For a simple reason: because young people are still very precarious in having, the future or whatever.
Contrary to the obvious, young people do not have a better future just because of their age, what they have is more time to achieve it, but only if they mature enough.
Etymology, which is a kind of philosophy compressed into words, grants the Latin term habitus the origin of "habit", which is both "clothing" and "possession".
To have the future, to be accustomed to the future, to intentionally wear it as clothing, requires a life course that is not very compatible with youthful age, since young people have very few habits and too many passions that make it difficult for them to have, and this while they imply a drive to annul time and not inhabit it, not wear it as clothing: they are impatient, they lack the pathos of time, and for this very reason they are imprudent and unpredictable, traits that cannot be reconciled with possession.
The future is not made of time, nor is the past, and just as the past is made of memories (re-cordare, "to go through the heart again"), the future is made of promises, which are the human way of being there and then, waiting from now on, and even if they don't always do it, adults are more capable of making, keeping and fulfilling promises, which is their way of having a future, something very different from the proverbial fickleness of the young.
Having a future does not depend on how much or how little time can be supposed to lie ahead of us, but rather on our ability to deal with it.
Certainly, the old have less time left, as a Spanish journalist shrewdly responded to what he believed would be the main features of the reign of Charles III of England: "without a doubt, shorter than his mother's."
And less time means the promise horizon is shortened.
However, even so, it is very likely that -honoring their promises- the old are masters of the future they have left, at least as long as vulnerability does not make it completely impossible, since it is already known that we are born and die too soon: we are born when We still do not know how to live and we died just when we were beginning to live as we know how, as the Spanish thinker Daniel Innerarity affirms.
There are young people capable of promising, it is true, but not because they are young, but because they have matured soon, and they do have the whole future to live.
For others, however, it is not true what some acidly affirm about themselves: that life is the time in which one has all the past ahead and all the future behind, life is much more.
In order for them to be capable of the future, adults must teach young people to have, but above all to have oneself, says Higinio Marín, since life is a sum of temptations to lose oneself, to lose oneself, fundamentally because without having-one there is no having possible, and the young person is the one who still does not have oneself and does not have the future, but only himself and his present.
The young person is, therefore, the one short of the future and plenty of time.
Tener is related to tendere, "to address", and also to attende, "to pay attention to".
To inhabit the future is to direct oneself attentively to the future and to have it is to attend already through promises to the way in which it is being born.
And young people do not know that, nor does it come with time, because it is not the result of more than one day but, as Don Miguel de Unamuno said, of the "inside".
Carlos Álvarez Teijeiro is Professor of Communication Ethics. Graduate School of Communication of the Austral University.
