Welcome to the second day of 4th edition of EAYW, or in the words of a colleague from my Deep Dive group: the day we finally started doing something. The ultimate understatement, from my perspective here in the evening, as I sit down to write this blog. Feels more like the day we did everything (and remarkably, we still have two more days to go!).
If you decided to join the optional warm up activities in the morning, and stayed for the bonfire event in the evening, congrats: you made it through the 15-hour Academy day! If that isn’t enthusiasm, I don’t know what is!
Our official program kicked off with a keynote from Peter Merry, who brought a much-needed framework to the confused feeling I mentioned yesterday. He introduced the hyper-complexity, a state where the world is changing so fast that our traditional models of “predict and control” simply break down.
Now, if you followed last years blog, you know one thing about me – I love analogies with SciFi books. And there is a specific trilogy that came to my mind a lot during Peters keynote, Liu Cixin’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”. I am sharing with you a quote that perfectly aligns with Peter’s insights about the “Gamma Trap” and the danger of staying stuck in old, linear ways of thinking:
“Make no mistake, the universe is a grand machine, but it’s a machine that produces uncertainty.”
We often treat youth work and social systems like “grand machines” that we can predict and control if we just have the right manual. But, as Peter argued, these systems produce constant uncertainty, and it’s up to us to be agile, stay adaptive, and learn to navigate the unknown.
One more key takeaway from the session to be aware of: When we create solutions, we create them in the context of problems we are facing, but they always have in them the seeds of next level of problems.
As the day went on, the “uncertainty” of the future wasn’t the only thing we had to navigate. Before lunch we also had to experience the very present reality of FOMO. With the program splitting into six parallel Deep Dive sessions, you realize you can’t be everywhere at once. You choose one room, one topic and one group of people, but a part of you is constantly wondering: “Did I make the right choice?” So, during all of the breaks, you hunt down and investigate people from other Deep Dives for insights.
Now, I’ll be honest: before I started writing I had a plan not to share any specific insights from my Deep Dive session here, because it felt unfair to spotlight my own experience while missing out on the other five. But, as we learned today, the future is fundamentally uncertain and even the best plans fail (mine probably a bit more often than in general, but oh well). So, in the spirit of that failed plan, I share with you quote from one of the facilitators – Ilze Jece – that stayed with me through the day: “Hope and frustration can exist at the same time, and they should”.
In the afternoon, Prof. Dr. Özgehan Şenyuva took the stage for his keynote “Generations Forward” that sparked a lot of questions and an open discussion (bravo for Anita and Darko for keeping the thread as we jumped from one idea and question to the next). Instead of providing easy answers, Özgehan seemed to meet every question with two more of his own, pulling us even deeper into that necessary (un)confusing process.
At the very end, the discussion opened about how society in general expects youth workers to intervene in all the topics where systems fail: from schooling and education to migration and climate. A bit of a personal thought: haven’t we imposed this on ourselves by acting like superheroes on call for all these years?
If this blog already feels like a full plate, imagine that today also happened: board game presentations and play-testing at Ljuba & Drago bus – as a huge board game fan (another understatement) I have to strongly recommend paying them a visit, marketplace of more than 60 useful tools and practices, and a bonfire with stories and connections.
So many things happened and our brains are starting to overheat, so you will allow me to close with another Liu Cixin quote that feels appropriate after a 15-hour Academy day:
“In my experience, any thinking is liable to go off the rails. You should just go to sleep.”