Optimism has been snatched away from young people and no one is doing anything to restore it - Andrew Vine

Many of us kept in touch and over the years our hopes for the future mostly turned out to be well-founded. Yes, there were ups and downs, but the jobs were great, we got on in our careers and earned a decent living.

I guess very similar pictures are still being snapped as groups of friends finish their studies and set out into the world, but so much of what you read and hear from friends and family points to far less happy outcomes for today’s young.

Hardly a week goes by without another warning being sounded about the uphill struggle being faced by those in their 20s even getting a career started or laying the foundations for happy and fulfilled lives.

Whether we call them millennials or Generation Z, they’re having a harder time of it than they should and nobody is doing anything like enough to help them.

They’re the most tech-savvy generation in history, which is supposed to help build everybody’s future, and have done everything asked of them in terms of study and gaining qualifications, yet the outcome for many is exactly the opposite to what they had every right to expect.

Politicians of every persuasion look the other way and say too little about the plight of the young, let alone formulate policies that give them the chances they deserve.

So many of the things that previous generations took for granted – a job, the camaraderie of colleagues at work, their own home to go to at the end of the day – now look like privileges enjoyed by relatively few while a massive cohort can only look on and wonder why things have gone wrong for them.

At a time in their lives which should be rich in promise, there’s a risk that what should be our brightest and best are turning into a lost generation frustrated in their ambitions and stymied by the technology they embrace more confidently than any of their predecessors.

Over the past few months, there has been a whole series of alarming indicators that young people who should be forging ahead with their lives are instead getting stuck in dead ends which are shattering their confidence and compromising their health.

There were the stories of new graduates finding they couldn’t get a job despite submitting hundreds of applications, which are being rejected by the same artificial intelligence simultaneously destroying their chances by vacuuming up entry-level positions that would once have been a way into a career.

There are the stories about those who do manage to land a job being stuck in a spare bedroom at their parents’ homes, rarely or never meeting colleagues because of remote working, and becoming ever more isolated.

There was an academic survey that found young adults in their late teens and early 20s are increasingly beset by anxiety and despair, resulting in rising numbers abusing drugs or even taking their own lives.

And there is Britain’s plummeting fertility rate, accounted for by millennials delaying having children because of financial pressures, especially the seeming impossibility for many of ever owning a home.

Taken together, this amounts to a society that should be giving its young better chances than ever before instead denying them the opportunity to get started.

People I know with teenagers who have just begun their final year of school, approaching A-levels next spring and likely places at university beyond that, are all worried about what lies ahead for their sons and daughters.

Those concerns must be shared by parents all over Britain, whose own experiences of life haven’t equipped them to help their children cope with the pressures taking such a toll on health and prospects, including the potential harm social media can cause and AI destroying jobs.

A flatlining economy and lack of growth is only jeopardising the young’s chances even further, and meanwhile the political establishment has no strategy to help them, standing by while lives are buffeted by outside forces such as big technology.