The Gifts We Give, the Strength We Forget

Reflections on generations, discipline and resilience in an age of AI

We are flawed, all of us. However polished we believe ourselves to be, the way we think and what we hold to be true shifts across the centuries, and often, once the change has come, part of us longs to return to where we started. What once looked harsh softens in memory. We revisit it and call it the good old days, unless, of course, those days carried pain and suffering too deep for nostalgia to reach.

What we were given

As children, many of us blamed our parents. They were never there enough, we said. They made us work. They were too strict.

I grew up with pocket money, and when I did something really well, I was rewarded. I was never handed everything I wanted. Even at the dinner table, the choice was simple: eat what was served, or go to bed hungry. Looking back, I received everything I needed and more, materially more than many of my friends and family had. What I also received, though I could hardly see it then, was discipline at every turn, firm yet never abusive. That discipline built my character.

The cycle we repeat

When I became a parent, I made the promise so many parents make. I would give my children what I had gone without. In keeping that promise, I forgot that the very things I had gone without were the things that shaped me. We complained that our parents were too strict, forgetting that their own parents had been stricter still.

We were raised among family and friends, held within circles of trust, even if some within those circles did little to deserve it. The generation after us grew up softer. They were given what we had never received, and we answered every small whim, wanting to spare them any suffering. With the kindest of intentions, we raised many young people to expect ease as their right. They, in turn, began raising children of their own while blaming us, and our parents, for what went wrong.

So the cycle continues. Each generation gives the next what it could never have. Our parenting practices have evolved, and yet something in our shared capacity to endure has quietly thinned. Place a world of technology in those hands, with endless scrolling, gaming and everything available at the touch of a screen, and real life, with all its friction and patience, begins to feel harder to live.

The quiet gift of discipline

Discipline helps us focus. It helps us build ourselves. Whenever I mention it to young people today, however, I hear the same belief I once held when I was young: that discipline is simply about making life hard. It becomes the question of why me?

Somewhere along the way, our focus moved from us to I, me and mine. Privacy and personal benefit came first, at times at the expense of others. Love and relationships began to be weighed in money and power, and people became disposable, spent and replaced like currency. Tolerance, care and kindness seem to have been exchanged for money, and money, of course, is what we now need to survive.

When technology holds the keys

Even technology, the great promise of our age, has begun to let us down. Apps that were once free now charge considerable sums, and each year the subscription climbs a little higher. To keep what remains free, we must stay online and store our lives in the cloud, often unable to download what we believed was ours. We pay, and the cycle continues.

What happens when there is an outage, and the information we need is needed now? Accounts are hacked. Access disappears. We rely on AI to keep food refrigerated in shops. Our homes are watched by security cameras running on Wi-Fi. Our money lives online. If these systems were hacked or switched off, how far would we truly have progressed? Would we still know how to manage our lives, or would we panic, search for someone to depend on, and blame each other, or our parents, for the way we were raised?

Questions for the generations ahead

I raise this because I see so many of today's troubles laid at the feet of previous generations. Meanwhile, AI is replacing a great deal of work, and many people now find themselves without it. Are the next generations as ready to face the future as those who came before them? Are they as resilient? Could they function if the internet were switched off for a few days, or for a few years? If AI replaces human work, what will people do to live and to earn, and if life itself becomes a subscription, how will they pay for it?

Strength we can choose to pass on

These questions have no easy answers, and I ask them as someone who is part of the cycle, never apart from it. Blame passes easily from one generation to the next. Resilience is different. It has to be built, deliberately and with love, through the small disciplines of waiting, earning, going without and trying again.

Perhaps the most valuable gift we can offer those who follow is a little less ease and a little more strength: the capacity to think, to cope and to care, with or without a connection. Technology, AI included, can be an extraordinary partner. A true partner walks beside us. It was never meant to carry our whole weight.