The Navigation Voice
Our young people know the way; are we listening?
It was stifling hot in the Uber. The driver, a man in his 70s, was having an awful time with his phone, an apparatus one relies on quite heavily as an Uber driver.
The chime of another potential fare kept popping up, much to his chagrin.
“You can’t see where you’re going when that keeps popping up,” he said, shortly followed by, “You don’t know how to get your phone to talk to you? Mine stopped.”
He couldn’t get the audio function to work. It wasn’t talking to him. And honestly, I was tired and couldn’t believe I was in this situation.
What transpired over the next 17 minutes was me providing step-by-step directions to where I needed to go. His uncertainty, despite having lived in this city his entire life, combined with the heat made for a pretty uncomfortable ride. I was trying to hold it together, giving grace, holding space for patience, but I kept thinking to myself: Ben, you are paying for this.
I’ve had this thought a lot recently. Maybe it’s because I’m about to start paying for college and am really assessing where my dollars go. Maybe it’s the current economy and watching how far those dollars don’t stretch. Whatever it is, I’m more sensitive to value now than I’ve been in a long time.
Here’s where I land, though. The problem in that Uber wasn’t the heat. It wasn’t even the fare chimes interrupting every thirty seconds. It was that the navigation voice had gone silent, and there was no way, at least in that moment, to fix it.
We have the same problem in mental health policy.
The navigation voice is there. It hasn’t disappeared, truly. It belongs to people with lived or living experience, young people, teenagers who are living inside this crisis, who can describe it with precision and nuance that would surprise most adults in positions of power, and who are, when given the chance, offering exactly the directions we need. We just aren’t listening. Or worse, we can’t hear it.
A recent piece out in the Colorado Sun puts this plainly. Youth mental health advocates, teenagers themselves, are calling on the state’s next governor to make mental health a Day 1 priority. And what’s so cool about this? They’re not showing up empty-handed, they’re coming with specific ideas: better awareness of existing programs. Things like mental health woven into school curriculum and navigating screen time and social media in ways that actually prepare them for adulthood. They’re asking to be taken seriously, not managed. One of them put it simply: once you actually give youth a chance, you’d be surprised by the conversations they can hold.
The more I see examples of this, the more I recognize how this is not a call for a seat at the table, it’s an offer to help provide the navigation we need for the moment.
So then the natural question becomes, what would it look like to actually follow their voice? I think it has to start with lawmakers treating youth mental health as a policy priority with the same urgency they’d bring to a political crisis or a budget shortfall. It means finding funding for mental health that doesn’t evaporate the moment the cameras are turned off and we’re on to the next issue. It means philanthropic investment that takes the long view beyond an immediate win. And, perhaps most importantly, it means creating the conditions where young people aren’t asked what they think about what decisions we’ve made, but are genuinely a part of shaping them from the beginning.
My Uber driver eventually got me where I needed to go. I talked him through every turn while using my personal phone. It wasn’t elegant at all, but it worked. And here’s the thing, he was grateful. He wasn’t too proud to listen once he understood that the voice he needed was right there.
That’s the part that stays with me. The willingness to listen, however late, however imperfect, it still gets you somewhere.
Our young people have been talking to us for a while now about their ideas. I don’t think the question has ever been whether their voice was working, but more if we’re ready to follow what they are saying.