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