Do generational differences matter?

I don't care for younger generations claiming older generations messed up the world for them. I think that is a flawed and misguided mindset that will never understand the circumstances in which the world existed before the world was technology-driven. I think there is a lot of revisionist history where younger generations feel they have the right to pronounce judgment on previous generations as if they owe them something. No, no one owes you anything. Previous generations lived in a world that you will never fully understand, and people lived the way they knew how based on how things operated at the time. Very few could imagine that things would change or evolve today as much as it has. Yes, many generations wanted better for future generations and did what they thought was best at the time. What many did not realize was that some of what seemed good at the time was detrimental to humanity in other ways, such as environmental issues. I can tell you that the 1990s young adult me would have said you were ridiculous if you told me the world was going to change as much as it has in 20-25 years. No matter how many predictions people make, you can't ever fully know how things will unfold. Many changes were thrown at us overnight, and we had to adjust pretty quickly. There are many things we learned today, that we didn't know yesterday. Hindsight they say is 20/20.

So, of course, it is easy to judge from today's perspective but if you do, it will be narrow, short-sighted, and misguided. Many options and rights people so casually assume are deserved today were not available to many not that long ago. So, no, I don't think younger generations have a right to judge the past. You were not there, so don't assume you can be judge, jury, and executioner of times past. It's more important to have perspective and understand why things happened the way they did from different angles and perspectives, not just a self-righteous present. As younger generations, you can make fun of all you want about previous generations and talk about how messed up the world is because of what previous generations did, but you only know this because of the knowledge that's been developed over a period of time. You will never understand what it was like to live as they did without all that you have access to in this world today. You know nothing about the constraints of the past, and the conditions or circumstances under which decisions were made. You may understand it intellectually but not from a lived experience. If you're not careful about your judgments of previous generations, you will find yourself not so happy on the other side of this when your children and grandchildren, Generation Alpha and Beta, are old enough to check you.

For anyone to think they can sufficiently or even partially pass judgment upon an era long since passed, well usually this often ends in a misguided attempt to give a clear, unbiased perspective to fully appreciate who a person truly is. This doesn't mean we can't have opinions educated or uneducated.
 
For anyone to think they can sufficiently or even partially pass judgment upon an era long since passed, well usually this often ends in a misguided attempt to give a clear, unbiased perspective to fully appreciate who a person truly is. This doesn't mean we can't have opinions educated or uneducated.
Agree, that we can all have our opinions, and share our perspectives. What I have a problem with is the presumption that younger generations have that they can be the ultimate judges of past generations simply because they live in a more privileged time where they have access to that hindsight that previous generations didn't.
 
Agree, that we can all have our opinions, and share our perspectives. What I have a problem with is the presumption that younger generations have that they can be the ultimate judges of past generations simply because they live in a more privileged time where they have access to that hindsight that previous generations didn't.
What's always been interesting to me is that history, what occurred, the mindsets and perspectives from a given historical era seems to be forgotten and or not properly given its due consideration when forging the present and the future.
To me it's borderline arrogant ignorance for one to think i have a complete clear representation of historical hindsight.
Given that in present day most don't even know how to see the humanity in others tells me until we master this basic quality how can we hope to achieve the greater.
 
What's always been interesting to me is that history, what occurred, the mindsets and perspectives from a given historical era seems to be forgotten and or not properly given its due consideration when forging the present and the future.
To me it's borderline arrogant ignorance for one to think i have a complete clear representation of historical hindsight.
Given that in present day most don't even know how to see the humanity in others tells me until we master this basic quality how can we hope to achieve the greater.

Agree. You're right. We don't always learn the lessons we should from history, and thereby repeat the bad patterns that lead us to poor outcomes. So, we do need to reflect on our history, consider it carefully, and analyze what happened. We will never have complete insight into the past, but we can use what is available to use to make sense of it.
 
A quote often seen around comes to mind.

Bad times make men good.
Good men make good times.
Good times make men weak.
Weak men make bad times.

The baby boomers and Gen X seem to have built the modern world. The subsequent generations seem obsessed with making it unlivable.

I really can't stand other people my age. They're just going around looking for ways to cause trouble, annoy, or to get their butts kissed.
 
China's Boomers

 
I think it's a bit of a paradox tbh.

