Generational Drama

A short discussion and analysis of our obsession with generational perspectives and differences, where it comes from, and why it anchors so much current discourse.

The past 15 years have seen public discussions frequently focus on generational habits – whether cultural or political – and the ongoing effort to analyze their meaning, how they connect, differ, and sometimes conflict. The countless stories and jokes aimed at Boomers, Millennials, Gen X, Z, and now Alpha fill our conversations and are used to explain various societal issues. The clear division of one generation from another, starting with the “silent” generation of so-called traditionalists who grew up during the Great Depression and lived through World War II, serves as a way of orienting perspectives, driving the motivation behind this categorization, and explaining its importance over the last decade and a half. It reflects our outlook over the past century and illustrates another facet of the dissolution of the idea of progress, a diminishing sense of the future, and the fragmentation of a shared collective memory and common history. The loss of modernity and future through the unraveling of the idea of progress exists in a feedback cycle with the acceleration of digital technologies, which feed off pre-existing culture and ideas, to regurgitate what has been in ever new packaging. This has resulted in a splintered culture and, with it, the disappearance of collective institutions and talking points.

Although innovations in media have acted as socio-political disruptors in the past, they still constituted largely stationary, centralized nodes of information communication that required specific acts or certain ritualized interactions, such as reading, listening to the radio, watching TV, listening to music, or even using a landline telephone. This created both an overall shared world as well as smaller shared ecosystems of engagement with information that was dispersed from centralized sources. One could take it or leave it, have an opinion, and decide what one thought about various news stories, radio plays, movies, or music, but it was not imperative to who one was as a person and didn’t necessarily define how one chose to walk through the world. Of course, if one chose not to accept a popular narrative, disliked or liked certain media or music, one could and would find others who felt the same way and would then share a bond in one’s negative stance toward a societal narrative or embrace of a certain culture deemed to be fringe. These trends would usually be larger and much slower-moving, simply due to the lack of diversity in the media channels, the infrastructure for broadcasting, and a relative scarcity of cultural content and turnover that resulted from these factors. Taking part in cultural or socio-political discourse, therefore, necessitated a certain focus and dedication as well as time spent alone, interacting, actively consuming, or grappling with ideas, stories, or music. Finding others who did the same would create deeper connections through common shared experiences. In worlds shaped from commercial capitalist consumption, many of these experiences were, and still are, bound to specific storage mediums, cultural touchstones, and the effects of historical events on certain demographics.

The world we now inhabit has left nothing of the previous versions from the last century intact. We no longer share any tangible realities. Digitalization and the permanent acceleration of culture, and how we are supposed to interact with society, paired with the hyperindividualization borne from neoliberal politics and fed through the common mediums of the day, have siloed all of the former shared experiences into individually tailored feeds of culture and politics, feedback loops of mirrored self-expression, and near constant antagonization to meet the ever-changing demands of society and various groups, whether that is through work, family, partnership, or simply as a normal individual. The collapsing of all culture into flattened platforms that coagulate all previous subcultures and creative schools into clickable thumbnails means that, on the one hand, people can discover and dive deep into almost endless libraries of cultural artifacts that exist timelessly next to one another, on the other hand, it hollows out cultural signifiers and identities that once would constitute people’s core individuality and life blood. Existing in the “Big Now,” where everything that once was, exists simultaneously, and can be combined in any way, shape, or form (something that would be considered near-blasphemy just a few decades ago), has ejected any deeper meaning attached to the artistic expression and transformed it into the backdrop for the individually constructed ad-infused experience of the world.

Beyond the creative cultural space, the workplace has also been digitally transformed, with neoliberal start-up speak encroaching on most aspects of labor. We should “never stop learning” and come to terms with the fact that jobs that people were trained for over the last decades are now obsolete. Someone in their fifties should now be prepared to start from square one or go back and do a Master's in their forties to stay competitive. There are no longer clear, age-related life milestones that people can expect to hit if they live their lives in certain ways. This means that a 20-year-old might find themselves in the same situation as a 55-year-old, a university lecture might have someone’s child learning the same material as another person’s parent, while someone else’s grandparent does the same. All these people have had very different experiences of life, culture, and what it represents to them, not to mention a different experience of time and what the future could mean. Yet all of them now face the same world with its new set of obstacles, leading to radically different expectations. These various times clashing with one another, this huge acceleration combined with the feeling of a complete standstill and stagnation, was the impetus behind Paul Virilio’s essay “Polar Intertia,” and German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s theory of “rasender Stillstand” (frenetic standstill), who dealt in depth with this feeling of sociocultural whiplash. Our attempt to understand this moment of transition at the tail-end of our progressive view of history is reflected in our obsession with generational discourse, how we see ourselves, Generations Z and A, the Alpha, and the Omega. At the same time, they fit perfectly into our current world as marketing instruments and incessant, obsessive political positioning.

Generations down through time may have seen their experiences as distinctive and different from those of other, previous generations, but more often than not, they grew into existing communities of elders and societies that were felt to be part of a larger cycle that mirrored past times, with generations still arriving at common and collective experiences which fit into historical narratives, be they positive or negative. We, however, seem to find our experiences utterly unique and never before encountered – the perennial tendency of modernity to see itself as existing outside of natural, or often even other human, history. In this ostensibly unique situation, as we face the prospect of a looming cataclysm, we cannot look back to past experiences of change or dissolution, although some try. Some even go as far as to try to draw parallels between humans and dinosaurs, though dinosaurs had a much more successful run than we have. Those desperate attempts aside, we seem to have found our orientation point in the comparison of generations along a fixated trajectory of historical progress, specifically that of the last one hundred years, and its apparent stagnation and dissolution over the last fifty. Unstuck from other historical narratives, mired in an ever-deepening present, and combined with a bludgeoning generational marketing and political discourse, we have submitted to the infantilization of adulthood and ceded any idea of mutual understanding or responsibility. We have been robbed of any feeling of collective society or a trace of shared history outside of our ingroups. Age has become one of the easiest ways to categorize someone’s entire being, their life story, their political views, cultural awareness, art, and media consumption – everything is filtered through this last set point of reference. These lines can be drawn so close as to even separate siblings. We all exist in different timelines while we are all still trying to seek value and approval in what we feel to be larger, shared spheres existing amorphously “out there.”

We pursue these spheres digitally, but the reality is that we still exist, socially, within them in a very real sense, be they neighborhoods, cities, or countries. Polities of every size still need our collaborative efforts to work, let alone succeed. The backdrop to all of the atomized cultural slop and political noise remains the natural world, which is itself shifting. We continue to be born, age, and die. All of life’s markers remain the same, even if we interpret them through slightly adjusted lenses. The “end” of progress as a viable future-oriented quasi-religion on the right or the left means the end of our conception of time and our place within it. The crisis of time overlaps with the climate crisis; once combined with technological acceleration, we fully enter a crisis of progressive identity. We see this as digital realities and their nihilistic, defeatist, and fatal consequences, spill with increasing veracity into our real-world political realities. While the generational narrative might help us try to make sense of others’ expectations of the world, it is ultimately of no use when trying to find common solutions for the world we inhabit. We need a collective understanding of society to function.

Generational discourse is a mirage spawned by the acceleration, then ideological dead end, of technological progress. We are nowhere new in the sense that we are sitting at the end of one developmental phase and standing on the crest of the next, poised to drop into the circumstances that will define the next centuries and the well-being of everyone on the planet. We are prone to categorization, but we shouldn’t believe that these mean anything other than our attempt to feel less disoriented and make sense of our current impasse. There will come a time soon when generational discourse will sound as antiquated as any other debates from centuries past.