When I was a child I looked forward to the future, fixed upon the year 2000, when I would be 40 years old. I envisioned myself as a 21st century man in the prime of my life, fully invested in the future, ready to exploit all that the 21st century had to offer. My parents on the other hand, my father in particular, scoffed at what he called a “glass and stainless-steel” vision, and they encouraged me to remain rooted in the present.
As I matured and saw the new century approach, it seemed as though the future, at least as I imagined it, was in fact an illusory notion that had likely led on countless generations before me. Not that I saw myself as gullible, for I had always looked ahead with confidence toward a future that I hustled, with some success, to achieve. Plus, there were indeed unimaginable boons and benefits to the 21st century- especially in the realms of health and technology. For example, when I was a youngster cancer was referred to as “the big C”, for it struck with random abandon, decimating some families, while sparing others; and almost everybody knew someone who had been culled by some form of the awful disease. But by the turn of the century many of the most common cancers had been efficiently managed, if not cured, thus rendering what was once an object of fearful superstition to the level of a malady that one might casually mention to a co-worker.
And yet in maturity I realize that although I had seen myself as a child of the future all of my life, I was in fact a child of the past, hopelessly rooted in the 20th century, the present where my parents had wanted me to remain. Nevertheless I understand that there is no going back; not by dint of sheer stubbornness, simple reminiscence or even by some manner of time travel. Glass and stainless-steel may have once represented a kind of science-fiction fantasy, but it was in fact a reality of the evolution of 20th century engineering; a method of construction engendering vast civic and commercial growth. Such design brought capacity and capacity enabled the eruption of megalopolises such as New York, London, Chicago, and Los Angeles. When populations are concentrated in dense cities they derive the benefit of efficiencies not available to people elsewhere.
Thus technology and demographics render societal change over time, but always with an eye toward the future; just as, say, the course of political liberal democracy, or the ineluctable progressive acceptance of human rights follows an evolutionary arc. When some things change, I have learned, they can not be undone. By contrast, the trajectory of the global inequities of wealth, resources and power are described by a different arc altogether, especially as compared to any individual’s opportunities for personal growth. In fact it is a stark shame that while the one must always rise, so to speak, the other must needs fall.
There is a tendency in popular media to ascribe nicknames to contemporary generations. I am a “late-boomer”. My children are “millennials” soon to followed by “gen Xers”, “gen Yers” and “gen Zers”. These latter letter gens have arrived too early in their century to go through the type of epiphany I described above, for there will be no calendar date-line beyond which everything should change, must change, has to change if any of the half-baked theories of a thousand “futurists” and the story-lines of a million sci-fi authors are not to be deemed irrevocably silly and quaint. Perhaps for these 21st century generations the future shall ever recede, and they shall follow, occasionally stopping to pick up and admire the wonders strewn on the trail before them.
For me the struggle will be to resist the easy comfort of a repetitive past, where the music sounded better, the people were friendlier, the jokes were funnier, the skies were sunnier. And allowing that there can be no going back, it is incumbent upon me, who once sought the promise of the future, to keep up; to learn its tech and its terms, to feel its rhythms and hear its music.
The generation that preceded mine was in its time mired in war and societal turmoil, with folks lashing back against the authority and institutions they no longer respected, while quixotically proclaiming the end of hypocrisy. Members of that generation imagined a bleak future overshadowed by implacable superpowers bent upon mutual annihilation. For them the 21st century held no aura of promise but was instead to be associated with the term “apocalyptic”. Many of my heroes came from the so-called “Viet Nam” generation, but few of them survived to see the 21st century with me.
It was all too easy for some of the so-called “flower children” to be discarded along the road and trod upon by the advancing late 20th century narcissists, whose grab for power and posterity became a global spectacle. For them, “reality” was something that one watched others experience, and experience was something rare and expensive. Here, it is believed, was the genesis of a new human dynamic; one that conceived the possession of the vast percentage of resources by a super-minority. This minority boasts of a peculiar quality: that it eschews moral perspective, and that its decisions, though momentous for a vast uninformed constituency, are taken more with whimsy than with care or consideration. Few other historical eras compare with the recent fin-de-seicle, with its computer panics, corporate crashes, global re-alignments, and the abandonment of the “personal”.
In fact the letter-gens face an new obstacle to success and security: elders who exult in their new longevity and thus refuse to cede power and responsibility. The 21st century gens are forever looking in the mirror, looking at the phone, and checking for proof of life in their text feeds. They seem to be caught is a tendency to experience both urgency and ennui at the same time.
But I am speaking from a so-called “western” perspective, (the term “New-World” having lost its relevance during the last century) and the one earth-shattering reality of the early 21st century is the fact that the world is getting smaller. On the one hand, events that are local and seemingly unrelated end up affecting the world-at-large, while on the other, macro-events such as rapid climate change create conditions that affect everyone and everywhere.
People all over the world, from ‘foreign’ cultures and other continents, are experiencing the effect of rapid global change as well. Having long observed the west through its self-representation on television programs and movies, they are not as easily convinced as they once were that this culture, this part of the world is admirable, either in terms of standard of living, or in terms of societal values. Folks may wish to move to the places that offer the best opportunity for peace and personal advancement, but they are finding that one place ends up being much like another, and that the dynamics of economic inequity are far more powerful than, and tend to win out over the forces of universal dignity and equality.
My perspective may be narrow, but I do occupy a tenuous perch afforded to me by my age, from which I can peer over and at the latter generations, not to exploit, but to advise them, at least the ones with whom I share some demographic similarity in this so-called “first” world.
