Our future is already showing up

Five days into the new year, I sat down with a longtime sparring partner for our usual catch-up.

Over chicken noodles at OG Ha Yuan, we found ourselves circling the topic we always do. It sounds predictable, but for people with aspirations like ours, these meetups are the calendar’s small, anticipated checkpoints. We traded notes on work, family and the country’s mood, then landed where we often do.

This year, the topic tilted toward what’s said to be a generational divide. He’s older than I am and about to acquire the so-called dual citizenship, which will earn him a discount on his vitamins. Our discussion turned to how the young have become more participative, as the last elections made plain.

We talk about generations like fences, but they lead to the same destination. What look like gaps are really choices: the vehicle, the route, the time of day, the speed. The young face twice as many options as we ever did; some didn’t exist for us at all. That’s the gap we keep mistaking for distance. They depart and arrive in a style of their own choosing.

And that’s the point: not labels but ownership, with youth moving from audience to co-authors.

Young Filipinos are already turning those choices into weekly habits of building, from school to barangay, from group chat to groundwork. For those of us who came earlier, the task is to learn their tempo if we want to keep pace. Somewhere between the last sip and the bill, we named the thread we keep returning to: labels are loud; ownership is louder.

I remember the late senator and statesman Raul S. Manglapus who said the only revolution worth keeping is democracy; and that the young are partners, not pupils, in building a republic that measures up. You can already hear the whistle of their trains; in many places they’re pulling into the station. As Rizal reminded us, the youth hold the nation’s future. Our job is to clear the tracks and make room for their assumption of stewardship.

As a parent, I’m confident our generation has laid, however imperfectly, a platform. We can keep widening the space for them. We can shift more allocations, resources and airtime their way, because we need to listen. Listening isn’t applause — it’s shared control, resources and time.

Share control through co-design with clear scopes, deadlines, and public outputs. Back it with scholarships, paid apprenticeships, microgrants and fair pay. Protect time through respectful schedules and welcoming spaces on campuses, in offices and barangay halls. When these are real, elections follow the work. The ballot becomes a record of effort already underway, not a substitute for it.

To the elders, lend steadiness without asking the young to age overnight. To those in the middle, translate less and try more. To the young, keep showing up and keep your word. If we hold that line, the week stays governable and the republic we want begins to look like us.

Governance doesn’t happen in keynote speeches. It happens in repeated conversations where people work out what they actually think, test assumptions against someone else’s experience and adjust course before the stakes get too high. These chicken noodle checkpoints matter. They’re the infrastructure of intergenerational dialogue: regular, specific, grounded in food and friendship.

I learn from my sparring partner. May someone from the current generation return the favor, chicken noodle soup or iced macchiato and keep the conversation going.