I recently watched a series of interviews of people who lived through the sixties, done in the 90s, reflecting on who they were and what they believed and did, and how things actually turned out and how they had changed thirty years later. Suffice to say, things turned out very differently than they expected. They thought everything that they didn’t like was the fault of their parents’ generation, and they would do things radically better and differently and be radically better and differently because they had that secret knowledge and perspective and wisdom and creativity that no generation had ever had before. They were what the world had been waiting for, what it had all been leading up to.

I think the lesson you can take from such a look back is that everyone always thinks that they’re right, in every generation, by default. And every succeeding generation lives with the consequences of being handed the world that that generation created. And often it’s not at all clear what the consequences of their unique contributions and decisions will be, in large part because the people who are making the choices and changes are taking for granted so much about their world that was really contingent on the people who came before them.

They think they know what the world is, and they think they know what they want it to be. But it’s not clear that they understand either, because they don’t understand their parents or themselves enough to seperate the world from what was contingent and variable in the behavior of each generation.

It’s even harder to judge whether you’re making things better or worse, because how we judge those outcomes is so dependent on our particular aims and values, which aren’t stable but vary from generation to generation, and because it’s so dependent on how we see ourselves in relation to our parents and their generation. And vice versa.

I doubt many of these people could have foreseen where we would be today. And people today have even less idea where we will be tomorrow. We live inside tacit assumptions about the world we inherited and tacit assumptions about the world we think we will pass on. And we’re all a bit embarrassed adults by the things we said and did and thought when we were young. Time puts us all in our places, eventually. And it’s only in our middle or old age that we finally start looking back and actually trying to understand the generations before us, so we can understand the world they gave us and how they gave it to us, and how we come to better understand ourselves and the role we are playing. As youth, we think we already know everything about those subjects, and are always willing to talk about them at length. But in our older years, with the benefit of perspective, we close our mouths and finally start listening and thinking.