Spiritual compass is what youngsters need

It may be unfair to deliberately let the younger generations suffer simply because some among the elder generation believe that suffering teaches. But the reality is that it does pay for quite many to suffer.

George Elliot said: "Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state." It is not difficult for many, who were born in the 1950s or the 1960s and experienced the country's economic adversity and various spells of political turmoil, to identify with this quote. But the majority of young people born in the 1980s or the 1990s may probably sneer at such a saying, arguing if suffering teaches, why do people then try to become happy rather than feel bitter?

There is apparently nothing wrong with that question. And it is unreasonable and unrealistic to insist that young people with much higher living standards nowadays should suffer the same way as we did. But it does not mean that they should be ignorant of the hard lives their elders led. Reading about how their elder generations suffered is one way for them to benefit indirectly from what they have never experienced themselves.