I wish that there were less of a "gap" between generations. With each new generation, we are moved further from our ancestral past: which for our society does not exist. Which is weird.
But really the reason I wish for this is because I want to know if the generations before my own ever experienced the sensation that every single person who was a part of that generation was just "not okay."
Is it because our generation has finally reached the point of really having nothing wrong in our lives, so we turn to mental weakness? Every single person in my life has some huge mental wall working against him or her. There's always something, even when it isn't obvious.
It freaks me out, and because of the generation-gaps, I don't even know how much I can look to the generation before for advice. Unfounded trust issues? The insistence that "no one gets it?"
Either way, this gap (real or imagined) has lead me to turn to people my own age, which has lead me to count more on myself than on what an authority figure in my life has to say.
Anyway, I'm babbling and I don't feel well.
So here is what I know:
I can't trust myself
I possibly can't trust the generation before mine
I can trust my generation, but who are they getting their information from?
We all have something wrong with us.
endpost.
1 comment:
I disagree with several statements. The United States is part of Western Civilization. Two key characteristics of Western culture is the emphasis on individuality and a sense of society's linear progression. It may seem like each generation is radically different from the past one, but really these two traditions remain constantly valued. the vast majority of our cultural practices-including cultural changes-reflect these two assumptions. For example, the fight for women's rights in the United States and Britain cleanly reflects the continuity of our culture with regards to these traditions.
In the 1700s, women in the British Isles and the Colonies fought for intellectual and legal freedom. Then, having achieved limited success there, they felt that they needed to progress their rights to political freedom with the right to vote. After this was achieved in the early 20th century, US and British women of the late 20th century urged that their cause progress through equal opportunity rights, including the right over their bodies. The individualism valued in the West served as a catalyst for these changes and a general sense of linear progression of society sustained them. The women of 1919 may seem radically different from the women of 1979, but the very same Western cultural assumptions of individualism and social linear progression shaped them and have essentially stayed the same. The only difference is where these women chose to apply these cultural assumptions.
I don't think that our generation has nothing wrong in our lives. On the contrary, just as the basic Western cultural values have remained constant, so have our social ills such as materialism, hedonism, and an obsession with the new. Also, our generation is still replete with social injustices.
Because of this, I think everyone has always been "not okay" and I look to history to justify that. I also look to all of Western classical literature to offer solutions to these problems because of its enlightening nature. Such authors have been struggling for centuries with the very same problems that our generation faces simply because they come from the same cultural assumptions that have essentially not changed. Our ancestors, and especially relatives (if they grew up in the West), are in the same boat as we are in.
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