How The Corona Crisis Helped Us Find New Intergenerational Discourse

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i am in the business

of the future which for many people

sounds a little bit

weird and also probably because most

other futurists if you look around in

the world of futurology

are usually quite a bit older than me

and always keep on talking about

technology and how

artificial intelligence is going to save

all of us and so on

my interest personally more is the more

softer one i’m interested in how

society and especially generations are

adapting and communicating with one

another

and as was mentioned before the

communication between generations tends

to be very very difficult

and that’s why i thought the corona

crisis was such an interesting time to

see

how this discourse was changed and what

happened even if only for a brief moment

because as

i speak right now i think some of the

benefits and some of the experiences we

had are slowly getting lost again and

that’s why i kind of like to

recapitulate

what happened why it was good and then

the question of how we can hold it

and how it can help all of us the world

after corona

is obviously a very difficult one to see

i think this is the question that most

futurists get all the time is how will

the world

be afterwards and obviously it is very

difficult for us as individuals to put

ourselves into a

future when the crisis is so imminent

when it is

so incredibly close which is why i would

like to ask you to not look into the

future for a second

but feel back into the past

in the moment of lockdown and it came to

everyone at different times

there was a feeling of solidarity within

society that i think

we have missed for a very long time even

and i think this needs to be mentioned

at this point whilst

on facebook and other social media

platforms discussion between groups is

getting more and more difficult

because we do like fighting here and now

there was a moment during corona

where even the anti-vaccination crowd

shot up for a second

and just listened and saw what was

happening we were all in this boat

of fear to a certain extent together and

i think that was quite an

interesting experience because when we

put aside our differences and the things

we like to fight about usually

suddenly a lot was possible things that

seemed impossible in a rebellion before

that namely friday’s the future where we

asked for

um you know calm down a bit can we turn

down the economy a bit maybe consume a

bit less

that was all deemed completely

impossible and in the second

the crisis or the enemy was in front of

the gates

we managed to pull together as a society

over age groups

and kind of get it under control for

some time at least

so the central question that kind of

comes out of this

generational solidarity is was this

something we can hold

is there an intergenerational solidarity

that we can find that we can hold that

we can perpetuate

a move towards the future in you know in

a combination of different societies and

uh generations instead of everyone

always just looking out

for their own age group if you may

and i think if we look back at this

beautiful phrase i’m sure you remember

it okay boomer

that went through the internet that got

me that was a sign of when

generational discourse was not working

okay boomer basically meant okay we were

trying to discuss

the climate crisis and the future to

come and essentially

we said the younger generation said okay

boomer this is not working the

conversation we are not on the same

level

okay you do your thing we do our thing

and that’s something that i hope this

intergenerational solidarity that we

found

that we can get behind because as said

for some time

we were quite close and then this whole

okay boomer dynamic kind of is slowly

coming

up again the youth are trying to you

know go out and live again

after a few months of lockdown there’s a

will for freedom

and that is kind of leading to erosion

of this

solidarity that we had and i think at

this point it would also be interesting

to mention

that the boomer generation the baby

boomer generation which has this divide

to the younger generation now

i think me as a person of the younger

generation should maybe say this

you did a great job you rebuilt the

world after the second world

war you brought individualization and

tolerance to

most of at least western society and

that is a

really good thing but what has happened

through the

basically this communication between

these two groups or the underlying you

know not always completely bubbling over

conflicts

was that a new quite funny if you ask me

type of generation or

generational mean as okay boomer was as

well was born and those are the

so-called doomers

so quite funnily you know the gen z is

the youngest generation they’re the

digital

crazies as they call them and they were

called zoomers

for a long time like zooming around you

know you always said they had very bad

attention spans and so on so you know

very unfocused and so on

and now because the situation for the

younger generations to a certain extent

looks so dire especially if we look at

the job market and the economy and the

outlook of global growth

they have changed from the zoomers to

the doomers and it’s quite funny you can

go online and find

doomer music playlists for instance

which are just very sad guitar music

with people mumbling over it

it’s absolutely fantastic i can only

recommend it but you see if the if the

world is divided into boomers and

doomers i don’t think we’re gonna get

very far in this entire thing and i

think there are two main

main efforts that we need to take in

order to bridge this gap properly

so the one thing us younger people need

i’m afraid to say this

is something i would call historic

empathy so

right now in the discussion between

boomers and younger

generations there’s somehow this divide

where where we think they you know they

did a terrible job and they’re to blame

for the world ending and climate crisis

consuming all of us