The boomers are definitely materialistic af which makes no sense to me considering half of them lead the hippie revolution (correct me if I'm wrong but I believe they peaked around this time). Anyway, one thing I have noticed about the boomers is that they are being sneaky with laws, they refuse to move out of the higher parts of society and retire and instead approve laws that specifically f**k the following generation. They have been approving laws that will just make the FED money printing machine go brrr infinitely and screwing the generation that follows. Unfortunately I cannot find a link to these specific laws because I found that information a few years ago so you will have to trust me on that. It's always band-aid policy that aims to fix issues now and fuck future generations. But I believe it has become particularly obnoxious with the boomers and they seem to be behind that band-aid-not-my-problem solutions. However, I have noticed that the increasing financial technology made by millennials and zoomers (Crypto) started out as a revolutionary way to hold value and bank the unbanked, but very very quickly crypto has turned into a cesspool of the same tactics used in the current financial system. I'm not religious, but turns out Jesus knew it all along when he done flipped his shit at the temple and threw all the money changers out, no matter what generation the same sketchy money manipulation tends to occur anyway.
 
So, as time goes by, each generation advances, grows up, and experiences new things that put them in a different demographic or category. Our experiences of the world change, just as the world changes, and technologies we use to relate to each other change. But, I'm curious to know if generational differences have a real, significant impact on how we understand and communicate with each other? Does it matter in some contexts but not others? Which ones? Have generational differences affected you in any way, at work, school, friendships, etc.? Are you noticing significant differences among generations and how they approach work or life that you never noticed before?
Just synthesising a number of thoughts following on from the discussion so far ....

I have a very strong visceral resistance to the typecasting that generational classification labels force upon people. There's a whiff of something very wrong about it, because we then go on to talk about individual people we know as though they are representative of their generational lable, as though it defines them. There's a hint of stereotyping dehumanisation about it, and we just cannot treat individuals in each of these age groups as though the classifications were valid for them. They are generalisations at best.

Of course people are very different as they age - our mental attitudes change as we grow older, and we gain experience all the time. That's bound to affect the way folks of different ages interact - we see this most clearly in the way adults interact with young children and the way children of different ages behave with each other. Curiously though, unless folks are being extra specially polite to me, these differences seem to matter so much less here in the forum (I'm nearly 72), and a lot of the time I'm unaware of the ages of the people I'm talking to :)

I'm British not American so I guess the experience of people of my generation here will be different to those over the pond. Britiain was left in a pretty austere state after WW2, and didn't become noticeably affluent until into the 1960s. As a child, we had no central heating, no double glazing, no car, no television, no telephone, no fridge or freezer, no vacuum cleaner - and today's mobile phones or the internet or personal computers would have looked like something out of a rather unbelievable science fiction story. Foreign holidays were only for the very wealthy in those days. In winter, it was only practical to live in my parents' kitchen during the daytime because that was the only room with a fire. Most young people today are brought up with many of these things and take them for granted as I do now, but if I put myself back into the 1950s they make the current world seem privileged beyond measure. It was before medical care had advanced as far as it has today, and all childern caught measles and other nasties. There were often outbreaks of polio, diptheria, smallpox, etc, that were very frightening though only measles was widespread, but fear of illness was much greater then - those diseases are rare now compared with the 1950s. My generation was young and impressionable as well right at the heart of the cold war - when I was in my early teens I went off to school more than once wondering if I'd seen my family for the last time and if we'd all be radioactive waste by the end of the day - particularly at the time of the Cuba missile crisis. In the UK, we'd only have got 4 minutes warning of a nuclear attack and we all thought it was much more likely to happen than not, so there was a constant backdrop of fear.

As I got older and into my late teens, we too looked askance at the older generations. They were the folks who trashed the world in two world wars after all, and some of them clung to Victorian values that seemed irrelevant to the then modern world. I think this has nothing to do with specific named generations and everything to do with the natural cyclic processes of the world moving on. In general, young people will always have rather less than older people and resent them for it - the older one have had longer to accumulate wealth, and have had a lifetime to occupy the positions of power and control in society. But younger folks have more time left than us older ones so the world is always going to be yours before long - all too quickly in fact, because time doesn't stop. It was like that for us and it will be like that for younger folks today. On the other hand, this is where generational typecasting can be pernicious because although there are older people who have accumulated wealth and power and some of us misuse them, in my country there are lots of people of my generation who live in near poverty - on very low incomes, with no assets and in rented accommodation. Many are invisible too, unnoticed and locked out of the social world and terribly lonely as the people they know and love die off or become infirm. Some of us have enought to live on OK, but are not wealthy and often on fixed incomes that can be destroyed quickly by inflation. Many of us who are reasonably comfortably off don't hoard it but give help to our children and grandchildren with things like house purchases, childcare, practical and emotional support - and we provide an escape haven for them if things go wrong in their lives, as they help us out when we become too old and frail to live unaided.

