I’ve mentioned before that my family’s origin story in Hawaii began when my paternal grandfather, Pablito, died of a heart attack draped over my then-infant father’s crib in a house on Pensacola Street. His last words before passing into eternity were both personal regret and parental hope: “Please God, don’t let my son Daniel end up like me.”

The idea that the next generation needs to have a better life than what we experienced is one of the most basic human aspirations. And yet, both here in Hawaii and across the United States, young people are about to inherit more trouble than opportunity as they rise to adulthood. We haven’t talked about this much, so I think it’s time for me to give you a wake-up call.

Since 1950, we’ve told young Americans that they need to go to college and get a bachelor’s degree if they want to have a successful career. That soon escalated to telling young people they needed to get additional advanced degrees, and we saw higher education become less of an experience in enlightenment and more an exercise in taking on huge debts before even entering the workforce. 

The Catch-22, however, is that even if you do have a degree, you’ll quickly discover that you probably don’t have enough experience to get hired, anyway. There are many young people right now fresh out of high school and college who can’t get a job, to the point that CNBC recently did a special entitled “Why Getting a Job Feels Impossible Right Now.” But guess what? Employed or not, you still have to buy food, pay rent and pay for all the compliance costs that constitute living in 2024.

Now, we’re telling people that because of artificial intelligence, we may not even need a human workforce, as many jobs will be replaced by AI that can do everything from piloting drones that drop off groceries, cooking short order recipes in an automated restaurant or even controlling medical instruments that will replace doctors and surgeons in a few years. 

The implications are that there will be roughly four types of people in the future world: Owners of AI and robot technology; government; supervisors; and people performing maintenance or technical services.

Most of you reading this article would probably be unemployed if that future world were the present world. What about our children and grandchildren? How are they going to pay for school or make it in the future job market if we can barely handle the one we have now?

And then there’s the issue of housing and rent. A house in the U.S. went from a place you lived in 1960 to a store of wealth that you may or may not planned to cash in on by the year 2000, to finally becoming a symbol of unattainable privilege for many Americans in our present day. 

Here’s the catch: Your politicians know you want affordable housing, so they promise that to you to get elected and stay in office. They also know that residents who already own homes would be outraged if housing got too “affordable,” because that would mean their store of wealth just got devalued. God forbid that you discover you’re not actually a real estate millionaire, and you’re just a middle-class worker who owns a shack and a small patch of lawn. 

So what happens? Housing is only “affordable” when we talk about it abstractly on a campaign mailer, and government homelessness policy is less about putting people in homes and more about assigning lucrative no-bid contracts to nonprofits.

This is all fine for people aged 35 and older who have the means to hold on to what they already have. But it presents a bleak future for young people who won’t have the same kind of preferential interest rates or prices that we exploited in our moment in the sun.

Now you can see why young people are increasingly nihilistic, why there is an increasing conflict between voters born before 2000 and those after, and why depression, frustration, and fear about the future has besieged young voters.

Many of these problems did not emerge overnight and won’t be solved in the course of a single election, to be sure. Part of the problem is that the interests that profit from this untenable, unsustainable status quo don’t want it to change, and they outvote us every time at all levels of government. 

The other problem is that we’re not prepared to ask or even think about the direction Hawaii and America are headed. We’ve become averse to strategic planning, dismissive of people who want to discuss problems, and we entrust our future to people who call themselves “leaders” but are really followers of status quo profiteers. 

Yes, you should be anxious, unsettled, and feel like things are at a dangerous precipice. Maybe things are manageable for you and me, but we should really be worried about the future of our children. These problems are going to take a hell of a lot more than politicians whose leadership or technical acumen consists of taking group photos for Instagram and mailing you summaries of the capital improvement projects that have been approved in your district.

I’m saying these things because our young people, including the ones not yet born, are going to need us to take a stand right now at every level of Hawaii and U.S. government to change the trajectory of their future. 

Too few of us have been paying attention to what’s going on in the policy world. “Danny, I don’t have time.” Yeah, and you’ll have even less time when you’re old and your children are adults living in a broken future you could have fixed today. 

We need more people to start testifying at hearings. We need more people to start writing letters to their members of Congress. We need more people to turn off the TV and go and find out first-hand how things actually work and what’s going on in their communities. 

If you’re content with how messed up things are because you already have your slice of the pie, I’m sorry, but you are part of the problem. 

The late President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Let us not despair, but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

If we really believe in “helping the keiki” then let’s help them now with action and purpose, not just platitudes.