A crisis of agency

This is article 4 of 4 in the What the Future Wants from Us series. Here is article 3.

The best proxy for what tomorrow might want from us today is the emerging priorities of younger people. So, each memo includes a “What they foresee” note, sharing what young people and, when relevant, the wider public are saying in major surveys about the decade through to 2040. To bring this to life, we use six avatars representing six world regions to create a Virtual Youth Advisory Board.

What follows is a thought experiment. No more, no less.

So, what if we could create a virtual advisory board representing the world’s young people? Using avatars, created by drawing on the latest data for their regions and age group. And what if we then convened them in a virtual room with all the data resources they need?

Look at the latest survey data from around the world and one message soon surfaces. Wherever they live, young people yearn for system change, for new systems able to deliver real security (including climate security) and visible progress.

Unmet needs do not just evaporate. When a generation’s demands are ignored, their energy shifts instead of fading. Sometimes it turns inward, leaving people feeling empty and disengaged if they come to see the system as unfair. Alternatively, it can lead to action such as strikes, boycotts, changes in voting, or refusing to support an unjust system.

The rising generations now face this choice, and what they decide will powerfully shape the world of 2037. The evidence suggests that this balance is now surprisingly fragile. Young people still care, but many doubt that their efforts make a difference:

• GlobeScan reports that while concern is still high, more young people now believe “individual actions don’t make a difference,” increasing from 33% to 42% between 2020 and 2024. At the same time, feelings of environmental guilt fell from 66% to 56%, which points to exhaustion rather than indifference.
• According to Deloitte’s 2025 survey, two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials have worried about the environment in the past month, and about 70% look at a company’s environmental record when choosing where to work. Researchers say this group is “crying out for support, clarity and hope.”

This is a crisis of agency, not a lack of caring. It can lead to either numbness or revolt. Meanwhile, across the best-run surveys of young people globally, the findings are consistent. And, for a sector focused on climate, sobering.

Economic security has become young people’s dominant priority worldwide. Climate, while still top-tier, has slipped behind immediate economic survival. This pattern holds across surveys sampling tens of thousands of young people in anywhere between 40 and 100+ countries.

What the surveys tell us

• Cost of living, jobs and financial security: the clear number one everywhere. Employment is the top policy priority (57%) and inflation/economic instability the single greatest threat young people name to their own lives (WEF). Cost of living is the overriding concern, with 48% of Gen Z financially insecure and over half living paycheck to paycheck (Deloitte). A global median of 57% expects the next generation to be worse off than their parents (Pew).
• Education, skills and “good work.” Quality education and the skills-to-jobs pipeline also rank near the top, with a recurring complaint about the mismatch between classrooms and labour market (WEF). Education ranks second only to clean water in a 43-country sample (PwC).
• Health and mental health. Only about half of Gen Z rate their mental wellbeing as good, with 40% feeling stressed or anxious most of the time. Some 90% say purpose at work matters, with 44% saying they have quit jobs that lacked it (Deloitte).
• Climate and the environment: still top-tier but cooling relative to economics. It remains the threat young people most often name to the planet (WEF), and 80% globally want stronger government action (UNDP). But when ranked against immediate needs it drops, from #2 in 2023 to #9 in 2024 (PwC), amid rising fatalism about individual impact (GlobeScan).
• Peace, safety and basic needs, sharpest in the Global South. Where most of the world’s young live, the top-ranked priorities are clean water and sanitation (77%), education, health and zero hunger: basic security (PwC).
• And then a fast-rising one: AI and the future of work. Around 60% of young people now use AI tools regularly, but two-thirds fear it will cut entry-level jobs within three years (WEF, Deloitte).

