This weekend I spent a lot of my time building IKEA furniture whilst helping my girlfriend redecorate her bedroom and it got me thinking…

A lot of what we’ve been doing for the last century has been boiled down into an easy to follow, step-by-step guide to a life of mediocrity just like flat pack furniture. Fortunately/unfortunately for young people, the new economy has torn up the guidebook.

Our schooling system took shape during the industrial economy and so we created ways to make young people more compliant, obedient and afraid to be wrong.

Nowadays the kind of jobs we’ve all been moulded to serve are becoming few and far between and so the surplus either go on to further education in the hope to join the ladder a few ranks higher or end up joining the end of dole queue and fall away from society.

Just like building IKEA furniture there is something alluring about structure and having a clear end goal, but with this certainty comes a huge chasm for creativity. In order for young people to flourish in today’s economy they first need to remedy themselves from years of creative suppression at the hands of an outdated system.

Knowledge and creativity are the lifeblood of the new economy and are the only way to move things forward. Like the saying goes, we’re being forced to “jump off a cliff and build our wings on the way down,” it may feel scary but really we should be grateful because it’s finally a chance to think for ourselves.