The Generational Gap
I feel old and tired. Yes not something a person of my ageof 26 should be saying, and to the older generations that still believe I’m young and nieve. As a few others can probably relate. There is a generational gap. Its real easy to see how things have changed. Have a conversation with someone twenty to thirty years older than yorself. What they learned at our age we learned about have mostly expienced by the age of twelve. Now I’m talking about comparing going through the depression, but on most life expierences. The truth of the matter is we had growing up alot more different situations and pressures that they didn’t have back then. There is no traditional way of thinking anymore. Whats important for my generation to learn is that unlike our parents and how they were raised without change. We have to be the voice of reason because we were raised in a world where things are no longer black and white. We life in a grey area where we can adapt, and take things from past generations, and correct the wrongs and make this a better world for ourselves and our children.
I can relate to feeling old. Age has always had a stigma that seems to only worsen with time. The younger you are the less seriously you’re taken, regardless of your words, and the older you are, the more likely people are going to think you’re bitter and set in your ways.
I wouldn’t say there isn’t traditional way of thinking in this generation; it’s harder to see than it was in the past, but it truly is everywhere you turn, albeit more buried. We seem to be the generation that is ashamed; we wish to appear more progressive, but we are still held down by many of the same issues our parents and grandparents were, simply in a different context. The world changes, but in my mind, the people do not. They alter ever-so-slightly, but deep down they still hold their grudges, still are out for themselves much of the time. They simply embrace whatever is considered socially acceptable at the time, and that is what makes them unchanging, because they ALWAYS embrace it, no matter how much it may condradict what they were told five minutes ago.
As for tradition: Marriage. Kids. Money. Religion. There you go. It’s the same thing, same aspirations. Same boring cycle that everybody wants to be a part of, while I stand back and scoff.
The only reason people care about the future is because they picture their own bloodline existing in it. If we did not perpetuate ourselves through children, many would feel they were nothing.