Waiting Is Not Enough
In the 74th edition, we asked whether generational progress has hit a wall, and whether our
children will be better off than us.
The answer was not a simple yes or no. Progress has not collapsed. The broad gains in health,
literacy, life expectancy, access and global connection remain real, and we should not speak
of decline as if those gains have disappeared. But something we used to take for granted may
no longer hold as reliably. The pathways that once converted effort into security, education
into opportunity, work into dignity, and prosperity into confidence for the next generation are
weakening.
History gives us useful caution here. Societies have found ways through disorder before, but not
because renewal simply arrived. Song China, after fragmentation, chose to reward learning,
administration and institutional competence. Abbasid Baghdad invested in translation, scholarship
and intellectual infrastructure. Renaissance Florence, as Ada Palmer has argued, was shaped by
finance, patronage, education, insecurity and the stories it later told about itself. In different ways,
each shows that renewal has to be made.
Unlike in the past, we now face newer compounding forces. AI is compressing transition into
years, not decades. Ecological and resource constraints may limit the old path of expanding
consumption to absorb disruption. Demographic ageing is changing the arithmetic of who supports
whom. Institutions, education systems and individuals may not get enough time to reorient before the
strain is felt.
Yet as I explored the way forward, I found evidence of new thinking and action that gives us
reason to believe the generational promise can still be worked on, not merely hoped for.
In this 75th edition, we ask what it means to turn that promise into a test: what we can build,
protect and pass on so that future generations have a real chance to be better off.
When A Promise Became A Test For Progress
250 years ago, the United States of America was founded with core ideas enshrined in the
Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.”
This was a promise.
It did not describe the lived reality of 1776. Slavery existed. Women were excluded from political
rights. Indigenous peoples were not treated as equal participants in the new promise.
As Walter Isaacson described in conversation with Judy Woodruff on PBS NewsHour’s Crossroads:
America at 250, the promise endured because it did something more powerful than describe the
present. It became a “forcing mechanism,” setting a direction forward even when progress came in fits
and starts.
Lincoln invoked the Declaration against slavery. The Seneca Falls convention drew from its language
to demand rights for women. The civil rights movement returned to the same promise to challenge a
reality that still fell short.
That is the connection I found useful for our question.
“Our children will be better off than us” was once treated almost as a prediction. If families
worked hard, if societies educated their young, if economies grew, the next generation would
inherit more possibility. Edition 74 showed why that can no longer be assumed.
But the promise need not be abandoned. It can become a test.
Not a test that we fully pass today. A test we return to: what are we building, protecting and
passing on so that future generations have a real chance to be better off?
Before we do that, we must first ask what “better off” for the next generation must mean now.
What Must “Better Off” Mean Now?
If the promise becomes a test, we first need to ask what we mean by being better off.
It is a phrase most of us understand instinctively, but perhaps do not define carefully enough. Too often, we reduce it to income, GDP, consumption, or access to better science and technology. By those measures, much of humanity is better off than previous generations. That is real and important.
But when parents ask whether their children will be better off, they are usually asking something more
human than whether the next generation will have faster devices or higher aggregate output.
They are asking whether life will be liveable, meaningful, secure and worth building.
This is where the voice of younger generations matters. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Gen Z and Millennial
Survey, covering more than 22,500 respondents across 44 countries, suggests that many younger
adults are not simply chasing rapid advancement. More than half of Gen Zs and millennials say they are delaying major life decisions such as marriage, starting a family or business, or further education because of their financial situation. Only a minority say they prefer fast-paced career progression marked by rapid promotions.
What comes through more strongly is the desire for stability, skills, wellbeing, meaningful work and enough financial footing to enter adult life with confidence.
This should not be dismissed as entitlement. It is close to what older traditions have long recognised in different languages.
Across civilizations, the good life was rarely defined by material accumulation alone.
Western ideas of justice ask whether social arrangements are fair to those who do not choose their starting point. Confucian thought places responsibility inside relationships and across generations. Dharma asks what right action means within one’s role and time. Indigenous seventh-generation thinking asks whether today’s decisions can be justified to descendants we will never meet. Abrahamic stewardship traditions remind us that what we hold is not simply ours to consume; we are custodians. Daoist restraint warns against forcing systems beyond their balance.
These traditions do not say the same thing. They come from different worlds and carry their
own limits. But they do point toward recurring values of order, fairness, duty, restraint,
stewardship, learning, legitimacy.
In the age of AI, I would add that learning must become a life habit, and that we must keep thinking
independently without losing judgment, attention, mastery, discernment and a sense of taste.
So a working meaning of better off for our times may be this: the conditions, capabilities and
responsibilities that allow children to build their lives with wisdom and values worth passing
on.
