I’ve had a tough time processing 2025. Too much is happening, too quickly. What is passing and ephemeral and what is structural and deep? How do I evaluate what I hear on the news and see on the ground? And just absorbing and evaluating change and trends has been difficult. That sense of being overwhelmed felt very personal two days ago when I was speaking with a young relative here in the US.

Like a lot of countries right now, the US economy is going through major restructuring. In your teens or 20s, you begin to understand — to make a perverse joke — if you did a good job of picking your parents and the time and place of your birth. Right now, today, I think a lot of young people are feeling like they didn’t do a good job with any of those “choices” (i.e., accident and luck) in a time of very rapid change. Their resources feel inadequate. The sense of options settled before they were aged five or ten.

Two days ago, I was on a call with a young man, updating him about his grandmother’s health — she had a crisis, and he was worried about her. His aunt was there too, mostly quiet and listening as I said how she was doing. His aunt jumped in at one moment: Your grandmother has been thinking about you. She has some help that she’s set aside. She wants to support you.

When I was in my early 20s in the 1980s, the world was a little more forgiving, and you could more readily fill in economic, educational, and social gaps through hard work combined with some luck. I wasn’t sure if the young man fully understood what was being said to him, so I jumped in: You just won a very small lottery. This is not about buying a new car. It’s about what you can invest in yourself to drive on a new road with your old car. You’ve got a different set of choices now. Use this help well.

Different choices, better choices. It’s hard not to feel like this is a summary of what adaptation and resilience should aspire to in a time when even whole countries must wish they had been born in a different time, in a different economic place.

This year, I feel like many friends, colleagues, and the institutions in which they work and live (and that support their families and communities) are confronting difficult circumstances and hard choices. The links that secured funding, training, partnership, and guidance are transforming — which means that many paths are coming to an end, even as new ones (very slowly) open up. Part of our task now is to imagine those new paths and roads — to see them clearly and have some luck in what choices we decide to make.

This year has seen many roads become blocked, attenuated, and restricted. I have to feel that 2026 will be one where these new paths become more clear. I hope we can find them together.

John Matthews

Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

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Advice to Youth: Adaptation and Resilience in a Time of Crazy Change