Acharya Prashant explains that the youth are always in a peculiar condition. Within a short span of about six to seven years, the body attains an almost sudden biological maturity. A person at eighteen is a very changed biological being compared to what they were at twelve. With this maturity, one can do many things that adults can, possessing comparable energy and the power to procreate. However, this happens while they are still in formal schooling, and suddenly they are faced with adult responsibilities like building systems, earning a living, and making major life decisions such as choosing a career and a partner, all without sufficient life experience. The fundamental issue is that the youth have immense potential and energy but lack the corresponding understanding. The education system does not cater to their inner development needs, erroneously assuming that inner maturity comes with physical growth. Consequently, the youth's energy is not driven by their own understanding but by the random forces of social, cultural, and biological conditioning. This condition of the youth is timeless; it was the same during Swami Vivekananda's time, it is the same today, and it will remain so because of how biology shapes them. The youth was vulnerable then and is equally vulnerable now. In Swami Vivekananda's time, this conditioning manifested in two ways: physically, the youth was not strong and was often emaciated; and mentally, they were conditioned to believe that life is about weakness, misery, and subjugation. Swami Vivekananda's genius lay in challenging both these conditionings. He urged the youth to be physically strong and to reject weakness as the foremost sin and a feeling of helplessness. He was fundamentally challenging the conditioning that expressed itself as weakness. The youth of that era were famished, believed in superstitions, felt inferior, and held casteist and sexist views. Today, while objective superstitions have been largely defeated by science, the new superstitions are subjective and thus harder to tackle. These are unexamined beliefs, such as the idea that happiness comes from consumption or that the purpose of life is to retire early. A superstition is any belief held without inquiry into its last detail, which includes inquiring into the believer themself. The core problem remains the tendency to live by such unexamined beliefs. The work of a spiritual revolutionary is to challenge the conditioning of the day. While the form of conditioning has changed, the fundamental challenge for the youth remains, making the task equally, if not more, difficult today because the believer who loves to live in beliefs has not changed.
