the Global Youth, 6500 young voices between 16-29 in eleven countries seem to agree on one point: in order to have a future we need a common goal. And today that goal is not to be seen anywhere.

The discontent among young people around the world cannot be mistaken. In all surveyed countries except Sweden and Russia, the youth is convinced that most people in their generation will be worse off than their parents. A majority also states that society has become too individualistic, and that it is politics that is to blame.

Instead all their dreams and aspirations are focused on another arena – the personal one. The small, close collective: the family. And when it comes to family young people are anything but short-sighted. They want relations that are so strong they will hold a lifetime. According to them, the achievements that are most worthy of respect are not making lots of money or saving the world, but being a good parent and keeping a family together for years. The small dreams about settling down seem to be the dreams the young can hold onto in turbulent and uncertain times.

INTRODUCTION
For more than two decades we have followed the values, aspirations and attitudes of young people. Starting at the end of the 1980s with surveys of young Swedes, we expanded the scope to the Nordic region in the early 2000s, and conducted our first truly global study in 2006/2007 when we interviewed 23,000 of the young and middle-aged, from 17 countries around the globe, in our first Global Youth study. During the last five years we have followed up by mining hundreds of millions of blogs, microblogs and forum posts in more than 15 countries, hunting for the unknown unknowns in the fields of youth values, attitudes and lifestyles. And over the years we’ve published numerous books, written hundreds of reports, and given thousands and thousands of presentations on various aspects of youth, work, consumption, lifestyle and society.

During this period, we at first witnessed a steady trend of increased individualism, post-materialism and striving for self-expression. However, in the late 2000s we saw the trend bending. The youngest generations were no longer the ones with the most extreme values; the ”extremists” were still the now 30 year-olds, born around 1980. We primarily identified this new pattern in our Swedish longitudinal studies, but gradually reports from other countries began to strengthen our hypothesis. Something new was about to happen, something that this year’s Global Youth study confirms.

A SNEAK PEEK OF THE FUTURE
The reasons why we’ve been so interested in young people’s views are three-fold. Firstly, of course, young people’s values and attitudes are important per se, since the young are employees, students, consumers and citizens. Secondly, it is the youth that set the trends in society; what young people do today, older generations tend to do tomorrow, simply because it is the young, fresh generation that usually experiment with new technology, music and behaviors. Finally, and possibly most important, young people’s values provide a glimpse of the future, since we tend to stick to the values we acquire during our formative years. Naturally, as life moves on we cannot express our aspirations as we once did. Starting a family, for instance, puts restrictions on what you can do. And as society changes, so too the priorities of generations alter. But these do not mean that you abandon your most fundamental values and ideals. This value consistency is the main reason generations and not only age groups differ in terms of values, attitudes and lifestyles. So we are proud to present a glimpse of the present through the eyes of the young, and a sneak peek of the future through the aspirations of today’s Global Youth.

Mats Lindgren, CEO, Kairos Future

WHO ARE THE YOUNG?
In this survey, youth is defined as people between the ages of 16 and 29. The respondents are therefore all born between 1984 and 1997. This generation is often referred to as ’millennials’, while sometimes called Generation Y, Generation Me, or the MeWe Generation. In this report we refer to them as the Global Youth, since the young we’ve interviewed are from all over the world and have one thing in common: through smartphones and the internet they are connected to people, networks and ideas that go far beyond local boundaries.
Do the young agree with our definition of youth? Yes, they do. According to the respondents, people stop being young on average at the age of 26, and are expected to start a family at 27. Thus, we believe, that 29 could be a fair approximation for the upper range of a ’youth community’.

BRIC, BRICS, BRICST
In 2010 South Africa was included in the BRICcountries and BRIC became BRICS. In this report we include Turkey in this association of fast-growing economies and emerging powers and use the term BRICST. In some parts of the report we have found that a comparison between the BRICST-countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Turkey) and the rest of the countries in the survey (US, Sweden, UK, Spain and Australia) makes the analyses of the global results deeper and more accurate.

Download the survey below (PDF 36 pages)