On Generations

New Jersey

Often people are grouped by class, nation, ethnicity to explain struggles and coming conflicts. More and more people are being grouped by generation. The class wars never happen. Wars among new elites and old elites do - that is war among generations. The next war will be no different. It may already be happening.

The pervasiveness of generational divides is a relatively recent phenomenon. Generations have existed for generations, but their omnipresence in our social consciousness has never been greater. There is more at play here than a growing population. Generations span more dimensions than age; they also cover social demographics like culture and connectedness. The same age group at the same time in two nations across the world from each other and not economically or socially connected would not represent the same generation. I argue that while generations have always existed, they were smaller in that they were exclusive to elites. Generations were bounded physically by geography in the same way that politics and economics were. With an ever growing population, proportion of elites, and growing interconnectedness (in large part thanks to the Internet) that transcends geography and politics, we are seeing generations penetrate the same boundaries and grow their cardinal and influential magnitudes. These are the major factors, but first let’s talk about the advent of youth, and how it serves as a requirement for generation inclusion and generation building.

The Advent of Youth
Youth, like being a part of a generation and inheritance, used to also be the privilege of a few. (these few being the elites, but we’ll discuss how the proportion of elites is growing later). As recent as two centuries ago (perhaps less than one), children in the United States and Europe were working in factories and farms full-time. When children join the workforce, they are deprived of the isolated social circles formed among children of the same age in schools and other youth programs. They are immediately part of the whole working class with everyone else. This is something typically not experienced by many in the West until after college (while I would argue against the merits of this isolation that is for another essay, perhaps…). 
This period of time, experienced as youth, bonds people of the same age, sharing the same experiences (typically due to being part of the same culture, community, nation, etc.). This experience, and how it differs from their parents’ and their childens’, defines the generation as it builds it. Youth not being experienced by many until the early 20th century prevented such stark experiences and divides between people born in different decades, and furthermore prevented the defining and construction of large generations in the West. Thus, it is not surprising that any study on generations in the United States seems to begin in the 20th century. 

Elite Packing
Along with granting youth to those enrolled, the education provided by schools offers a pathway to a knowledge based career. With more children attending school, and later more adults entering knowledge based professions, a larger share of the population was leaving the working class and entering the (upper) middle class as the middle class itself began dividing into ever tiers. More children in schools led to more adults pursuing careers typically exclusive to the existing elites, or new types of careers entirely, and thus lead to more elites, or at least blurring the line between elites and non-elites. 
With more elites every generation, comes a larger and more diverse generation every generation, comes greater differences between generations, comes different treatment of each generation by the preceding generations. Different treatment only furthers intra-generational bonds by providing another influential and shared experience. As the boundaries between classes intra-generationally blur, the boundaries between generations thicken. 


Nationalisation, Globalisation, and the Interne
Before the internet, flights and trains connected the coasts of the United States, uniting people across the continent. The shipping industry connected nations far and wide for centuries past, but with the spread of capitalism, people across the world began drinking the same Coca Cola products. Literature, film, and now brands and consumer products became among the shared experiences of people across the world.
The internet took this scale to a whole nother level. A new culture - a culture of the Internet - began. Social media sites, gaming, and forums allow people to not only consume the same material, but communicate with each other and produce new content together. People across the world share the same courses, the same favorite shows, are influenced by the same news and world events, and laugh at the same jokes. 
I don’t need to tell you about the power of the Internet though. The very fact that you’re reading this post says so much. What’s important here is that when you take a rising social construct like generations, and introduce it to the kind of scale the internet provides, it can either get lost in the midst of such enormity or scale with it. Generations are scaling with it. 

Final Thoughts and Further Exploration
I did not do any research for the post, so I’m likely missing a lot here. I’ve been spending a lot of time with different generations of my family during the pandemic and wanted to explore and articulate my thoughts on the very notion of generations - how they are defined and what defines them. There are a lot of other reasons why I think generations are becoming of increasing import. In this piece, I did not explore the following:

• People are living longer
• People are working longer
• Types of jobs are changing
• Career paths are changing as the idea of the career is being challenged
• The wealth imbalance among generations
• The power imbalance among adult generations

All of these issues are tied to generational divides. Understanding why they exist can help us either see past them, or work with them, to push forward and solve problems together.