Entrenched Generations
Philosophical Ramblings Journal Entry #7
There is always that feeling, creeping in the background, that yesterday was so good! The lights were brighter, the summers longer and Christmas was more magical than it is today.
We all live with this bias. Our nostalgia creates swathes of soft, black silk out of what was in actuality darkness and horror cloaked in shadows. The distance of time plays strange tricks upon our minds.
From generation to generation it has always been the case that we hark back to some golden age of youth. The problems and topics of our times always seem so present and unique, but when history is addressed this veil of bias is pulled back only to reveal the same old story playing out with different actors.
Are things now actually changing though? Is it the bias of my age that sees this era as truly reformative? Or is there a real paradigm shift coming …
One thing does seem to distinguish the current age from the others. That is, the technological progression and speed of advancement on a universal scale.
Before the turn of the century we had begun to see the initial effects on mass communication, but now we have picked up some real momentum the acceleration in generational changes looks to be allowing for little to no decompression time (or is this just another case of aged bias?). It does seem that as each generation marches on there is a good enough amount of overlap to allow for intergenerational relations to survive, yet as technological breakthroughs increase and communication across different age groups adapts it may well be that the old “when I was a lad” expression might actually voice a true and substantial difference in the gaps between generations.
As an analogy of history repeating itself, let us take history to be an island we are constantly circumnavigating. Every so many years we spy the same shores as the last generations did but with new eyes. In this analogy what I am suggesting the current age shows is something like a speedy and stretched out flotilla of generations slowly drifting apart in terms of our mutual understanding, ability to relate and something akin to a kind of blindness to the island of history due to the mists of spray thrown up by the number of ships churning the waters.
All this long-toothed pondering aside, I think it is worthy to note how younger generations now are able to interact and communicate in ways inconceivable in any other generation. Today a child of ten can play games and chat to another child on the other side of the world. This is normal, where merely a generation or two ago it was inconceivable.
We have seen racism and sexism rear their ugly heads. Could it be that the next putrid dish we have to stomach is called ageism? Will a fifteen year old soon be looking upon the life of a ten year old as so far removed from their own understanding that by the time a decade has passed they are as different in their cultural understanding of the world as a twenty year old and seventy year old are now?
Probably not to such an extreme, but I have a suspicion the differences between generations are going to grow more and more pronounced over the next several decades before they concertina again. Maybe this is just one of those cycles of time, sometimes stretched out and sometimes compressed. Let us hope the music is good at least!