The lesson I would impart is that by nature we are in youth “too young” and by the time we mature, we are “too old”. This condition is primarily a consequence of the ratio between our age and our potential (not actual) longevity. Actuarial tables report that the average human in a contemporary western society may achieve a certain average age before death; and not surprisingly, people tend to consider these odds, these generalizations as “sure-fire” and dependable. In youth we lack judgment not only by virtue of our immaturity as humans but also as a result of our failure to properly assess our odds of survival. Perspective can become somewhat skewed at a time when child mortality is relatively low, there are no predators and few natural hazards, and we enjoy the best education that a system of tutelage rooted in the past can provide.
By comparison it is worth noting that during historical eras when life-expectancy was low, folk tended to assume roles of responsibility within their societies at younger ages. Furthermore, the elderly were valued for judgment, experience and overall wisdom, and old folk, “survivors” remained in proximity to young folk. Thus first of all the young must engage and revel in the remarkable truism that one person can indeed change the world. Some fields of human endeavor still thrive on the creative employment of youth, such as art, music, athletics and the military. What I suggest is that we emulate that model and intentionally make room for the young in government, commerce, medicine and education.
As for the folks who are no longer young but not quite old, I would recommend changing the current focus upon work productivity as a measure of personal worth. It has long been held that an individual produces the best as well as the most work between the ages of 25 and 40, and that the years afterwards reveal an inverse relationship between wages and productivity. Without challenging corporate traditions of employee rewards or benefits, I would recommend re-interpreting productivity data and re-prioritizing corporate values. Certainly long before Willie Loman came along, academia, the military and society all knew that businesses tended to value the ‘bottom line’ at the expense of the workers and that one effect of high productivity and profit was a measurable rate of burnout and disease in long-term employees. As average life expectancy increases, it is important to acknowledge that individuals of 45 or 50 years of age have already worked for some 30 years. They may be able to work for 30 more. It is well within the power of companies, especially companies for whom the term “retirement benefits” is an anachronism, to offer sabbatical, travel, education, rest, teaching, and or healing packages to these older workers, as well as to reassess the value of experience within organizations. Society can no longer afford to discard older workers and relegate them to assisted-care communities and the like, for the health of society and all its members depends upon integrating the old with the young.
Despite being rooted in the 20th century I still look ahead, but not toward gleaming cities of glass and stainless-steel. For all of the attractions and efficiencies of the cities, they are fundamentally unfair, for they still fail to provide equal access for people with disabilities, they are still cold, pitiless, and perhaps dangerous for folk who do not know how to navigate and how to hustle. And if society is to adapt to the increasing presence of older folk, then cities are going to have to change to welcome them.
For as long as humans have been self-aware they have tried to determine how to understand and interact with time, for they were instinctively aware that time existed to be experienced both objectively and subjectively. As we age time appears to be less of a conceit, and more of an independent and malleable reality. It seems to expand and contract depending upon the circumstance, and it even seems to demonstrate the principle that the famous Heisenberg once applied to sub-nuclear particles. Furthermore to a child a given day may seem interminable; but every subsequent day will be a little shorter, and in subjective terms, there will be a little less “time” to do what must be done. Teenagers in particular seem to chafe against time to an inordinate degree. It is as if by sleeping they can make it go away. But they can hardly escape the rude awakening when work schedules and term papers and commutes and dates and all other timely burdens finally make them understand that they must acquiesce in what is fundamentally what Einstein called a relative problem, or a problem of perspective.
I saw the year 2000 and it was no big deal. The years since have been somewhat of a disappointment. The idealists had a poor showing, having been trounced by industry that shrewdly co-opted bits of their message. The super-wealthy-super-minority still abdicates all responsibility for owning everything. Those who once advanced the “apocalyptic” never to see their vision realized now enjoy the oddly nostalgic “post-apocalyptic”, as presented in countless books, movies, role-playing games, and plays. The gens who gave up “the personal” as an offering on the altar of the perfect internet have nevertheless taken up “self-identity” and “folks like me” as their new notion of a communal comfort-zone.
Now the 20th century can seem really old , especially when videos or photos from the last 30 years or so of the century are viewed. So-called black-and-white images from prior decades are still somehow crisp, but the color images from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s usually appear washed out, or blurry. It was only then that photography became commonplace and widespread as a hobby, and the inexperienced public was often satisfied with somewhat ill-composed shots of hard-to-recognize people and places. By contrast, 21st century smartphones are able to independently compose shots and capture images to best advantage. Yet people no longer value these images and examples of “recorded time”, for such images are ubiquitous, and they encourage an odd side-effect by which neither the original experience nor the recorded images of it seem to matter. Time, memory, and recorded memory become saturated and indistinguishable.
There really will never be another generation that can boast of their “grandma’s recipe”, or tell of something they alone witnessed, like a rainbow, or a falling star. Because grandma is still around, and she got her recipe from the internet; and if you saw a rainbow, then a thousand people in your neighborhood already posted a clip of it. News gets around fast, especially when people succumb to ‘credo primus’ or the belief that only the first version of a story is the right one.
In closing, I return to the notion that every day matters, that life is too short no matter how long medical science manages to prolong it. The young should be free to express themselves, but they must be sure to listen to older folk as well. We can control our individual destinies only as far as we can establish priorities that are not only morally feasible, but applicable to all members of society. We live, it seems, to work, but we often fail to see the importance or relevance of the work we do until it is too late to appreciate. Time is of the essence, but it can obfuscate us; and unless we understand that we are as much a part of time as it is of us then we will be frustrated, sidelined, and left feeling as though our contributions matter for little. Billions of people who lived and died before us struggled to sync their ambitions to the sidereal, the lunar, the solar, only to be thwarted by the circulatory, the respiratory, and the life cycles of mitosis and meiosis.
Nobel laureate Bob Dylan wrote:
“Time is a jet plane,
it moves too fast;
ah, but what a shame
that all we’ve shared can’t last…”
But he too lived through the end of the 20th century.