Today’s youth seek their future not so much in the question “Who am I?” but rather “Who will we become together?” A thousand young people from all around the world gathered at the Goetheanum in April 2026 for the International Students’ Conference (ISC). Under the theme “The Threads That Hold Us Together,” the Youth Section invited participants to discover a sense of connection. Two young organizers share their experiences.
A Shared Will
I was born in Italy but grew up bilingual because my father is German. I’ve been attending the Waldorf School in Trento since kindergarten, and five years ago I joined the class that helped found the new upper school. I took my high school graduation exams 15 days ago. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do next. I’d like to travel and later go to university. But I haven’t been able to discover exactly what I want to do with my life yet. At the moment, all paths are open, but it feels as though none of them quite fit—or perhaps there are too many all at once. What if, in my search for the right decision, I lose my self? And anyway, there’s the question of all questions: Who am I? Should I already know the answer?
I admit, even though these questions might sound otherwise, I’m not an especially spiritual person, or, at least, I wouldn’t describe myself like that. Being only 19 years old, I’m still on the actual quest to find the meaning of life. And to be honest, spirituality isn’t at the top of my list of priorities, even though these topics have been on my mind for quite some time. At the moment, the future preoccupies me more than anything else—my future, about which I still know next to nothing. This uncertainty can sometimes feel quite heavy. And yet, every time I travel to Dornach and wander through the halls, rooms, hills, and meadows of the Goetheanum, it seems to me as if there’s something magical in the air. It’s like a whisper of some familiar energy that makes everything seem a little lighter, even the heaviest of thoughts. This energy has the power to bring people together and make it possible for something special to arise. I experienced this for the first time during the 2024 International Students’ Conference (ISC), Taking Heart: Finding Our Way Together. It was my first time ever in Dornach and at the Goetheanum, and I was so impressed by that dreamlike but real atmosphere that, just under a year later, I made it my mission to organize ISC26. I wanted other young people from all over the world to be able to have the same experience.
I learned different things at the two ISCs, both as a participant and as an organizer. When like-minded people come together, something wonderful always happens. A connection emerges, something thought to be lost long ago, something that has the force to create something new—even with only five days together. And by “like-minded,” I don’t mean a complete unity of thought, but a shared will to make a change. And that is exactly what I felt and needed back then when I participated in ISC24. I was 16, and this sudden, powerful sense of connection with young people from all over the world awakened in me a wish to search for it further and more deeply.
Today, I don’t know any more than I did back then exactly what spirituality means to me, but I can now say that these moments of connection certainly have something to do with it. Perhaps that’s why I’m still wandering through the world, searching for commonality, for a genuine, lasting connection that may continue to evolve. And yet, I often hope it could also remain, that it wouldn’t change, for all eternity. In a world like ours, constancy is pretty much the thing one can long for the most. Everything changes at breathtaking speeds, and it seems as though we have nothing we can rely on. What is considered untouchable today could be destroyed tomorrow, and wherever you look, conflict is presented as the only way to reconcile contrasts. You first have to adapt to such a situation before you can feel reasonably comfortable, until you’ve grown accustomed to the continuous changes. But what if we don’t want to adapt? What if we want to explore precisely those questions that are considered unimportant or too important for young people to grapple with? What if, in a digital world, we want to rediscover human closeness? What if, in the age of AI, we’d rather celebrate our own insecurities and strengths? Because one thing is becoming clear: In these times of maximum digital connectivity, we’re actually losing sight of one another more than ever; we immerse ourselves in screens every day and rarely return to the present moment.
We wanted ISC26 to be shaped around these questions that concern us all: Disconnect to Connect—The Threads that Hold Us Together. Deep down, these questions remain, just waiting to be awakened, to resurface in our consciousness, and there, finally, in search of an answer, to begin anew the process of unfolding. Questions generally require two things to be awakened: a certain amount of intuition and a larger dose of courage. It takes courage to venture into certain lines of thought and then to voice these questions aloud, or even just to think them. At the Goetheanum, this courage, which is otherwise so rare, suddenly becomes something entirely natural. Similarly, it becomes quite natural to talk, almost without hesitating at all, with people from all over the world about profound and extremely personal topics. Sometimes, then, just five days are enough to help bring these important questions to life again. And that is precisely where the strength and importance of the youth conferences lie. They are a place of exchange between cultures and generations, a place not necessarily of many answers, but certainly of life’s many big questions. And perhaps that is exactly what we young people today are seeking and longing for: not so much a predefined and structured spirituality, but free spaces for sharing with each other, where questions can be asked and answers found together, in search of what each and every one of us is truly made of. In an age of instant answers, we long for the time and courage to grapple with the deepest issues ourselves. In this sense, spirituality seems to us less a question of believing and more a question of searching. —Anna Christina Steffens
What is spirituality?
Today I asked myself this question. For me, it is something hard to define, and yet something I feel constantly present. I realised that I will never manage to define it while sitting at a desk: spirituality is not something you define, it is something you encounter. One of the places where I encountered it was the ISC. That is why I would like to begin with another question, which is really the same one: why did I organise this conference? What am I looking for?
