Are you fickle? They don’t even know what it means as it is considered normal!

In contemporary Sri Lanka, the word of a young person is as good as hot air, only around for a few seconds. They are the most unreliable segment of the population and in organizing youth activities one has to be cognizant of this fact if one is to keep sane. There is a way to tackle this situation, as it has to be of use to the person concerned. There is just no point in getting them to do any favors for anyone, unlike in the past where they performed out of duty or obligation. Today there is no duty or obligation. Those words just do not matter in a world of greed and opportunism, and the Youth have mastered this faster than any other segment of the population. Is it any wonder why older people today just frown upon the young as having no ethics, morals or a sense of duty? To young people of today anyone older than themselves is just a fuddy duddy not worth their time, unless of course they can get some personal and not communal benefit out of them.

In a sense one has to take the law of probabilities a little more seriously in one’s dealing them, especially male, as females are still a little more dependable and reliable and are also more responsible when tasks are assigned to them.

When young people are fickle there is a method to exploit this behavior by informing them that they missed out on a glorious stroke of good fortune as they were not able to take advantage, by their absence. There is nothing more penetrating to a psyche than being told that your unreliability cost you big.

In my experience I know when I invite 100 youth to an event, the number who actually say they will come and turn up is under 50%. One therefore has to take that into account when doing this type of invitation. When there is nothing but an obligation with little perceived benefit to them, then the take up rate is less than 25%. When one takes account of these factors and operate under that, it is easier to organize events and make guesstimations.

This when added to the Sri Lankan inability to say no to one’s face, the presence of the probability factor plays a huge part in the expected turnout. The threat of eviction from a program and one’s rights being suspended are other means by which one gets a better rate of attendance especially at events that are important, and the participation of the particular young person is too. The showing of one’s face to say they turned up is one of the most annoying characteristics of youth as they do it for no other purpose, but not to lose out on any benefit allocated to the presence. The handing out of certificates of participation at the end is a suggestion to this thorny and sensitive issue, as expectations are nevertheless high.