but if we look back into the history of

what they did and what they accomplished

they actually did a really good job at

what they did

and now suddenly ironically we have very

similar values to them but

just because generational cliches are

fun and it’s always fun to tell the

younger generation they’re

stupid i mean everyone has this instinct

to a certain extent

um that that is eroding this so i think

if we look back in history we can see

that they actually did a pretty good job

of bringing things like equality

progress even ecology i’d like to remind

you the 70s hippie revolution that was

them and they were super into ecology

so there’s actually a lot more

synergistic potential here than i think

we believe and on the other hand and i

think this is something that

some of you here might have already felt

is the younger generation was looking

for something to rebel against and it’s

very

hard to rebel against individualist

parents you know they

accept you they think you’re going your

own way is a great thing

i can totally get that i tried i tried

so hard to rebel against my father and

my mother

i played in a heavy metal band for

instance they were like cool go at it

yeah so

you see the the problem kind of is

there’s nothing really individual

to rebel against and i think the

rebellion which was friday’s for future

in this case

one of many there are more to come i

think the the central

movement and the mechanism behind that

was that they were or we were if i may

say so

rebelling against a structure against

institutions that were built but not our

parents

as individuals and it’s always easier to

rebel

against individuals and i think that to

a certain extent is where this conflict

is coming from because

the rebellion is against the structures

and systems that now need an overhaul

but the feeling that the boomer

generation gets is they’re criticizing

us in our entirety

in our existence and that is not the

case and i think this is a this is

something that we need to

communicate properly you know thanks for

all the work you did now let’s

move the system in a way that it doesn’t

collapse

but that it can go forward into the

future so i think these are the two

dynamics that both age groups

if i may should try to get into

another interesting dynamic that

happened during corona was what i’d like

to call the acceleration

of deceleration so when we were all

locked down and stuck within our own

four walls we all suddenly had to slow

down there was just a complete

standstill of

life as we knew it and these

acceleration trends

that you know for instance minimalism or

digital detox all these kind of trends

that try to get out of the

perpetual cycle of consumption that kept

on running all the time

those got amplified we were all forced

into them to a certain extent and i

think this could

have quite a cathartic effect on us for

instance many

of the deceleration movements example

again minimalism

they don’t do it because it’s also fun

and so moral but because you actually

increase life quality

through it if you just slow down a bit

calm down a bit and focus on what’s

actually necessary

for you to be happy and i think this was

an experience that many people

had to have forced upon them to realize

the actual benefits of it and i think

that is something

that will be with us for some time now

because if we now say okay we need to

calm down

consumption a bit maybe slow down or

change the economy a bit

you won’t be able to say oh that’s

impossible we’ve never done that because

we all did it together at one point and

it worked

so i think the acceleration of

deceleration to a certain extent is

going to be part of the success story we

will be more willing

to change our over accelerated maybe

over capitalist if you want to

behaviors because we’ve experienced the

benefits of actually doing that

once in a while so i think that’s

something that could also help us

quite a bit now i’d like to get to the

term

prosperity which is something because

if i’m if i can be honest i’ve been

looking for a new motto for the future

how can we move towards a future that is

not only focused on growth growth growth

growth because i think that

is a paradigm that has led to some of

the communicational difficulties that we

have right now

and prosperity is something we always

hope for and wish for

you know live well and prosper but it

has this effect of

going or turning itself around thriving

growing more and more and more

and i think prosperity is not the

correct word or not the correct

feeling that we should look for when we

move towards the future which

in my opinion the next big crisis ahead

of us is clearly climate change and

prosperity might not be

the right mechanism to go around that

even though we will always keep on

wishing this

onto each other i think and this is a

very nice

similar english word which has a quite a

bit different though

is posterity i don’t know if you’ve

heard of the word posterity it

sounds very similar to prosperity but

it’s not the same

to be in a sense posterious means that

you realize that all or you do something

for the generations after you and i’m

talking way after you yeah i have this

slightly basic simple old greek proverb

in here

a society grows great when old people

plant trees whose shade they know they

shall never sit in

but this is essentially what posterity

is it means

you do something for the next

generations and that has a value

within itself and in order to not or not

get the boomers say to me oh you’re just

doing this from europe the perspective

of your generation

i think this should apply to everyone so

to a certain extent i think

my mission at the moment to get the you

know the communication between

generations working again

is to bring this term into the public to

say

to do something for posterity is

actually

something worth doing so in a certain

sense because this word has not

disappeared it’s just not used very much

anymore

i think it’s my job or i’ll at least

attempt to

make posterity cool again and with that

i say

thank you very much you