Generational Problems: 10% Real, 90% Illusion

Here’s a quote from Morgan Housel:

“Every generation is disappointed in their kids, partly because things typically get better over time, and you become resentful as you see younger generations bypassing problems you had to overcome.”

We all know what he means. We all have a grandpa that had to walk to school in the blizzard, uphill both ways, and hates how easy and safe it is to get to school now. And we all know that grumpy old 50-something that resents student loan forgiveness, because I Had To Pay My Loans Back By Working.

Every generation hates the advantages its children have, to some extent. Both because of a sense of unfairness (resentment) and because they want their children to face the sense of challenge that they faced (good parenting).

It’s because of these narratives, these seemingly profound changes to quality of life, that we see, or think we see, drastic differences between generations. And plenty of us are unhappy about it — even the beneficiaries. But 90% of the problems of every generation are the same ones its parents had. Things don’t change all that much.

Each generation thinks its main problems are those caused by the excesses of its own parents. But that's not the whole truth; it’s not even most of the truth.

Change™ is often just a narrative that’s used to sell you new products and new politicians. A narrative used to capture a new generation of hopeful, starry-eyed Consuming and Voting Citizens. And it works incredibly well. Because we want to feel like we’re different from our parents — like we have a firmer grasp on “how life really is now.” A firmer grasp on reality.

We like to tell ourselves the story that things change profoundly over time. And we like to tell ourselves the story that our world is so very different from the world of our parents. But it's really not. Every 20 or 30 years, we fall ass-over-teakettle right back into the mistakes we condemned our parents for. Because we face the same moral challenges, the same vocational challenges, and the same fundamental human experience that they faced. And then we introduce our own excesses, and we (or our own kids) have to face those, too.

The challenges of each generation look different; they might come in different technological or social packages. But they beg the same fundamental questions. How do we respond to change? What are we willing to sacrifice in order to defend? How will we handle the abundance of choice and freedom in our lives? Who will we trust to run our lives? What will we do when our institutions fail us?

Why do we let old people run the government even though they're completely out of touch with modern life? (This problem is arguably worse now than before, but that doesn't mean the problem did not exist before.)

We all deal with problems like the decline of church and religion in our children's lives. Problems like who we'll allow our kids to be friends with. Problems like how to raise our kids in an impossibly, horrifyingly complex technological world.

These problems are not generational, they are eternal. They will always be with us, no matter where or when we live. Therefore it is not incumbent upon any particular age group to solve them, but upon all of us. It is not incumbent upon one particular segment of our culture to solve them, but upon our culture as a whole.

People have literally been saying "nobody wants to work anymore" for 100 years. And I’m sure they said it in Greece and Babylon, too.

People often say this as if it's some "gotcha" moment or a moral triumph over the "lazy" younger generation. But it's not a generational problem. It says far more about the speaker than about anyone else. The only people I hear saying "nobody wants to work anymore" are people who fail to properly cooperate with or incentivize other people. When I hear business owners say things like this, I take it as a hint that they're running a terrible business. It’s not that nobody wants to work; it’s that nobody wants to work for them.

I’ve seen interviews with rappers where they are asked how they feel about the newer (implied “worse”) rap music. And I’ve seen the same answer over and over: respect what the young people are doing, and collaborate with them, or be left behind. It does no good, professionally, to be a judgmental old dinosaur.

Part of what we remember about the hippies is that they were rebelling against the corporate lives of their parents. Rebelling against being part of a "machine," a "system," a society with too many rules and too much obligation for empty toil. Part of what Gen X (the hippies) were trying to do was escape corporate America. Guess who else did that? Their children, the Millennials. Now guess who else is doing that? The children of the Millennials: Generation Z.

There's a saying that I always found interesting: "If you're young and not liberal, you have no heart. If you're old and not conservative, you have no brain." It’s an overgeneralization, as most clever sayings are. But part of what it’s trying to say is: it's natural for each generation to try to overthrow the rigid structure of its parents' world. That's natural. It's part of growing up.

But what each generation does not realize is that this war has been fought by probably every generation since the beginning of civilized human life. Communes and free sex are the dreams of the young; organization and tradition are the wisdom of the old. You need both. But you also need to recognize that no generation is special or interesting just for wanting to overthrow rigid structure. Because that's what always happens.

Time after time, history has heard the words "the death of writing." The printing press, the internet, the universal availability of easy blog sites, and now the “summarizing” capabilities of AI. People have predicted over and over that their generation would be the last one in which writing was a rare or essential human skill. And yet here I am writing this blog for you, and I have no intention of stopping, nor do the other writers I respect.

Each generation thinks it is the one that will either solve or grapple with some huge old problem in a world-defining way. And that's rarely the case. What usually happens instead is that things change a little and then they stay almost entirely the same as they always were.

What I mean by that is: there will never be a time when human beings do not need to write to each other. Why? Because writing is how we communicate our best ideas from our heads into someone else’s head. Robots cannot do that for us, even though we’re currently having some sort of fever dream where they might soon be able to. Half the value of storytelling is in the telling. Besides, writing is how thinkers think. Suffice it to say we will never reach such a utopia that we won't need to think anymore.

What I mean is, there will never come a time when youth does not rebel against tradition.

What I mean is, there are rarely times when the world of a child is profoundly different from the world of his parents. Because no matter what’s going on in our technological landscape, we all spend our lives answering the same basic questions. And those questions are mostly about us, not about the world. They’re about how we as individuals are going to live.

This is also why I try to stay away from societal calls-to-action in my writing. "It's time to this, it's time for more of that." As if I'm going to be the bell cow of some sweeping change in the structure of society. Because I know that's just not how the world works, and I'm not quite arrogant enough to think that I myself could provoke it.

Society finds its direction through how individuals handle change and decision-making. Society is guided by the spiritual health of the individual, not by sudden changes in collective priorities. That's what my blog is about. It's about the individual. My call to action is to the individual. And it’s slow and steady, not sudden and alarming.

Society is shaped by how well its individuals understand the world. The more a society thinks that “today is a special day,” the less equipped it is to handle the fact that it’s not.

Today is a day to take care of oneself, one’s family, and one’s community. It’s nothing more.

"Generational problems” do little more than distract us and keep us from cooperating. They give us a scapegoat for our lack of fulfillment. They give us a convenient group to blame for all of the ways in which we're unhappy. What we should be doing instead is producing a world in which we could be happy. And producing the kind of habits and lifestyles that would make us happy.

When things do change, they tend to change more slowly than we thought. They change in the hands of multiple generations. But more often, they don't change at all.

Drink some water and blame your parents for everything,

JDR

“All great change begins at the dinner table.” - Ronald Reagan