My friend Antonio's boss jokes that Denmark is "Mickey Mouse country" and it's the same thing I realized after landing with the plane to visit him for a few days: many children, strollers everywhere, driven by amazingly young parents.
Although Danish youth is not at all childish, as they very quickly achieve full vital and economic independence.
This is not the case in Spain, where no one guarantees that young people will leave childhood even at the age of 35, if by childhood we understand the phase where one can barely take charge of his life.
It is the most alienating face of youth precariousness: the impossibility of being masters of one's own destiny or of building a significant life project, either as a family or as a single person.
Depressions or anxiety grow in young people who want to escape their hyperrealism and misery, while our welfare state suffers from low birth rates or pensions.
But little is pointed out how the context robs youth of their identity forge, their right to be and grow, because in Spain we manufacture dependent individuals, castrated by autonomy.
I watched him walking through Tivoli in Copenhagen, while Antonio and her husband Alejandro recounted the ups and downs of their new Danish career at the age of 28.
Her now equals seemed adult lives, stable, even though they were running around like us between cotton candy and flying chairs.
I thought of Madrid, and our peers, who would be drinking something for Malasaña, instead feigning a kind of eternal youth.
But this has nothing to do with mental maturity, or with leisure, but with its material conditions, its instability, and its lacerating poverty.
The first symptom of that quasi-childhood can be seen in the new homes.
Out of necessity, the family in Spain today is made up of roommates, many of them strangers.
Or maybe,
The closest thing to a family unit of your own that can ever be built is friends, even if it has not been chosen that way.
Most Danish youth, on the other hand, are emancipated in their twenties and, if they wish, can soon raise children, or fulfill themselves in other ways.
An example is that its birth rate appears in the upper part of the table compared to the Spanish.
All this will not be due to the false mantra of our right that abortion is normalized as a “contraceptive method”, nor will it be solved by handing out baby checks.
Nor will it have anything to do with blaming the “dark powers” for not making more progressive policies, as Moncloa is already insinuating, in the midst of an inflationary crisis, the third that youth will suffer after austerity and the pandemic.
The Danish recipe is obvious: adulthood is reached with little unemployment, good wages, a prosperous labor market, and real conciliation, no matter how demagogic it is to compare both countries.
Another example is that Alejandro did not take even a week to find a job.
Qualified labor is scarce in Europe, so the best pastry shops in the capital raffled him off with conditions that he never dreamed of in Barcelona.
His salary, as the last to arrive, doubles what he had before, when he was the head of the workshop, and with more days off.
In the afternoon he has time to study Danish, shop, organize the house, or take care of a child, if they have one.
Antonio also knows it, who used to return at eight in the evening, and now, on his worst day as head of strategy for a large multinational company, he usually gets home at five on his bike.
In that paradise, the rents also represent almost half of a salary.
But the Danes start life earlier, since many work as teenagers to earn money.
The possibility of having children is another symptom of their autonomy.
Due to their prosperous job prospects, but also due to a cultural factor, in the Nordic countries there is no need for parents to overprotect their children until they mature, and people tend to make a living even before they stabilize economically.
How is it going to be possible to get out of childhood in Spain, on the other hand, when life becomes a struggle for survival, being impossible to fulfill oneself neither in a precarious job, nor at home.
Then the squares are filled with people drinking, or taking other substances, of lives exclusively based on leisure until almost forty.
Some have no other possession, or self-affirmation, than to prolong that presumed enjoyment in a flight forward that allows them to escape from a terrible today.
That atomization may also hide the germ of a deep loneliness or emptiness.
So it was enough for me to see their happy faces, in a horrible winter climate, in a very closed society in which they don't even understand the language, to understand my friends' decision.
And from there an entire system is derived, where the mattress of well-being resists, trust in institutions is present, and solid ties nurture their lives.
The opposite is to condemn youth to live in the country of Mickey Mouse, but not in the Danish utopia, but in the Spanish dystopia, feeling sunk in thirty, never being able to be an adult.
And no stroller.
Estefanía Molina
is a political scientist and journalist.
She is the author of
The political tantrum
(Destiny).
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