Here we are, less than a week after it started, and already I’ve found what will probably be the most shocking story of the year.

Last week the Prince’s Trust published a report that suggested one in 11 young people feel they have “nothing to live for”, while a third of long-term unemployed youngsters have even contemplated suicide.

These are people who should be full of the hope of youth, and feeling indestructible, not like they have been cast on a scrapheap.

But it’s not their generation that’s failed. It’s ours. We’ve let down our young people, and we should feel ashamed of ourselves.

The evidence for this is found in the attitude of members of the public who commented on the story about young people’s despair when it appeared on the BBC News website.

Almost all of them did what our generation usually does first these days whenever anything goes wrong, which is find somebody else to blame. We are no better than politicians.

There were plenty of candidates: the last government, the current government, unions, bosses, immigrants, the European Union, the abolition of National Service, and even the perceived laziness of everybody under the age of 25.

Nearly everybody who had something to say about it based their comments on their own narrow view of the world and completely ignored what it was really about, which was the despair of a whole generation.

It was clear most people thought they should be left to fend for themselves.

All these self-appointed experts had conveniently forgotten about the innocence and inexperience of youth, and how important it is for young people to be given help, encouragement, understanding, and, above all, hope.

We elect people on a whim and stand by while they dream up educational systems that only teach young people to pass exams and ignore a vast range of other life skills that should be passed on to them.

Then, when kids come out of school ill-prepared for the battle for too few jobs, we blame them for being unemployable.

It has to be said that some older people also work for too long when they don’t need the money and could make room for youngsters to get on the employment ladder.

Still more assume all young people are bad, lazy or indifferent, yet whenever I come across them, the opposite seems true.

Kids today are just what they’ve always been – a pleasure to be around, full of curiosity, wonder and fresh ideas.

To allow all those things to drain out of them until they feel completely written off is a failure their elders should stand up and be counted for.

I’m not saying I have an easy answer to youth unemployment or any of the other problems that we’ve left our kids to face, but the first step is to make their happiness our priority once again.

If we have become too selfish to do it for them, then we should do it for ourselves, because bringing up a generation without hope means it’s hopeless for us, too.