Dear adults,

I’m 24 years old, working at a charity aiming to get more young people involved with social action and I love my job. Outside of work, I try to volunteer as much as I can, I play music, I sing and I try to make people as happy as I can, however I can. I love to learn about science and technology. I’m a smart phone tinkerer and computer enthusiast. I love comic books and I love food, cooking and eating. When I’m not at work I’m an introvert. I’m happy in my own company and big groups of people I don’t know make me extremely anxious. At work, I’m more than happy to make myself look like an asshat so that the people I work with don’t feel the way I feel in new situations.

Your children, your friends children and the children of the people you barely/don’t know are just like me and also completely different. Your kids share a lot of my hopes, dreams and passions and also a whole lot of my fears, worries and anxieties.

I’m writing to you to try to convince you to allow your children to make their own choices in life. Chances are, you’re good parents who only want the best for them. They have unlimited potential that they can only reach if they have someone believes in their vision, their decisions and their passions. I worked with a group yesterday who told me so many stories which inspired me and broke my heart at the same time. They feel pressured to follow traditional education routes when their passions lie in the creative fields, they feel pressured to make money to become “successful”. The men in the room feel like they can’t be themselves, show their emotions and show they care. The women in the room feel like they either have to sit quietly and act “ladylike” or have to shout and be a “bitch” to get their voices heard. But when we debate together with peers, there’s a mutual respect for everyone’s beliefs.

These are the values that you’ve managed to instill in the current generation. But these are also values that we all fail to respect and show. The young adults that we have in this country and all around the world are not the lazy, rude, apathetic people that your peers may paint us to be. We are proud, passionate, creative people who are fixing the problems created by generations past. We don’t care all that much about who caused these problems in the first place. All we care about is that everyone whether they created the problems or not, work together to fix it. They’re doing their bit. What are you doing? Convince your peers to listen to reason. To talk to our young people. Work with us. Respect us. We are well informed. We dig around and find facts that aren’t often reported in traditional media. We’re the experts in the digital age, the age of information and we’re happy to help.

I alone, have thousands of ideas floating in my head. I find it hard to articulate them all in this post. But I can guarantee you, your kids, your friends kids, kids you don’t even know have even more. One of the young people I spoke to yesterday said that we’ve always been told that you need to play the game to change the game. After a little discussion we decided that we’re no longer going to play your games. We’re making our own and it’s about to become very popular. We know full well that there are textbook answers to issues in the world but we’ve read the textbook and clearly they’re not effective. We’re writing a new one. We could use some support.

If, after reading this, you’re not convinced, at the very least, don’t forget that we’re going to be the ones that will be looking after you when you’re old. It’s much much harder to do if we don’t have everything we need to do that.

Yours Sincerely,

Alex Quang

Do you have anything you’d like to say to the “adults” of the world? Drop it in the comments and let them know!