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After two years of talking, listening, and reading anything I could about young people in their twenties I have been forced to conclude that suits like me don’t understand anything about jeans like the occupiers.  People older than let’s say 40 have no clue of what’s going on with people younger than let’s say 30.

That should not surprise me. I am 75 years old and there is a half a century between me and these kids in jeans.  That’s a distance of twice their age!  Whatever I can realistically hope to know about them I can only know from the outside in, never from the inside out.

My surprise has to do with something else.  I really like these young people.  I like being with them.  And they with me, it seems.  But they are not like me.  They are different.  From my perspective they are wonderfully weird.  I dare say that this is how anyone over forty feels about anyone under 30.   The generations don’t get one another because they are just not like one another.  In the words of one parent: “Trying to understand our twenty-something son or daughter, is much like immigrating to a strange country.  We neither know our children’s language nor their customs.”   That was already the sentiment of Margaret Mead in 1971!  She stated that because of the rapid pace of change in our culture younger and older people live in different worlds.

It’s not as if the generations hate one another.  They just live alongside one another like two solitudes.  There exists a profound intergenerational disconnect between parents and children, teachers and students, employers and employees in our world today.

Perhaps the most fundamental way in which young people differ from older folk is that their lives are by and large characterized by what someone called “ the integrity of questioning rather than the certainty of knowing.”   Theirs is a probing generation.  They view testing things out as an authentic place to stand.  They like to live on the edge, to try new things, to walk in a space of not knowing, and to believe something tentatively for the time being to see where it leads them.  They are receptive to otherness, welcoming of diversity, open to dialogue, willing to be taught and ready to change their minds. 

They believe that all points of view are inevitably subject to revision and doubt that there are many prefabricated truths worthy to live by.

By way of contrast, their parents, their teachers and their employers have a stake in maintaining that some things must be true no matter what.  They feel uncomfortable with so much openness and uncertainty.  They tend to trust the validity of scientifically established facts more than their children and value historically established patterns of living.  It has taken them years to craft a credible way of living of their own and they feel that their life style is currently under attack.  They secretly want their children to adopt their values and their life style, to accept their worldview and follow in their footsteps but see very little evidence that this is happening.  In my experience it is troubling for many parents to watch their children’s lives go in a direction that is quite different from their own.