The grandchild of a friend is sad. Thirteen, handsome, smart, capable, friendly and befriended, beloved by his parents, a real “standout,” what in blazes is he sad about! So my friend moans and I with him. It makes no sense. But it must be made sense of. Life is never what we think. We must snug experience into the patterns we’ve envisioned. Sometimes the fit is poor.

I advance no theory. I know the kid only from the occasional awkward handshake and dazzling smile. I’m his granddad’s pal, more remote than the moon. Even close relations misread one another across generations. Our grandkids cannot imagine where we’ve been or we how they feel.

I never knew wretchedness as a child. Ambition, yes, frustration, confusion, disappointment, fear. Young for my class I cursed my slow pubic hair and fast pimples. An academic overperformer and teacher’s pet, the raffish ingroup excluded me. I loved playing the piano and church organ, which didn’t play well with peers. I can remember tempests of rage, but they passed and my sun shone on. Hindsight doesn’t rate my childhood happy, but I didn’t know that yet. My later indictment of the phony values, parochial narrowness, and unexpressed (and, to my knowledge, unfelt) affection results from reflection, not experience. At the time, things were how things were.

Today’s young, it seems, are less immured from the aches of later years. A recent study “finds that young people across the world are now reporting the highest levels of misery of any age group.” That’s astonishing to this seventy-four-year-old brain. In Dickens, kids were wretched, but they got over it and triumphed hundreds of pages later. For adolescents to be moping through this epoch of unprecedented privilege? What the f***, excuse my French, is going on!

For starters, this grief is not their fault. Age 13, one’s reacting to the world one finds, not shaping it. What are our grandkids glimpsing about the future that has them so glum?

One thing may be the shittification of the future that’s taken place during my lifetime, not just in digital experience (where that useful term originated) but in many aspects of being. When I was thirteen, the future was my oyster; for our grandkids, it seems their oy-vey. Among adults everybody’s savaging one another, treating each other like enemies, not fellow travelers in time. Our politics is undisciplined indecency through and through, not just our elected leader, who behaves like a rotten kid, but the lot of them, with too few exceptions. AI, global competition, cut-throat ambition make employment prospects iffy: wanna win? – start backstabbing and elbowing now! Social media and the shamelessly revelatory Internet expose young eyes and minds to human depravity before they’ve developed the emotional sea-legs to withstand the shock. The confusions of sex, especially, swamp our grandkids’ consciousness half a decade sooner than in our day.

The more eager you are for life, the more daunted. I always assumed a glide-path to glory; sometimes (I can’t help myself) I still do. I commenced enterprises brimming with confidence. Even today, sitting to write, I anticipate eloquence which, if it fails to materialize, surely will next time. It is not the present that delights humans, dog-pal Henry reminds me, but prospects. My prospects have always been glorious, even when my present was dire.

Less so for our grandkids. Their present may be OK, but their prospects? Don’t ask. Bleak. Forbidding. Impossible perhaps. Why bother even trying? Might as well give up now.

I’d be grim too if that was my lookout. But what to do?