Italy and Censis Hope is not a waste of time

The latest annual report by Censis, the Italian Center for Social Investment Studies, shows us a picture that, at a first glance, seems disheartening: Italians were asked the most cliche, but at the same time, pressing question, “How are you?” and 80% of them replied that, in their opinion, Italy is a country experiencing an inexorable decline; 69% believe that globalization has done more harm than good to them; 60% fear there is a solid chance for a new world war to break and with regard to this 50% of them believe Italy is not able to defend itself. 

Cold, hard statistics that however give us the finger on the pulse of the country: Italians are increasingly more pessimist, confused by the complexity of present times, scared and discouraged. According to that picture, the future is something to be afraid of, to be waited with anxiety, without a leap of hope and trust. A trend confirmed also by statistics on new births and the number of young people leaving the country, the  “voluntary exiles” of the new millennium: Italy is today the “oldest” country in the world, after Japan, and more than 36,000 young people emigrated abroad over the last year, looking for happiness and a new future.

There is no doubt that those figures can only be explained by the current economic, social and international scenario we have been living in the early 2020s: the pandemic that subverted our social relationships and the resulting economic crisis, the war that hit again Europe, the hotbeds of war in the Middle East strongly flaring up again, an environmental crisis with which we urgently need to confront. One would say that it is difficult to have hope and faith in the future when looking at what is happening. 

However, Italy made it: Italians built something on the rubble of World War II, an economic and population boom that laid the grounds for the recovery of the country. And they did it in a period of great crisis, however without letting the economic depression to be turned into a cultural one. On the contrary, the cultural factor was actually the key: an open mindset towards the future, a can-do attitude, but above all one cherishing the community. People were aware that “no one is saved alone” and collective dimension was the hallmark of the postwar period. 

Just like it happened to our founder, Vittorio Tadei, who founded the first Teddy store in the stimulating and sparkling environment of 1960s Rimini. And if Teddy is today the inclusive, happy and confident company everybody knows, it is because, when thinking about it, our Dream is that hope, understood as a real, restless, existential drive pushing with positive energy towards the future and its challenges.

All this seems a bit lost today: there cannot be individual confidence in the future if it is not strongly embedded in a collective mindset driving everybody in the same direction. So, this makes you wonder how much causes and consequences can be muddled, whether it is not actually ourselves self-feeding with negative and not constructive thoughts: in other words, how our distrust in the future is actually the true source of our unhappiness, just like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

As it often happens, perception matters more than reality itself: we live in a safer, wealthier country with more freedom than 50 years ago, but we feel less safe, less free and less wealthy, however not enough to be strong and react to this. It is what the Censis Report calls the “sleepwalking” of Italian people: the feeling of experiencing the “darkest hour” has not become, like it happened in the postwar period, the essential drive pushing to achieve a change and bearer of energy and confidence.  So depression has replaced initiative. 

More than 9 out of 10 Italians prefer happiness from small things (leisure time, personal relationships): there is a change compared to the collective outlook within which happiness in 1950s was conceived. However, all this must not scare us or lead us to linger on cliches about the egoism and laziness of young people today: each generation, each moment in history has had its prevailing mentality, different from the one before them. What is important, if anything, is that, together with happiness for the small things, hope is not lost that, through their rediscovered empathic perception, people could still think to be happy(ier) if also others are happy. It is a self-nourishing process with positive thoughts, generating energy, confidence and hope. 

In Rimini, just to remind us every day that our happiness is strictly connected to the happiness of those around us, there is the bow of a ship, a sculpture by the Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro, which seems to tell us that we are all navigating on the same boat and we can sail better if we make the wind blow in the same direction, all together.