Twelve Things That Will Be Obsolete in 10 Years

As life expectancies rise and generational lifestyles merge, the distinction between young and old is beginning to blur.

Adolescence – a word that raises images of wild, insubordinate youths undergoing a traumatic period of change in their lives – is something one may think is part and parcel of being human. Adolescence certainly is a difficult period, as it is experienced by pubescent individuals in modern-day cultures. But has it always been that way? Or, more precisely, is adolescence a product of Mother Nature or of historical forces?

Ancient stories about wanton or egoistic youths such as the Prodigal Son and Narcissus abound, portraying young people as separate from adults and as “works in progress” towards maturity. The “gap” between young and old might thus seem to be hardwired into the human brain. But is this really so?

In the past, children were expected to “come of age” when puberty arrived. The historical facts show, actually, that adolescence was a social experiment of the industrialist 19th century, when the pubescent period came to be viewed as a phase of late childhood development for various social reasons that need not interest us here. There are no records, documents, or narratives about adolescents (as we know them today) before that era – none! Even today, in societies where poverty or bellicose conflicts are the rule, adolescent development and generation gaps are meaningless concepts.

The term “generation gap” can be traced, seemingly, to Ernest Hemingway, who wrote on the title page of his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises that fellow writer Gertrude Stein had called the circle of writers to which she belonged in post-First World War America a “lost generation.” In the early 1950s, young writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were labeled with the term “beat generation,” an epithet coined by Kerouac himself. The concept of a generation gap entered the common lexicon shortly thereafter, becoming part of groupthink in America. It referred to differences in lifestyle, appearance, esthetic tastes, language, and overall worldview.

When rock ’n’ roll came onto the scene in the mid 1950s as the artistic voice of generational difference, the gap became imprinted into our social DNA. By the counterculture era in the mid 1960s, the gap became wider and wider, as hippie youths set themselves apart from adult society by calling it the “establishment.”

But today, things have changed radically. The endless cycle of separate youth cultures and subcultures, with their own music, dress, and outlook, seems to have come full circle. Young and old today listen to the same kinds of music, share the same political and philosophical values, and even talk to each other routinely. Making a clear-cut distinction between young and old, which has been a characteristic of human societies from the very beginning, is becoming increasingly meaningless as life expectancies increase and generational lifestyles merge.

The gap may also be disappearing because previous eras of youth rebellion have cumulatively changed the world, projecting everyone onto the same socio-political page, so to speak. The election of a black president in 2008 would not have been possible without the rebellion of the past. The dividing line between young and old is becoming a thin one indeed. It may, in fact, have already disappeared.