The Mt Kenya Times 
Every generation inherits the world the last one built — and bears responsibility for the next
By Hadassah Karangu
Every generation believes it is living through the most turbulent chapter in history. Generation Z is no exception — except that today the verdict is delivered faster, louder and more ruthlessly, via the same platforms that define their daily lives.
They are labelled entitled, distracted, rebellious, allergic to commitment and constitutionally incapable of looking up from their phones. Social media has become the courtroom where young people are tried daily, sentenced by comment sections and hashtags, with no right of appeal. The charges are familiar: they want everything immediately, respect nothing, challenge authority reflexively and mistake online activism for genuine courage.
Perhaps some of that is true. But before the prosecution rests, a more honest question deserves asking: what story did this generation inherit?
No generation appears from nowhere. Every cohort is shaped by the one before it — its values, habits, wounds and opportunities all planted years, sometimes decades, earlier. The habits we celebrate today, the problems we condemn, the freedoms we enjoy and the burdens we carry did not begin with us. They were seeded in homes, schools, communities and nations built by people who are now doing much of the criticising.
Our parents were young once too. Long before smartphones and artificial intelligence reorganised daily existence, they were navigating economic hardship, political uncertainty, romantic mistakes and social expectations that quietly but decisively shaped how they would eventually raise their children. They rebelled against their own elders. They questioned traditions that no longer made sense to them. They dreamed of lives that felt impossibly distant. They, too, were told they were doing it wrong.
Many of their sacrifices are the harvest today’s youth enjoy without fully recognising its origin. Some walked kilometres to school so their children could inherit better options. Some surrendered personal ambitions — careers abandoned, dreams deferred — so the next generation could access opportunities they themselves never had. Others worked without holidays, without rest, without complaint, building homes and educating families on incomes that barely stretched to the end of the month. The foundation most young Kenyans stand on today was laid by hands that are now wrinkled and tired.
That deserves acknowledgement before any criticism is issued.
Access to instant information, careers that did not exist twenty years ago, a mobile phone that functions simultaneously as office, classroom and business centre — none of this arrived by accident or divine generosity. It is the fruit of seeds planted by people who had far less and gave far more. When a young person in rural Kenya today can access a university lecture, conduct business across county borders or apply for a job in another country from the same handset, that possibility was paid for by generations who built the infrastructure, advocated for connectivity and created the economic conditions that made it conceivable.
Yet every harvest carries weeds, and honesty requires naming them too.
The same generations that built roads also bequeathed inequality. The same leaders who expanded education also entrenched corruption. The institutions meant to deliver justice, opportunity and security have, in too many cases, been hollowed out by the very people trusted to protect them. The broken families, the rising tide of mental illness among young people, the unemployment that haunts even the university-educated, the cynicism that greets every political promise — Generation Z did not manufacture these realities. They inherited them, fully formed and already deeply embedded, before they were old enough to vote.
Blaming young people for every social failing ignores a fundamental truth: a generation does not raise itself. Every child grows within a home, a school, a community and a nation shaped by choices made before their birth. The environment we construct eventually produces the people who inhabit it. Parents who wonder why their children seem impatient raised those children in a world where technology delivers everything in seconds. Employers frustrated by young workers who want rapid advancement operate within a culture that celebrates overnight millionaires and viral success stories. Communities anxious about declining values have often struggled to model those values consistently, squeezed by economic pressures that left little room for the slower work of character formation.
We get, in large measure, what we build toward.
Equally, however, Generation Z cannot spend its entire adult life presenting inheritance as alibi. That path leads nowhere useful. Every generation receives an unfinished world. None begins with a blank page, a clean slate or a society without contradictions. The measure of each generation is not what it was handed but what it chooses to do with what it has. Problems inherited without effort to resolve them become problems bequeathed — and the cycle continues, growing heavier with each rotation.
The choices made today will shape children who have not yet been born. That is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. The decisions Kenya’s current generation makes about governance, accountability, family, education, environmental stewardship and civic participation will become the lived reality of the next generation — their starting point, their inheritance, their burden or their advantage. History has never been more or less than this: one generation’s choices becoming another generation’s conditions.
That thought should humble everyone, regardless of age.
What Kenya needs now is less comparison and more conversation. The generational debate has too often been conducted as a competition — older Kenyans defending their record, younger ones dismissing it; each side talking loudly while listening minimally. It is a debate that produces heat and no light, and the country can ill afford it.
Older generations carry wisdom forged through experience — the hard-won knowledge of what works, what fails and what the cost of impatience can be. Younger generations bring the creativity, technological fluency and appetite for disruption that calcified systems desperately need. Neither is sufficient alone. Wisdom without innovation stagnates, repeating comfortable failures. Innovation without wisdom destroys, mistaking speed for progress and novelty for improvement.
The strongest societies are not built when generations compete for moral superiority. They are built when generations cooperate toward shared purpose — when experience and energy are placed in conversation rather than opposition, when the old teach without condescending and the young challenge without dismissing, when both recognise that the national story belongs to all of them equally.
That is the conversation Kenya needs to be having. Not which generation is worse, but how every living generation can contribute to a country that the next one will be grateful to inherit.
One day, today’s Generation Z will watch their own children grow up in a world they barely recognise, shaped by technologies and social forces not yet imaginable. They will hear the familiar complaint — that young people are simply not what they used to be, that standards are slipping, that the old ways had more dignity. And in that moment, if they are honest, they will understand that history has always moved exactly this way. Every generation looks at the next with a mixture of hope and bewilderment. Every generation is convinced, somewhere deep down, that it did things better.
Perhaps the most important inheritance any generation can leave is not wealth, infrastructure or even institutions — though all of those matter enormously. Perhaps it is the habit of humility: the willingness to acknowledge that no single generation has all the answers, that the story did not begin with us and will not end with us, and that our highest obligation is to leave the next chapter more hopeful than we found it.
The harvest our children will enjoy depends entirely on what we choose to plant today.
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