If this is what “better off” must mean, then the next question is whether, around us in 2026, we
see evidence that societies, institutions and individuals are trying to make such a future
possible.
The Test At Three Levels
If “better off” is now a promise we must test, then it needs ideas and action at more than one
level.
Governments shape the public systems into which children are born. Societies shape the
trust, knowledge, opportunity and care that generations pass to one another. Individuals
shape the daily practices through which judgment, kindness, learning and resilience are
carried forward.
These levels are not separate. They reinforce each other. Good public policy weakens if society loses trust. Social responsibility weakens if individuals stop practicing it. Personal effort weakens when public systems make effort harder to convert into security and dignity.
So the question is not whether we have models of perfect scale and impact. We do not. The
more useful question is whether we can see ideas and action that are directionally right: non-
zero evidence that the promise can be acted on, seeded, adapted and scaled.
That is where we can look for hope that is earned, not assumed.
Governance:
Do public systems make it more likely that the next generation can live with dignity, agency and confidence?
Governance passes this test only when responsibility to the future becomes visible in law, budgets, stewardship, deliberation and trust.
Wales offers one of the clearest attempts. In 2015, it passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act, requiring public bodies to think about the long-term impact of their decisions. The Act created seven well-being goals, five ways of working, and a Future Generations Commissioner whose role is to act as a guardian for the interests of those who are not yet here to vote, protest, pay taxes or defend themselves.
That is a remarkable institutional idea. It does not merely say leaders should care about the future. It tries to put that care into the machinery of public decision-making. The results are still mixed. Audit Wales has found that the Act has raised the prominence of long-term thinking, but has not yet delivered the system-wide change originally intended. That caveat matters. But so does the attempt. Wales shows that future generations can be given a legal voice. The next challenge is whether that voice can change budgets, priorities and daily administrative choices.
Norway offers a different kind of governance lesson. Its Government Pension Fund Global was created to convert temporary oil and gas wealth into long-term national wealth. Instead of spending petroleum revenues as ordinary income, Norway invested them globally and built a fiscal rule around using the expected return, roughly 3 percent, while preserving the fund itself. The model is not easily transferable. It depends on natural-resource wealth, strong institutions and political discipline. But the principle is powerful: a society can choose not to consume its inheritance. It can convert a temporary windfall into a long-term asset.
Citizen assemblies offer another signal, especially in divided societies. OECD research on deliberative democracy shows that when representative groups of citizens are given time, balanced information and structured deliberation, they can reach more considered judgments on complex issues. This matters because long-term questions cannot be solved by expertise alone, or by noisy polarization alone. They need public trust and consent. The weakness is clear: many assemblies remain advisory, and their recommendations matter only if elected institutions choose to act on them.
This is where the trust question from earlier Mindvista work returns. In low-trust times, good intentions are not enough. Governance must make its tests visible. The future needs a voice, resources need stewardship, citizens need meaningful deliberation, and institutions need to show their work.
None of these examples fully passes the test. But each is non-zero evidence that governance can act on the promise rather than merely speak about it.
Society:
Are we passing forward only assets and burdens, or also trust, knowledge, opportunity and care?
Society passes this test when the generational handoff is understood as more than wealth transfer. Money matters, but it is not the whole inheritance. A generation also passes on institutions, norms, learning systems, business practices, family confidence, social trust and the belief that effort can still become progress.
Rawls gives us one of the clearest ways to think about this. In *A Theory of Justice*, his veil of ignorance asks us to imagine designing society without knowing where we would be born, what advantages we would have, or which position we would occupy. For this edition, the generational version is powerful: if we did not know which generation we would be born into, what conditions would we insist on inheriting? Rawls’s just savings principle adds that each generation has a duty to preserve enough for those who come after to inherit and maintain just institutions.
That idea is not only Western. Confucian duty places responsibility inside relationships and across generations. Dharma asks what right action means within one’s role and time. Pitri Rin frames inheritance as ancestral debt, repaid by carrying life forward. Indigenous seventh-generation thinking asks whether today’s decisions can be justified to descendants we will never meet. These traditions differ, but they share a serious intuition: we are custodians, not only consumers.
New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework offers one modern attempt to make this visible. It asks public decision-making to look beyond GDP toward wellbeing, institutions, resilience, sustainability, distribution and national wealth. It does not prove that better measurement automatically changes society. But it does remind us that what we count shapes what we protect. If society measures progress only as output, it will miss the conditions that allow human lives to be built.
Singapore’s SkillsFuture is another useful attempt. Launched in 2015, it treats learning not as something completed in youth, but as a lifelong capability. Adults receive credits for approved courses, and the system has evolved toward more career-oriented learning. The evidence is mixed: some programmes show useful employment and workplace outcomes, while uptake, quality and employer participation remain uneven. But the direction matters. In an age of AI and disrupted work, continuous learning has to become infrastructure, not advice.