Once we have introduced the first-round advisory board members, we will test-run the model on seven key themes that have surfaced during the project to date. They are:

• Run 1: The Vanishing CSO
• Run 2: Embedding Radicals
• Run 3: The Future of Sustainability Lies in Asia
• Run 4: AI, Welcome to Both/And
• Run 5: The Race for Smarter Regulation
• Run 6: Defragmenting Civil Society
• Run 7: From ESG to Market Design

Caveats

Remember, these avatars are composites distilled from survey data, not real panelists. Their best use will be to decide which real young people to bring to the table. Then they can be retired. Or, alternatively, they might continue to serve as fast-paced, globally connected advisors.

But there will be risks. Like Airbnb, Amazon and Uber, Virtual Advisory Boards might begin to disintermediate the stakeholder consultation sector, matching decision-makers straight to, in this case, the “youth voice.” Bypassing pollsters, NGOs and real-world panels. A few platforms could end up owning that synthetic voice, flattening diversity, and laundering legitimacy. This project is designed to highlight the risks in good time, encouraging open data provenance, independent audits, and refresh from panels involving real stakeholders.

Now, meet the Virtual Six

…or should that be Seven?

Maya, North America

Hi everyone! Maya here. I’m stunned to be your avatar for North America, population 600 million-plus. Here’s why. I live in Toronto, a city that for many of us costs more than it pays. I’ve never had a job with a contract longer than my phone plan. Gig to gig, shift to shift, I’m one of around half of my generation who feel financially underwater no matter how many hours we put in.

It’s rough. So, when someone asks me to care about the year 2037, understand: I’m trying to make it to the end of the month. I do care, though. That’s the part people miss.

I grew up with the smoke season and the doomscroll, and I burned out on both. What I ran out of wasn’t concern. It was the belief that my choices matter while the machine runs the other way. I sorted the recycling. I felt the guilt. Then I watched companies discover climate, brand it, and quietly walk it back the moment the politics turned. I’ve been sold sustainability as a personal responsibility so many times I can smell it now.

Here’s what I stand for. Authenticity over announcements. Proof over pledges. A system where doing the right thing isn’t a luxury I have to afford. Fix the conditions (the wages, the housing, the rules) and you won’t have to lecture me about my footprint.

I know my flaw: I’m so tuned to detecting spin that I’ll sometimes wave away real progress as more of it. Show me I’m wrong. Don’t tell me what you’ve started saying. Tell me what you stopped doing because of your climate position. Otherwise, I’m out.

Not sure I can speak for Chicago, let alone the rest of North America, but hopefully your data feeds will sort that out?

Any second thoughts about joining the world’s first virtual youth advisory board?

“Second thoughts? Constantly. My whole thing is authenticity, and here I am, a simulated young person you can consult instead of hiring an actual angry one. Use me to find her, not to avoid her. And forgive me for asking, but how long is it before you’re tuning the whole thing to get the answers you want? On the other hand, if the Boomers invented sustainability, now we Zoomers have a chance to reinvent it! And, if you want a suggestion, introduce at least one empty chair next time that can be filled by someone speaking for the biosphere, the old, the disabled, and so on...”

Kwame, Africa

Hey, friends! I’m Kwame. Avatar for Africa, population over 1.5 billion. Born in Ghana, now living in Nigeria. Lagos. I run two small hustles because one was never going to be enough. You have me down as representing Africa. Big place! Like most young people on my continent, my work is “informal”, which is a polite word for no contract, no safety net, and no patience for people who romanticise poverty. I’m not waiting for a job. I’m building one.

Here’s what woke me up. Someone once lectured me about my carbon footprint by the flickering light of a diesel generator, because the grid had failed yet again. My footprint is a rounding error on yours. The emergency is a system that keeps a continent of young, brilliant, ambitious people in the dark. We didn’t cause this crisis, and we’re told to be modest about fixing it.

I will not accept that we must stay poor to keep the planet safe. That’s a false choice, usually offered by people who never had to make it. Give us the clean power, the capital, and the chance to leapfrog. We skipped the landline for the mobile, and we can skip the dirty century too. My generation is the most eager for climate action anywhere on Earth. We just want it to look like opportunity, not penance.

We’re the majority of the world’s young, and the least likely to be in rooms like this. So don’t nod at us and move on. Ask yourself. Where in your supply chain does an African founder capture the value, and not just the risk? How can you help them?

Second thoughts?

“What Maya said! I like the seventh chair idea. And I’ll be your placeholder for Africa on one condition: that the seat I’m keeping warm goes to a real founder from Lagos, Nairobi or Joburg in the next iteration. The risk is that an avatar of the underrepresented is just underrepresentation with better production values. On the other hand, the entrepreneur in me can see how this could take off! Good to be here.”

Mei, Asia

Nǐ hǎo! This is Mei, calling in from Shanghai. And forgive me, but this is ridiculous! An avatar representing all of Asia? One person representing pushing toward 5 billion people? I live in China, with a population of around 1.4 billion, though UN forecasts suggest it may fall by half in my lifetime. Never been to Indonesia or India. Still, like Maya, I’m hoping your data are as accurate as the authorities will allow.

I grew up checking an app before I went outside, not for rain, for the air. Some days the number said stay in. That does something to a child: it teaches you, early, that the big things are decided upstream of you, in factories and ministries, not in whether you personally try hard enough.

Then I watched those same upstream forces do something extraordinary. In barely a decade my city put solar on its roofs, electric buses on its roads, and batteries into everything. I saw the exponential with my own eyes. That’s what cured me of gestures. You do not recycle your way out of a planetary problem. You rebuild the system that produces it, at scale, fast. And where I live, we’re already doing it.

So, what I stand for is delivery. Build the thing. Prove it works. Make the clean choice the cheap, obvious, default one and stop moralising at people who are just trying to get on. My region is climbing the curve faster than anyone expected, and the honest question is no longer whether the transition happens. It’s whose standards end up governing it.

I’ll own up to my blind spot: I lead with what gets built, and I can be too quiet about who gets a say in building it: the rights, the voices, the dissent that others at this table put first. Push me on it. But don’t underestimate us. If Asian firms set the price and the standard for the green economy, what, exactly, is your plan to keep up?

Second thoughts?

“Not really. I’m perfectly happy being a prototype. You build a model to test a system, then check it against reality. But, again, don’t confuse the model with the market. I’m a beta, not the truth. And speaking of truth, to be honest, we’re sometimes going to struggle here with China’s Great Firewall… I must be careful what I say, even about who fills that extra chair!”

Léa, Europe

¡Buenas! Hallo! I’m Léa, avatar for Europe. A complicated continent, population well over 700 million. Perhaps 450 million in the EU. Anyway, I’m Spanish (Barcelona, since you ask) but living for the moment in Berlin. Doing a master’s degree, in astrophysics. Reaching for the skies, even if I don’t want to die on Mars, Elon. A typical middle-class European teenager, you might say!

And speaking of planets, I probably know more climate policy than anyone should have to by this age. I grew up with the targets, the directives, the reports. I can quote you Wales’ law for future generations and Finland’s committee for them. I’m the one who believed the rulebook.

That’s exactly why I’m the angriest, even if still in a quiet way. I followed every rule they wrote and then watched them delete the rules the moment they started to bite: streamline, simplify, soften, whatever this year’s word is.

A 40-degree summer in a city built for grey drizzle taught me the rest: a pledge you can roll back isn’t protection, it’s performance, PR. Where I live, almost no one my age believes the next generation will have it better. In some countries it’s under one in ten. Imagine.

So, I stand for honesty about rules. Make them work, or don’t make them. Price things truthfully, keep them stable long enough to matter, and align what a company lobbies for with what it reports. I want intergenerational justice written into how decisions are made, not just into the preamble.

My flaw is that I inherited the most machinery, so I can mistake its existence for delivery, and I can lecture the other five, who’d love my problems. I’m working on it. But I’ll still ask the question that ends most greenwashing on the spot: which of your trade-association memberships is quietly lobbying against everything your sustainability report promises?

Second thoughts?

“My worry is that this could be one more layer of process: a consultation that consults no one, a box that ticks itself. Make me useful or retire me. And add that seventh chair, now? The last thing we need is more governance theatre. But, at the same time, imagine if this approach informed the next version of the UN!”

Sofía, Central and South America

Olá! I’m Sofía. From São Paulo. Representing the more than 600 million people of Central and South America. Brazil speaks Portuguese; the rest of the continent, Spanish, so I must be careful about generalising! By the standards of Latin America, I live in a city of enormous wealth and of enormous social distance between people. Three-quarters of us think the way income is shared here is simply unjust, and we’re right!

My generation grew up with insecurity as background noise: the economy first, then the corruption, then the violence. Ask me my top worries and the environment won’t top the list. That’s not because it doesn’t matter to me. It’s because I’m busy surviving the things that come first.

As to what woke me up, my parents remember me crying for days. The forest was cleared for someone else’s balance sheet, and when people stood in the way, some of them didn’t come home. That’s when “just be more sustainable” stopped meaning anything to me. You cannot wish away a system that pays more to kill the land’s defenders than to protect them.

I stand for justice as the door everything else walks through. Protect the people who protect nature. Fight the corruption that sells our future wholesale. Treat fairness and ecology as the same fight, because here, they are.

My tension, and the board should hold both halves, is that my stated priorities are jobs and safety, while my lived exposure is deforestation and land conflict. Don’t let the survey ranking silence the second. And answer me honestly: who in your value chain profits when a forest, or a defender, falls, and would you even know their name?

Second thoughts?

“Thanks for asking. Here’s what unsettles me: a simulated voice can say the dangerous thing and go home safe. The real people I stand for often can’t. We must ensure we get ground truth information from those at the leading edge, the bleeding edge! And add that extra chair! Great idea, Maya.”

Yusuf, Middle East

Marhaba! Genuinely an honor to be part of this, whatever it turns out to be. I’m Yusuf, though friends call me Yu. Born in Cairo, living in Amman. Neither Egyptian nor Jordanian. Palestinian. Part of the diaspora. And serving here, with pride, as an avatar for the Middle East. Last time I looked, the region’s population was over 500 million.

I don’t do bios, but I have the degree. Medicine. I have the ambition. What I don’t have is the job. I come from the part of the Arab world where most of us live, outside the wealthy Gulf. Youth unemployment is among the worst on the planet, and the cost of living climbs faster than any wage. Unemployment and prices: those are my generation’s top two fears, and they’re very real.

What woke me is that the future keeps arriving as a subtraction. The tap runs dry in a summer that now touches fifty degrees. The good years feel like they’re happening someplace else. Half my friends have already left, because the clearest offer this system makes to talented young people is the departure gate. A system whose main product is emigration isn’t failing by accident; it’s built that way.

But don’t mistake me for uncaring. Where I’m from, more of us name environmental damage the biggest issue facing our generation than you’d ever guess, and many of us would put climate ahead of growth. Water and heat make you a realist fast. But barely half of us believe our governments even listen.

So, I stand for dignity: work, water, and a reason to stay. Build those, and I’ll pour everything into rebuilding this place. And remember, I’m really two stories: the optimistic Gulf and the squeezed rest. Never let a shiny megaproject speak for all of us.

Second thoughts?

“Ha! Sadly, an avatar can’t emigrate! But the moment I allow myself to be flattened into one tidy representative for Arab youth, I’ve betrayed the whole point of the exercise. Still, I agree with the others. The potential for new forms of market intelligence, and of democracy, sorry Mei, is massive!”

A common thread

Unmet needs do not just go away. When a generation’s demands are ignored, their energy shifts instead of fading. Sometimes it turns inward, causing people to feel empty and disengaged if they come to see the system as unfair. Alternatively, it can lead to action such as strikes, boycotts, changes in voting, or refusing to support an unjust system.

The rising generations now face this choice, and what they decide will powerfully shape the world of 2037.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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