I hear people saying that the older generation has ruined the world that they have to live in. I think this is the application of a flawed moral judgement without an effort to understand where the world is and how it's got here. For example, I have no doubt that some environmental damage is caused by greed, but on the other hand it's the so-called damaging technologies that have allowed so many people to live materially secure and relatively fulfilling lives in many parts of the world - compared with our Victorian ancestors for example. The world could not sustain the numbers of people alive today, and many of us living far better than we did in the 1950s, without those technologies. Their global environmental impact was not at all easy to predict 50, 60 or 70 years ago, and they saved many, many lives long before they threatened to harm them. Indeed, lots of people alive today would not be here without the technology that we are increasingly concerned about, and that gift of life was given to us by past generations.

If the human race is up to the challenge then I believe it's not to regret the benefits that the last century has brought through technology. I think a good attitude is to see it in a postive light as making lives more secure and comfortable, but now the very real big risks and problems arising from it have to be addressed. We have accumulated decades of insight and hindsight from the science and the technology, and we can use where we are as a stepping stone to a more sustainable future, one that sits in balance with the Earth and its ecology. My generation had to deal with the aftermath of what was passed on to us by the World War generations, and that was no less challenging than what the world faces today - just different. Every generation is faced with a crisis of living - I feel that there is great hope for the future in the fierce desire younger people have to solve our present day problems, but the solutions must come from the younger generations, not the older ones because that's where the energy for change lies. The future is yours and the mistakes are now yours to make or to avoid - the path is going to be messy and full of controversy, as well as fulfilling and hopefully successful, but that's just the way life has always been :D.
 
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I think it's a bit of a paradox tbh

The boomers are definitely materialistic af which makes no sense to me considering half of them lead the hippie revolution (correct me if I'm wrong but I believe they peaked around this time). Anyway, one thing I have noticed about the boomers is that they are being sneaky with laws, they refuse to move out of the higher parts of society and retire and instead approve laws that specifically f**k the following generation. They have been approving laws that will just make the FED money printing machine go brrr infinitely and screwing the generation that follows. Unfortunately I cannot find a link to these specific laws because I found that information a few years ago so you will have to trust me on that. It's always band-aid policy that aims to fix issues now and fuck future generations. But I believe it has become particularly obnoxious with the boomers and they seem to be behind that band-aid-not-my-problem solutions. However, I have noticed that the increasing financial technology made by millennials and zoomers (Crypto) started out as a revolutionary way to hold value and bank the unbanked, but very very quickly crypto has turned into a cesspool of the same tactics used in the current financial system. I'm not religious, but turns out Jesus knew it all along when he done flipped his shit at the temple and threw all the money changers out, no matter what generation the same sketchy money manipulation tends to occur anyway.

In short they pulled the ladder prior generations had left for them especially during in the 80s and 90s when everything was being outsourced from America and Europe to Asia for quick profits off the backs of Asia's poor. The past two years have really brought home just how disastrous these decades long choices are when almost everything has to be imported resulting in ever rising prices and empty shelves while many are straddled with low paying futureless jobs after all one can't expect to run a healthy economy off 90% service jobs with only a few % of farming and manufacturing leaving behind vast trillion dollar/euro debts that will take centuries to fully pay off.
 
In short they pulled the ladder prior generations had left for them especially during in the 80s and 90s when everything was being outsourced from America and Europe to Asia for quick profits off the backs of Asia's poor. The past two years have really brought home just how disastrous these decades long choices are when almost everything has to be imported resulting in ever rising prices and empty shelves while many are straddled with low paying futureless jobs after all one can't expect to run a healthy economy off 90% service jobs with only a few % of farming and manufacturing leaving behind vast trillion dollar/euro debts that will take centuries to fully pay off.

Yes definitely this, to me it can also be summarised as "Let the good times roll". I can respect the concept of staying in the present moment and just dealing with issues as they come but none of the boomers I've met actually seem genuinely happy. But of course that is completely biased because these are only the boomers I've met. To borrow one of their own catchphrases, they seem to be "beating a dead horse" in terms of happiness. Their happiness must come from work, success and efficiency rather than a family focus and actually learning from what the hippie revolution was supposed to manifest.

But then as I said before, this isn't a attack on boomers as all the other generations are just as short-sighted. It just surprised me that the boomers aren't happy with their own recipe.
 
