Conference Program

This contribution offers a theoretical and empirical sociological analysis of the existential, identity-related, and civic conditions of contemporary young generations, with particular reference to the Italian context and its broader European implications.

The central argument is that today’s young people inhabit a historically unprecedented social condition, defined by a fundamental contradiction: on one hand, a process of “precocious adultification” driven by media, education, and contemporary socialization; on the other, an “interminable adolescence”, in which entry into the adult world – stable employment, housing autonomy, family formation – is indefinitely postponed. They are like sparks incapable of becoming fire. This unresolved tension produces a deep cognitive dissonance: a structural malaise that is not merely psychological but rooted in the material and economic stagnation of the country. The inequality young people face is therefore not only intragenerational, but intergenerational: it is the outcome of cumulative choices – political, cultural, infrastructural – made by previous generations that have systematically foreclosed opportunities for those who came after.

The contribution also offers an original historical perspective. Youth as an autonomous social category is an invention of industrial modernity: in pre-industrial societies, no existential space existed between childhood and adulthood. It is mass schooling, brought about by the second industrial revolution, that first creates this interval. With the digital revolution, a new phase opens – what may be termed the era of intergenerational agonism – in which the accelerating pace of technological and cultural change renders parental knowledge increasingly obsolete, widening the gap between generations to an unprecedented degree. Today’s young people often possess greater cultural and technological competencies than their parents, yet remain economically dependent on them, producing an asymmetry that is particularly difficult to sustain.

The demographic picture sharpens the analysis further: falling birth rates, population ageing, the widespread phenomenon of only children, and growing youth emigration paint a portrait of a country that is steadily losing its most vital human resources. The emigration data reveal a striking paradox: young Italians tend to migrate precisely to those countries – the United Kingdom, Germany, France – where the infrastructure and development projects that youth movements helped block at home have long been realized. This points to what can be described as a “passive active citizenship”: politically mobilized, but guided by anti-scientific and populist rhetorics incapable of generating constructive agency. The COVID-19 pandemic further aggravated this scenario, stripping young people of the school as a space of peer sociality and autonomous identity construction, with measurable consequences for mental health and psychological wellbeing.

The proposed response is structural: youth malaise is rooted in the country's lack of development, and demands active policies for quality employment creation, support for youth entrepreneurship, and a deep reform of educational systems capable of bridging humanistic and scientific knowledge, rethinking school-to-work transitions, and fostering a citizenship grounded in concrete values – civic responsibility, scientific rationality, and a genuine orientation toward development and social progress.