What’s in a generation? Will we be named the generation that lived through a terrible pandemic – probably. Will we live through more? Who knows. I catch myself wondering how we will all look back on it and how the historians will analyse this phase in our lives. I can’t help but question whether our generation has been focusing on the wrong stuff for far too long, placing importance on things that in a crisis situation actually have little power of helping, let alone saving us.
Wearing Safari suede dress by D.O.T Studio Belarus
Everyone knows that we live in a culture of mass consumerism, exercising our wants and aspirations to achieve self-importance, higher levels of material wealth and the perfect lifestyle advertised to us through social media. Our modern obsession with celebrities and the need for entertainment has at times clouded our judgement and distracted us from the more meaningful things which go on in the world. It is perhaps almost too easy these days to stick your head in the sand and submerge yourself in ignorance and denial. Eventually you become part of the problem. Even the people in power seem to lack substance and the ability to provide us clear direction, leaving many of us losing confidence in tomorrow.
Think back to the days of our grandparents and great grandparents – if you’re lucky they may still be alive. These are men and women who lived through a world war, possibly even two! “The Greatest Generation” – the generation of people who fought not for fame or recognition, but for their homelands, their beliefs, because it was the “right thing to do.” Their everyday lives and hardships moulded a generation of people united by a common purpose and common values, such as duty, honour, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself. They paved great lives for our parents, “The Baby Boomers.”
Perhaps it’s cynical, but I can’t help thinking that some of these values, a collective energy and spirit and the right mindset, might have better equipped the younger generations for the type of crisis situation we are facing today, and certainly with less panic.
Each consists of people born in a roughly 20-year period. As each archetypal generation reaches the end of its 80-year lifespan, the cycle repeats. In summary, the book suggests that “The Millennials” , born from 1982 through about 2004 (usually considered, as a generation to be very numerical, filling schools and colleges and propelling new technology) are about to take on the next hero generation cycle.
If the pattern holds, they will face a great crisis, which is supposed to influence the rest of their ( or should I say – our?) lives… just as World War II shaped the G.I. Generation heroes.