The conference offers so much: an immense space for artistic and cultural expression from all over the world, the chance to form hundreds of intercontinental friendships, pure joy among talks, and hands-on activities. But there is a deeper reason, one I never focus on when I talk about it, but is the heart of everything: the friendships born here are different from everyday ones. They develop in a unique way. We meet as complete strangers in a place that is outside everyone’s comfort zone. It is not a gradual getting to know each other but a full immersion: from one day to the next we find ourselves spending day and night with people we have never seen before, from wildly different cultural backgrounds. And that is where the magic happens. The barriers built by social conventions break down, and something new opens up: we stop looking at others through a mask of morals and habits, and we open ourselves to whatever that person wishes to give us. For me, this is the moment when I can speak of spirituality.
What I have managed to understand is not a definition but an image: a continuous, endless flow that we cannot freeze in a single image. Something impossible to have in a static form. And so, how can I speak of spirituality in a context like this one? For me, spirituality arises first of all from listening to and exploring ourselves, and only afterwards from contact with others. It is no coincidence that, during the conference, we chose to dedicate the first full day to ourselves: to how we feel, to our health, to our happiness. Only then did we turn our heads towards the person next to us, finally ready to truly listen. Attentive listening, in which we speak of what we really feel inside, sometimes with our eyes closed, almost without movement, devoting all our energy to the other. Not the undeserved grade at school or the gossip about a friend, but what lies behind, the questions that keep us alive every day. Questions we seek to answer—and perhaps not answer, because I believe it is precisely the unresolved questions that keep us alive, the ones that—under the pretext of searching—lead us to discover paths we would never have taken if we already knew the answer.
I remember one moment at the conference in particular. On the last day, after singing and dancing together, we—a thousand young people from every corner of the world—passed, in just a few instants, into a full minute of silence. A total silence—in which all you could hear was our breath, the beating of our hearts, and the song of the birds around the Goetheanum. There were no words, and yet, for me, it was one of the most spiritual moments of my life. A thousand different people, overwhelmed by euphoria an instant earlier, able to stop together and simply listen. In that silence I felt, for a moment, that continuous flow I spoke of: I had not created it, no one in particular had created it, it had simply happened among us, in the space that opened up when each of us stopped defending ourselves and let ourselves go into listening. As an only child, ever since I was little I have always desired to be among others. But often prejudice took over, and the relationship remained at the level of doing things together without ever being truly in contact: a collaboration, not an encounter.
I am learning that spirituality does not live only in our relationship with others, but also in the one with ourselves. It is like crossing a wall made of what happened today and yesterday, and going beyond it, towards what the events of daily life cannot touch. Spirituality is not expressed only through words, but also through our creations. I have played the flute for more than seven years, and music has always been a part of me. When I play, I am not just reading a score or blowing into an instrument. I mean, yes, I am—but behind it there is much more. Music lifts me, the way painting can lift a painter or sculpting a sculptor. It carries me into a dimension where everyday thoughts disappear and I can truly feel how I am, I can truly express myself. I believe each of us has a language of this kind. For some it is dance, for others drawing, or simply walking in nature. They are all different ways of touching that same thing, of saying something that words alone cannot contain.
Spirituality is everywhere and nowhere at the same time: it depends on us, on our will, and above all on the freedom we grant ourselves. We must be free in order to find it, and we must be at peace with others, and above all with ourselves. And so I wonder: in an age as frantic as ours, made of ever-changing habits to which we must react in a hurry, how can spirituality survive?
It must be a choice, a commitment. It means giving priority to ourselves over what surrounds us. Not isolating ourselves but being flexible and refusing to be conditioned: again, being FREE. A freedom that depends only on us, one that is realised when we stop comparing ourselves to others, judging ourselves, undervaluing our own uniqueness. Only by choosing what we truly feel can we discover who we are. And so I wonder: does this freedom depend only on us?
The final decision, yes, but the influence of others weighs on us, especially that of the people we care about, which can easily make us feel limited in our everyday and life choices. This is why it is important that our loved ones, whether family or friends, instead of imposing, learn to appreciate each person’s individuality in its uniqueness.
At this point I would like to address the reader directly, especially those who belong to a generation different from mine and who perhaps look at young people with a certain concern. It is often said that the young people of my generation, always connected and with a screen in hand, have by now lost the ability to stop, to listen, to truly be with others. I believe the opposite. I believe that precisely because we are always reachable but rarely truly present, we feel a deep hunger for authenticity, for silence, for real encounters.
The spirituality I seek is not a withdrawal from the world, but the courage to be finally present within it. And perhaps, if there is something we young people can offer to those who came before us, it is precisely a shift in the way we ask our questions. For a long time the inner search was above all a solitary question: “who am I?” A question one asks alone, searching within oneself for a definitive answer. I believe that for my generation this question is turning into another one: “who do we become together?” Not because “who am I” no longer matters, but because we are realising that the answer is not found by staying closed within ourselves: we discover who we are above all in the encounter, in what is born between us and the other when we truly open up. This is why we do not look for spirituality in ready made answers, but in the spaces where something real happens between people.
And so I would like to close with the same question I began with: what is spirituality? To be honest, I don’t know. A continuous flow, whose search will take me my whole life. —Pietro G. Gioioso
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Photo Sabrina Xuan
