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When kids teach parents how to navigate life

The recruitment agency YoungCapital launched its ‘Boost Your Boomer’ campaign, which imagines young workers donating their bodily fluids to create an energy drink that powers up older colleagues. The campaign is built on the idea that Boomers are often more critical of the attitude of young colleagues than the other way around. YoungCapital aims to counter that idea by showing that businesses need Gen Z’s energy (maybe even more than that of Boomers).

And… they might be right to some extent. Whereas our highly predictable day-to-day lives have become very stable, with Google Maps telling you how long it’s going to take you to get to work and your packages arriving at the right time or at least on the right day, at a macro-level, our lives have become very unstable. The Internet was not common when Baby Boomers were children and AI didn’t exist for most people until a year or two ago.

Political scientist Brian Klaas highlights this paradox in our modern world in which micro-stability coexists with macro-instability. He argues that while our daily lives appear highly predictable and optimized, the broader societal landscape is undergoing radical and unpredictable changes.

Think about generation after generation, if you know how to hunt and you know how to gather, you can teach your kids and they’re going to have the exact same strategy for life. So parents taught children how to live and it remained useful across generations. Now, think about the world we live in, which changes rapidly even within a generation. Right now children teach their parents how to navigate the world rather than the reverse as it becomes more likely that the skills of older generations might be less relevant for youth to make it in their future. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. 

However, that doesn’t mean, of course, that there’s nothing to learn from older generations that is relevant for our futures. Rather, it highlights the importance of mutual learning and collaboration between generations to better navigate the challenges of our ever-changing society.

“We have all these macro-level changes—computerization, smartphones, digitalization etc.—that have created a dynamic unique in human history, where children teach their parents how to navigate the world rather than the reverse.
Political scientist Brian Klaas

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Kim Pillen

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Kim Pillen

Consultant

Before Kim Pillen started as a trend consultant at TrendsActive, she worked for four years as a creative strategist at Dept. For brands such as Philips, bol.com, Beiersdorf, JBL, and the Consumers’ Association, she built (online) campaign, brand, and social media strategies. After four years, she decided that she wanted to better understand people and society in order to advise brands more effectively. That’s how she ended up at TrendsActive. Here, she can do what she loves most: digging into people’s needs and then working with brands to see how and where they can be relevant and meaningful.

Douwe Knijff

Researcher

Douwe is fascinated by how people work. With a background in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (Bachelor) and Psychology (Master) and an analytical mind he tries figure out how societal shifts manifest themselves through social culture and human behaviour.

Aljan De Boer

Keynote speaker

Aljan has been widely recognized as an inspiring professional speaker on the critical trends that will shape society in the decades to come. He works as the Head of Inspiration at TrendsActive, a trend consultancy from the Netherlands using social science to human-proof business decision for brands like

  • Disney
  • Vodafone
  • Hugo Boss
  • ASR
  • Rabobank

Next to his role at TrendsActive he is the Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth where he inspires and connects a global community of +400 CMOs.  

He has been on the board of the Dutch Platform of Innovative Marketing for almost a decade. Regular speaker and moderator for the Dutch Marketing Awards and 3 times winner of the best of MIE. 

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees his purpose is to help ambitious leaders and brands to human-proof their business. In 2003 he founded TrendsActive, a trend consultancy enabling brands to become more human centric.

Kees consults global brands like

  • Disney
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • Asics
  • Discovery Channel
  • Swiss Life
  • Vodafone

and many more.

Next to being the founder of TrendsActive, he is also initiator of the first academic trend master for executives at the University of Utrecht and is initiator of various trend studies and white papers on subjects like trust, meaning, visual culture & generations.

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Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist