# Chapter 104

Fascinating day yesterday talking with a 30 year old about politics, love, life and how to be a better human - his words, not mine. There was not a deeply spiritual theme here, he rejects that, or at least apathetic to the idea of a loving savior. He and my son are close in age and spent a lot of time together growing up, and they think similarly about many of these matters. It is also sad to see how fearful they are, how unpredictable they suddenly find the world - for it has been ever so - they are just now discovering how unstable that makes the ground underneath your life feel. They have moved out from under the protective wings of the parentals and now are truly standing on their own two feet completely, and it feels unsafe.

It is a subtle mixture of culture and rights and expectations all swirling around inside of him. He wants to have choices and he wants to have dependable contexts in which to work and expect results and expend effort and resources and have a predictable return on those efforts, a life of small risks and large rewards, the America he thinks his parents grew up in.

What he doesn’t realize, nor do many of us, the world is totally and completely a VUCA world now, and has been for a while. Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Now THAT describes the real world that we have and live in. Navigating that is reality and a good dose is what we all need. And this young man, and my son, feel that VUCA world around them and instinctively know that is a wildly unpredictable world - for good or ill.