Business also sits inside the social handoff. In Edition 71, I wrote about the B Corp movement and the shift from self-declared purpose to verified responsibility. That matters here because trust is no longer easily granted. Companies cannot simply say they are sustainable, fair or stakeholder-oriented. Increasingly, they must show it. The movement from “trust me” to “verify me” is one more sign that legitimacy must be earned.
Across these examples, the society test becomes clearer. We do not only ask what wealth one generation leaves behind. We ask whether it leaves the next generation trust, knowledge, opportunity, learning systems, responsible institutions and care. None of this is complete. But there is non-zero evidence that societies can begin to treat the handoff as something wider than assets and burdens.
Individual:
Am I strengthening the chain, or only consuming from it? Am I preserving judgment, attention, care and responsibility?
The individual test is the most personal, and perhaps the most available. It is also easy to underestimate. Public systems matter. Society matters. But the future is also shaped in what people practice every day: how they learn, care, work, give, receive, raise, repair, and remain human under pressure.
Edition 48 introduced the Give and Get Economy and the Personal Gratitude Product. The idea was simple: dignity comes not only from prosperity, but from the mutuality of giving and receiving. When I give, someone receives. When I receive, someone has given. In that awareness, ordinary life becomes less transactional and more human. That is not a substitute for public systems, but it is one way the social contract becomes lived rather than merely endorsed.
This matters for the future because much of what we pass on is not formal. Children learn how adults respond to pressure. Colleagues learn how leaders treat uncertainty. Communities learn whether people show up only when rewarded, or also when needed. Families learn whether care travels both ways: to those who raised us and to those we are raising.
There is also the quieter work of patience. In Edition 72, I wrote about Patient Systems: the long human systems that survive because people keep building without immediate reward. Families are patient systems. Education is a patient system. Health, science, sport, public service, and community are patient systems. Raising generations is the deepest patient system of all.
We see this in ordinary life more than we name it: parents making time, teachers holding attention, managers mentoring younger colleagues, adults rebuilding skills, families caring for elders, and communities gathering around sport, faith, food, music or shared joy. These are not substitutes for institutions. But repeated across homes, workplaces and communities, they become part of what a generation passes on.
This is not an argument that individuals can fix what systems break. They cannot. But systems also fail when people stop practicing care, judgment, learning and responsibility. If governance gives the future a voice, and society passes forward trust and opportunity, individuals keep the chain alive.
That may be the most immediate test of all: whether, in the life in front of us, we are adding strength to what comes next.
Our Obligation
We began with a question that many of us carry quietly: will our children be better off than us?
Edition 74 asked whether that promise had hit a wall. This edition has asked what follows if better no longer happens by itself. The answer is not one policy, one institution, one philosophy or one personal habit. It is a test applied to the systems, societies and daily choices through which the future is actually shaped.
We did not find a perfect answer, but we did find non-zero evidence: in public systems, social measures, business responsibility, lifelong learning, older wisdom traditions and the everyday human practice of care, judgment and resilience.
None of this is enough. All of it is real.
That may be the nature of our obligation: to keep asking whether what we build, protect and pass on gives the next generation a fairer chance to live with dignity, agency, wisdom and confidence.
Three questions I would leave with you, as I did in the 74th edition:
- What does “better off” mean for the children and young people in your life, and does it match what they themselves are asking for?
- Where in your own world, in governance, in your organisation, in your community, do you see non-zero evidence that the promise is being taken seriously?
- What is the nature of our obligation to the next generation, and how can we begin to practise it in the life we already have?
I would love to hear your reflections, your examples and your company as we work toward a better handoff between generations.
In the 74th edition, we asked whether our children will be better off. In this edition, we have explored how they can be. The journey from “will” to “how” is what we carry forward.
Best wishes,
Sidebar: References
External Sources
- Declaration of Independence: A Transcription, U.S. National Archives
The source for the founding promise of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. - Deloitte 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey
Research on younger generations prioritising stability, skills, wellbeing and delayed life decisions under financial pressure. - Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015: The Essentials
Wales’ attempt to give future generations a voice in public decision-making. - Norway Government Pension Fund Global, Norges Bank Investment Management
Norway’s model for turning temporary oil wealth into long-term national wealth. - OECD: Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions
Research and examples on citizen assemblies and deliberative democracy. - John Rawls, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Background on Rawls, justice as fairness, the original position and intergenerational justice. - New Zealand Treasury: Living Standards Framework
A modern framework for thinking beyond GDP toward wellbeing, institutions, distribution, resilience and sustainability.
- SkillsFuture Singapore
Singapore’s national movement for lifelong learning, upskilling and workforce resilience.
