THIS is not another “future leaders” speech. If you’re Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z or even Alpha, you’re not the next act. You are already running companies, building platforms, driving campaigns, shaping culture – and in some countries, sitting in cabinet and parliament.
Meanwhile, a world that is overwhelmingly young is still led, at the very top, by men in their 70s and 80s. That contradiction should make all of us uncomfortable.
A young world, old hands
Globally, youth aged 15–24 make up around one-sixth of humanity. Widen that to 15–29 and you are talking about roughly a quarter of the world. Children and youth together, 24 and under, are close to 40% of the global population. That is not a “youth wing”. That is the demographic centre of gravity.
In the workforce, Millennials and Gen Z already form the majority. By the end of this decade, they will make up roughly two-thirds of workers worldwide. The people writing the code, manning hospitals, teaching in schools, driving platforms and delivering your food are mostly under 45.
And yet, at the very top of politics, the grey heads still dominate. Presidents and prime ministers in many major economies are in their 70s and 80s. Closer to home, our region is still largely run by leaders in their seventies. This is not about personalities; it is about a pattern: a young world, old leadership.
Why are we still cheering the same script?
We rage about “out-of-touch boomers” online. We joke about leaders who don’t understand memes or climate science. We roll our eyes at speeches written for a world that no longer exists.
And then, when elections come, many of us either stay home, vote along the same old lines, fall for yet another “strongman saviour” who looks new but governs the same, or quietly vote for the envelope with a few notes inside.
If we truly believe our generation understands the urgency of climate, inequality, mental health, AI and identity better, then there is a simple, brutal question:
Why are we still handing the keys back, again and again, to people in their seventies and eighties?
Yes, some reasons are structural: party machines, money, electoral systems, cultural deference to age. But some of it is us. We mistake going viral for going to work. We think a killer thread is the same as a policy, that a trending reel is the same as a reform.
From spectator to stakeholder
If you grew up with social media, you’ve been trained to be a critic and a commentator. Rate everything. Review everyone. React fast.
But leadership is not a comment. It is showing up in boring rooms where budgets are decided, reading documents instead of just headlines, making trade-offs and owning the fallout, deciding policies that will affect you and your grandchildren.
Too many of us live in what you could call entitled outrage. We are absolutely sure we know better. But we want someone else, usually older, to carry the risk, take the heat, sign the papers.
If all we do is mock from the sidelines while men in their 70s and 80s sign off on climate deals, debt levels, human rights, war decisions, education and housing policies, then we are not the “new generation”. We are the audience.
The fears about younger leadership – and the truth
Let’s be honest. A world run by Gen X, Y, Z and Alpha will not automatically be fairer, kinder or more competent. We are not genetically superior.
There are real fears: that we drag the same old race and religion politics into a more explosive digital arena. We care more about optics than substance. Governing like influencers, not stewards. We burn institutions down in anger but don’t know how to build replacements. We outsource our thinking to algorithms and live in echo chambers with no patience for nuance.
Those fears are valid, but they are not destiny. We also carry strengths no generation before us had at this scale. We are more diverse and more used to diversity. We have seen crisis, economic crashes, pandemics, climate disasters, as normal background, not rare shocks. We understand technology intuitively; we know when it liberates and when it manipulates.
The question is whether we weaponise these strengths for real leadership, or waste them on performative rage.
Value or noise – nothing in between
In a world this fragile, neutrality is a myth. Every job, business, campaign, app and video either adds value, solves a problem, reduces harm, deepens understanding or adds noise, by distracting, inflaming, exploiting or confusing.
If you are creating, coding, designing, investing or organising, you are not “just doing your thing”. You are tilting the world one way or another.
Value-adding leadership is not abstract. It looks like a young minister who spends more time on policy detail and constituency clinics than on TikTok. A founder who fixes labour practices and carbon footprints before bragging about “ESG”. A designer who refuses to build addictive, manipulative features into an app. An influencer who uses reach to humanise complex issues, not to farm outrage and clicks.
Anything less is just a highly filtered version of the same old selfishness.
Why we still cling to the old guard
So again: why do we keep electing and empowering leaders in their 70s and 80s?
Because building viable alternatives is slow, hard and unglamorous. It means joining parties, NGOs, unions, residents’ associations, and staying long enough to matter.
It means learning how budgets, procurement and legislation really work. It means fighting for internal reform, not just external branding. It means taking hits, losing elections, being smeared, and coming back smarter. It means spending time on the ground listening, not just being a keyboard warrior.
It is much easier to retreat into the comfort zone: declare “They’re all the same”, treat politics like a Netflix series, and wait for the world to change without us.
But here is the truth no algorithm can hide: if you are old enough to complain, you are old enough to be responsible for how things are turning out.
From generation “like” to generation “build”
If you’re reading this on your phone, on the way to work or between classes, here’s the challenge: stop calling yourself “the future”. Start acting like the present.
That means showing up where decisions are made, party branches, youth wings, issue-based movements, professional bodies. It means picking one issue, climate, education, corruption, mental health, housing, employment, urban design and committing to it for a decade, not a news cycle.
It means stopping our worship of “Hollywood war” and “Hollywood politics”, leaders who act tough on camera, say big motherhood lines, then disappear.
Demand boring, consistent, accountable work instead. Hold your own generation to account. Call out our hypocrisy, our apathy, our addiction to performance over substance.
The youth of the world, hundreds of millions of us, are not waiting in the wings any more. We are already the majority of the workforce, a huge share of the electorate, the backbone of the digital economy.
If we keep handing power back to leaders in their 70s and 80s while telling ourselves we are smarter and braver, then the problem is not “them”. It’s us.
Tomorrow is here. It looks like you, sounds like you, scrolls like you. The only question left is whether it will also lead like you or whether you will leave that, once again, to your grandparents’ generation. - April 26, 2026
***Ravindran Raman Kutty is an award-winning PR practitioner
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