The Generation Gap Will Always Exist

Children nowadays love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love gossip instead of an activity.

We've all heard that, right? Well, guess what? That was said by Socrates, 2400 years ago.

The generation gap concept is nothing new. What's really amazing is how cyclical the opinions have been through the centuries. The generation gap is a situation where older and younger people don't understand each other because of their different experiences, opinions, and habits. For example, older generations will never understand the terror behind accidentally liking an Instagram post that's 72 weeks old and younger generations will never experience the torment behind having to sift through an entire Encyclopedia.

I want to address the clear ongoing conflict between the 'woke' generations, Gen Z and Y, and older generations, the Baby Boomer and Gen Xers. It's a conflict where neither understands each other, and neither is willing to understand each other.

Part of this disconnect is the rise and conventionalization of progressive ideas and lifestyle choices. According to a study conducted by the PEW Research Centre in 2016, 70% of the youth aligned themselves with liberalistic views whereas only 44% of Baby Boomers and 48% of Generation Xers have liberal ideologies. Topics such as sexual assault, mental illness, and sexuality were once confined to the walls of the bedroom, being thought of as blasphemous to mention aloud. Its concerns didn't reach the writers' room of a TV show or the editorial conference room of a newspaper. Before the mid-2000s, words affiliated with these topics hadn't entered mainstream media or simply didn't exist.

However, in the recent decade, the woke generations have shed light on these human rights issues, with campaigns such as #MeToo and All Lives Matter, resulting in a golden age of resistance to societal norms. Not only are rallies and marches being used to express the need to normalize these issues, but to also prove to older generations, who look at us as unable to handle “adult” issues, that we aren’t naïve.

I think the real problem is that the adults are unable to recognize that us young people have grown up experiencing social problems ignited by the older generations. They forget that over the past decade, median housing costs have risen from 200,000 to $500,000 in Perth alone due to the Great Recession, which they inadvertently caused. We’ve had to grow up quickly and fight the battles they left behind, as they tell us that these 'battles' will help us in the 'real world'.

My mom always likes to tell me, 'when I was your age, I was already working four jobs to support my entire family and never had any fun'. It served as a “teaching moment”, which was really her way of telling me that she does in fact have more knowledge. I’m sure that when we were growing up, we wanted to experiment with things for ourselves and forge our own path, telling our parents things like: “leave me alone” and “you don’t understand me”.

This difference in opinion is what creates the generation gap that exists in all families and society. It won’t be simple to ease the generation gap, but here is where we should begin: Young people should be representing young people, and so we should be given more positions in the government and platforms, like this, to voice our problems.

To ease the economic disconnect, we need the government to create vocational skills training programs for youth to garner the skills necessary to match experienced competitors in the labor force. We also need to redistribute taxes across generations as well as create a social security program that targets youth.

The generation gap will always exist - as long as technology is evolving, so will the gap. The hate that we show to other generations, especially younger ones, is unnecessary and kind of hypocritical. We didn't grow up the way our parents grew up. Our parents didn't grow up the way their parents grew up, and the kids of today aren't going to grow up the way we did.