Yes definitely this, to me it can also be summarised as "Let the good times roll". I can respect the concept of staying in the present moment and just dealing with issues as they come but none of the boomers I've met actually seem genuinely happy. But of course that is completely biased because these are only the boomers I've met. To borrow one of their own catchphrases, they seem to be "beating a dead horse" in terms of happiness. Their happiness must come from work, success and efficiency rather than a family focus and actually learning from what the hippie revolution was supposed to manifest.

But then as I said before, this isn't a attack on boomers as all the other generations are just as short-sighted. It just surprised me that the boomers aren't happy with their own recipe.

In short they chased their slice of the pie and whatever they could get extra while ignoring wider issues in society hell they even left their own behind to rot away as many who didn't "win" at the game of life who didn't make it into the middle and upper classes ended up in some form of poverty. For later generations such left very little to build from future wise which for Gen X meant delayed career advancement if not stalled out altogether in many cases while for everyone else younger well it gets bleak pretty fast. For many under 40 life may as well not happened much at all due to things like the great recession that meant stagnant and rock bottom wages coupled to rising cost of living with very few opportunities for most. Now with the end of covid in sight at least with the next year or so there is prospects of another big economic crash as well the rise of conflicts around the world at a very vulnerable time historically.

Edit: Pepperidge Farm remembers when it was all that love is all that anyone needs before it all become whoever has the most toys wins.

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Greetings :blush: if I may add my unsolicited opinion,

I think every generation has both good and bad things to offer, so I'm fascinated by them all and always want to know even the darkest aspects of each, especially the baby boomers generation since they are the historians of a world I've never met.

Getting along can be very hard sometimes, but there's always something to learn from other generations and even our own :smile:.


Incredible!!
 
I guess I haven't responded to this thread because there is too much I could say.

Yes, there are differences between generations. Collective mindsets shift based on the overall experiences of the group.


Really, there are three branches of each generation: the mainstream, the rebellious, and the destructive.
The rebelliousness of one generation tends to blend into the norms of the next.
The destructive nature of one generation causes problems for the next.
The mainstream is just the status quo that the children of that generation try to casually rebel against, while usually also embracing to some degree, so the overall shift from one generation to the next isn't a giant leap and change is gradual.

I never felt in sync with my generation or defined by it, but I make a considerable effort to live outside the mainstream because nothing about mainstream life made sense to me. I was definitely part of the "Rebellious Gen X" while, for example, destructive Gen X is responsible for "Karens". I'd call Grunge mainstream. Boomers have the rebellious "hippies", and the destructive Boomers who destroyed the job market and real estate for Gen X, Millies, and Gen Z. All Boomers were not responsible for that, only a portion. Before that, we had the Silent Generation, with the rebellious Civil Rights and Beat Gen branches and the destructive McCarthyism branch. The Greatest Generation is largely glorified and celebrated for the mainstream experience of fighting in WWII, while the rebellious and destructive of that era get much less "press".

When we complain about one generation we're usually focusing on only one branch.

Being Gen X always felt like we were stuck in between. This seems to be the first time a college education failed Americans. We were told to wait our turn, worked for low pay, and our turns never arrived because Boomers had no intention of making room for us. Most Gen X people I know are still underemployed. Despite being a forward-thinking generation, we finished school just before technology really took and computers were integrated. As we turned 30 we were surprised to be alive and only focused on careers and families after that because we figured out we weren't going to die young in a nuclear war. I'm not sure if all of Gen X realizes how much this concept of nuclear war shaped us. We had kids later, if at all.
Watching Millies complain about things like being underpaid and underemployed and not being able to afford housing or health insurance kind of amuses me... like welcome to reality. (Hi, I didn't have health insurance until I was 40.) At the same time, I find how Millies take for granted everything Gen X had to try hard to seek out in an analog world –– things that helped us form bonds and identities, annoying. I see the breakdown of bonds and how much harder it is to make friends because of this, too, which makes me sad for them. Boomers seem out of touch to me. On average, they have money, retirement plans, and beautiful homes, and this gives them a rosier point of view. They seem oblivious that this all stopped with their generation. And now, I see so much of my own subculture... the rebellious branch... popping up in mainstream "radical" ideas and it's just... bleak.

I think my generation is interesting, Our rebellious branch changed the world in so many good ways and forced many good ideas into the mainstream, as all rebellious branches do. We embrace both the tech and analog worlds. Yet, we're mostly forgotten and ignored –– which is a key characteristic in our generation's personality.
 
