The Crisis No Parent Saw Coming: The Loss of Purpose Among Youth

I used to think the answer to youth disconnection was obvious: They need more support, more resources, and more opportunities. Then I witnessed something that changed everything I believed about young people.

The realization hit me during a village meeting in Punjab, India. I was surrounded by teenagers who had transformed their entire communities, teenagers who had been handed real problems and told: "This matters. Figure it out."

Meanwhile, back home, brilliant, capable kids with every advantage, yet they were spiraling into anxiety and purposelessness despite having more support than any generation in history.

That contrast forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: We think disconnected youth need more support. What they actually need is more responsibility.

This isn't about resources or opportunity. It’s about something much more fundamental.

I started paying closer attention to how we typically respond to disconnection among youth. More programs. More activities. More validation. More protection from "adult concerns." We see a teenager struggling and immediately ask, "What can we do for them?"

But I realized we've been asking the wrong question entirely.

Here's what I discovered: When kids regularly engage with real challenges (not hypothetical ones, not sanitized school projects, but actual community problems that affect real people), something remarkable happens. They stop asking, "What's in it for me?" and start asking, "How can I help?"

That's not just a mindset shift. It's identity formation.

So I began experimenting with a different approach.

Instead of the typical question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" (which keeps kids focused inward), I started asking, "What problems do you see that you could actually do something about?”

The response was immediate. Kids who had been drifting suddenly had direction. Not because I gave them a path, but because they found their own.

This is where most of us get it backward. We think purpose comes from achievement. But purpose actually comes from contribution. Achievement might make you feel successful, but contribution makes you feel necessary.

That difference changes everything.

When we constantly focus on what young people want instead of what they can give, we inadvertently train them to see themselves as the center of their universe. Instead, we can prepare young people to see themselves as contributors rather than consumers. But real fulfillment comes from finding your place in something larger than yourself.

I've now seen this pattern repeated across 2,700 villages in Punjab: In communities where young people engage with real challenges, they thrive. Where we shield them from problems, they drift. Young people who engage with community challenges develop what I call "service entrepreneurship." This is the ability to see problems as opportunities and themselves as capable of creating solutions.

But here's what surprised me most: Watching this unfold completely changed how I see youth potential.

These teenagers weren't just participating in their communities. They were leading them. They were solving problems and thriving in ways that no amount of traditional youth programming had ever achieved.

The truth is, we've created a generation of spectators of their own lives. We've given them everything except the one thing that creates lasting fulfilment: the chance to matter.

But this revelation isn't really about them. It's about how we see them.

Every time we encounter a community challenge (housing, education, local business, environment, and so on), we have a choice. We can add it to our mental list of "problems the adults need to solve alone," or we can turn to the young people around us and ask, "What do you think we should do about this?"

This simple shift can transform our world. Not just for them, but for entire communities. And we may discover that some of our most creative problem-solvers have been sitting in our living rooms, classrooms, and neighborhoods all along.

Young people don't need us to clear paths for them. They need us to walk alongside them as they create their own paths to the solutions that matter.

The future belongs to young people who see problems as invitations, not obstacles. Our job is to make sure they get those invitations.

Lead From Wholeness. 

This article is part of Sunny Singh's LinkedIn series on Wholistic Wellbeing.