This July 26 marked my 10th-anniversary of being overseas. During the past 10 years, I spent almost 8 years in Singapore, a half year in Norway, and 2 years in the U.S. Not surprisingly, these countries all belong to the so-called First World league. My friends’ parents and mine seemed to wish us to live in a better place, be educated in a better environment and eventually live a (hopefully) better life than the one they were living in the past. While it is difficult to define what better life is and what constitutes a better life, I guess a simpler definition would be a life free from problems that our parents used to struggle with.

Our parents were right.

Our dorms were better than our parents’. Almost all of us have been working in air-conditioned, nicely-decorated buildings. We have more savings in absolute numbers. Overseas trips are affordable for us.

We are all having the better life than our parents did. More precisely, our lives are better than our parents’ [lives] when they are measured in the same set of dimensions. We do not face the exact same problems that our parents used to do.

Our problems (or challenges) are just different.

My friend and I often talk at length about our experiences and challenges in our journeys. While these observations might not be true for everybody, I think that I should pen (some of) them down as a self-reflection about things that I should constantly be reminded of.

I used to think that getting the first job is more difficult than getting any other jobs later in your life. You are inexperienced, you are young, you are fresh out of college. You know nothing.

However, this is what I did not know: The statement is true if and only if (1) the skills you get in your first job is valuable and (2) you are sure that you’d like what you are doing for an extended period of time. But the world is not in a constant state. Neither are you. They have never been.

As the world and you evolve, you’ll find that the skills that are valuable today might not be relevant in the future (to the world and to you, especially when product/technology life cycle is getting shorter). What you really carry with your first (or whatever) job is the experience baggage which could be priceless or just (too) heavy.

In short, there is no such thing as job security in absolute term. My friend and I often chat about technology news, share our envisioned future about the world, talk about our own doubts, discuss our blind spots, and seek the other’s opinion on what we could/should do in a certain stage of life to build up necessary skills and move forward on our learning curves.

I always envy my junior-school self for being able to concentrate for an extended period of time. N-hour studying really means N hours of studying back then, not the kind of self-negotiation that my mind uses to make me do things that are valuable in the long-term but has no short-term rewards attached. As such, for even a very small N, there is a not very small fraction of N dedicated to doing “other (useless) things”.

The hyper-competition for the scarce resource of human attention makes it difficult for anyone to have his/her mind completely unfragmented. Our brain has its own way to work, and it can be tricked by techniques that are purposely designed to induce the brain to behave in certain ways.

Mental health problem exists for years. Yet, technology has brought it to its next level. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology and I believe that it is the single most critical force that drives the world forward. But it has been developing at a super fast pace, and control mechanism isn’t able to catch up. It is exactly where problems arise.

We are taught by our parents how to keep a good physical health: to brush teeth after meals to keep our teeth cleaned and healthy,  to learn how to swim so that we won’t get drowned, to clean hands and nails before having food, or to protect ourselves from STDs. Yet (at least in my generation) we are rarely taught about how to manage relationships and loneliness, to deal with failures and losses, to practice self-awareness and growth mindset, etc. We have to learn how to keep our emotional hygiene the hard way.

(In Vietnamese: “bây giờ không cẩn thận là trầm cảm như chơi”)

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My friend and I usually end our hour-long discussions with an empathy for our younger Gen Z: they might live a better-conditioned life than we do, however, the challenges that they have to face will be much more complicated and in a higher level than ours. We might make our very best efforts to prepare our children necessary survival skills, yet there is no certainty (at all) that those skills would be relevant to the world that they will live in. All we could do is to let them know that their parents are imperfect, that the only constant is change, that what challenges us today might be trivial in the future, and that they should always look for ways to live their own lives. And, regardless of generations, always be kind and have a growth mindset. You’ll be just fine.