Hmmm...this isn't really about age is it. It's about beliefs and notions folks have in their heads.
Boomer..ok. Gen whatever...fine.
Do you get it? Are you a decent human?
What is the "it" you're supposed to get. Your it, my it, someone else's it..
We are all stardust. Energy. Here having a physical experience..
Maybe if we focused more on why we are having this experience we would craft a better planet
 
Hmmm...this isn't really about age is it. It's about beliefs and notions folks have in their heads.
Boomer..ok. Gen whatever...fine.
Do you get it? Are you a decent human?
What is the "it" you're supposed to get. Your it, my it, someone else's it..
We are all stardust. Energy. Here having a physical experience..
Maybe if we focused more on why we are having this experience we would craft a better planet

You nailed it! Exactly what I've tried to stipulate I'm my previous responses in this particular thread!
 
There is a tremendous wealth gap between millennials and baby boomers: "When boomers were millennials' age in 1989, according to the Fed data, they held 21.3% of US wealth. That's four times the 4.6% that millennials hold today".

In general, millennials are much worse off economically than boomers were at our age and are now. Most boomers I've encountered are completely out of touch with how things are for us and are prone to giving terrible advice like "just go to law or business school". Wage stagnation is a major issue. To make matters worse: Twenty years ago, nobody was talking about a student loan debt crisis. Education costs have gone up dramatically, and rent/housing costs relative to income have gone up dramatically as well.

Being trans, boomers scare me. It is exceedingly rare to meet an accepting member of that age group. A minority will be tolerant, but they will never actually see me as a woman. The rest do not want me to exist.

I've found generation x to be somewhere between millennials and boomers.
 
So, as time goes by, each generation advances, grows up, and experiences new things that put them in a different demographic or category. Our experiences of the world change, just as the world changes, and technologies we use to relate to each other change. But, I'm curious to know if generational differences have a real, significant impact on how we understand and communicate with each other? Does it matter in some contexts but not others? Which ones? Have generational differences affected you in any way, at work, school, friendships, etc.? Are you noticing significant differences among generations and how they approach work or life that you never noticed before?

Here's the breakdown of the Generations:


https://www.kasasa.com/exchange/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-z

Generational differences are only superficially important with the open-minded, but they are omnipresent with the obtuse. :)
 
I am Gen-X, and an earlier one at that. I’ve never known a world before technology, and to be fair, I loved it.

1969 born
1973 cable tv, sony trinitron
1974 could operate the stereo and play records
1975 played with neighbors’ minimoog and arp 2600 synths
1976 first electronics kit
1977 apple ][ computer
1979 first online community
1980 apple ][+
1981 start of golden age of video games
1982 faster modem
1983 apple //e
1983 first time writing code for $
1983 first part-time job in a computer store
1984 apple macintosh
1985 bought first compact disc
1985 internet access
1986 cd player
1987 first full-time job – computer graphics for media presentation
1987 adobe illustrator
1988 started freelance computer work
1990 apple mac classic
1991 first cell phone
1991 apple mac IIfx
1991 first 24-bit color
1991 first 19" sony trinitron monitor
1991 adobe photoshop
1992 first of many synthesizers
1993 apple quadra 950
1994 second cell phone
1994 first digital camera
1994 first website
1995 broadband internet access
1996 protools tdm
1996 apple powermac 7600
1997 third cell phone
1998 apple powermac g3
...and so on

I paid for everything from 1981 forward. Sometimes that meant a lot of snow shoveling, grass cutting, newspaper delivery, and a bit later, I made some good money from babysitting. Then the jobs and freelance began.

I never took notes when I was in school, but I do enjoy writing with a good pen, fountain or otherwise. Even after I had to relearn how to write, I still enjoyed it, although it isn’t as easy, and it’s a little different now.

I used to enjoy when someone younger than I would assume I was semi-tech-illiterate because I was Gen-X. Haha!

In my experience, Xennials typically do not have as-it-happened memory of post-punk and new wave music, and that’s a significant difference from Gen-X. Of course, I take note of this and think it is significant only because I am a music nut.

Cheers,
Ian
You played with an ARP 2600 synth?! Lucky lad.
 
I think where generational differences matter are when people have bad attitudes or narrow minds. No doubt this will correlate with personality type. These negative cognitive traits have negative repercussions at both ends of the age range. Older people will tend to be narrow minded and dismissive of young people and young people will be entitled and dismissive of older people. With intelligence, understanding and good character, there should be no barriers and opportunities for learning from each other.
 
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