The situation, most of you will recall from the young years. You come back home very late. You
open the door quietly, so as not to cause noise, because you know everyone in the
house is probably sleeping. You sneak slowly inside,
creeping like a cat. You don't want to wake anyone, just head directly to bed to hide your too late arrival. But your efforts fail -
there is always someone waiting for you. The conflict of generations - round one. Parents are angry cause they worried and feel deeply responsible for you and expect you to play by their rules and you are tired and think this is the storm in a glass of water cause you are grown up enough to decide yourself and do what you want - your independence from parents is crucial for you.
Each society has its own culture, a different era and different generations like every family. Every new generation is different and poses some other values, has other interests and what to emphasize and rationalize their otherness. The conflict of generations is as old as humans existed. Such conflicts seem to be an inevitable necessity. Only when two cultures / generations clash, their interdependence and fierce fighting can lead to the creation of something new, revelatory and riveting. Development as the result of conflict. Well, conflict doesn't need to have the negative staining. The secret lies in how we do play the rounds in the match between generations. How clever we are to use the old's wisdom to build something new.
Umair Haque writes "Dear Old People Who Run the World, my generation would like to break up with you." Every era has its own goals and tend to forget about yesterday's dreams, but trampling on the previous generations altars will not bring any good. I agree with Umair Haque that we need to "create an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity". We need to do instead of talk. But manifestos and breaking up will not take us there. In my humble opinion, it is interdependence along with fierce fighting and learning from the past success and fails that will bring us to the new set of values and allow to make a difference and move forward.
It is irrevocable, that everything is transient and the light of the young stars who just won over the old ones will be turned off later on in the curse of history as the new generations arrive. We need solid foundation anchored in culture and cores values to make a difference. Development. Otherwise we build house of cards. Every time the new winds blow, house falls down and the new generations come and build the new houses of cards, over and over again. In the result we never learn from the past and seem to start from the scratch.
The new generations like to rebel but overthrowing the old and replacing it with new manifestos doesn't guarantee the success. We can't cut off our heritage that shaped us and the society we are living. Not everything sucked what old people created as long as the new generation turned out to despise greed and crave for the new authentic and sustainable reality - we haven't been created in vacuum. The Generation M is the natural result of the collapse of the systems and economies that is happening in front of our eyes but it can't bury the past. It needs to learn from it. Generation M can't burn down the old monuments, it would be revolution and those usually lead to decapitations in the first place. Generation M needs to analyze the past, learn, blend and act, act smarter as it has the potential and tools to do so. After all, Generation M is a necessary reality, as if we don't introduce new trends, if we don't have ideals, and don't discover the new experiences, our world would be wishy washy and dull gray ... we would be stuck...
Photo by Pensiero
