Top five challenges facing my generation
Every generation has its own issues: mine starts with climate change - story 93
I am a lumper. Not a splitter.
Historians divide into tribes. One set has those who slice things finely — the “splitters” — and those who prefer the broad sweep. I’m firmly in the latter camp. I see systems first: connections, feedback loops, slow-moving tectonic shifts. It’s how I make sense of the world. And why this blog exists.
I need to explain why this is relevant.
This blog is personal. I am looking for answers to my question about living during climate change. I need the help of others to do that. So it is only fair she or he understands not just my opinions on kerbs, trees and commerce but also my values, how I think things.
In my last role, I often gave keynotes events to contextualise the issues and opportunities my team faced. Over time, I found myself returning to the same set of themes — the shared headwinds facing my generation. I would list them, reshuffle, test them against others’ reactions. Eventually, the list settled. Five challenges that define the experience of being a ‘late Boomer’.
Climate change
Climate was always the first item on that list.
That realisation became part of this blog’s origin story. The more I talked with colleagues, friends and visitors, the more I came to realise that every generation is confronted by a particular mix of historical forces. These are ours:
Climate change
Political disconnect
Internet time
Me v we
China’s return
These aren’t just talking points. Each one demands that we respond: by preventing, reducing, mitigating or adapting to their impact.
Political disconnect
Climate change is the only existential threat on this list to human beings somewhere on the planet, including in all probability (literally) London. Fixing the others wont matter is the planet is roiling from atmospheric change.
But fixing anything requires a functioning political system. That’s where the second challenge bites. Our political culture is in flux in the UK. There’s widespread distrust of politicians. Professor Sir John Curtice, a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) one the country's most trusted political analysts, warned in a a new report:
The underpinnings of the (political) system have disappeared, have been eroded. So class no longer equals vote. We now have multidimensional politics.
Trust in government, trust in politicians, is at an all-time low.
Brexit speeded up a process which is that our politics are no longer simply about left versus right.
We now have a second dimension, which has always been there to a degree but which now matters far, far more.
And that is basically culture wars, it's social liberals versus conservatives, it's libertarians versus authoritarians.
There is little political consensus on any issue, let alone climate change.
Internet time
And then come three conditions that make such a correction more difficult.
The first is internet time. The internet has changed our sense of time. There seems to be less of it. Things happen more quickly than a human brain can comprehend. The best ideas can get swept away by the next notification. So the defining technology of my lifetime - I spent twenty years of my career developing digital services and it still dominates my life - has at least one quality which is a direct challenge to me as a person.
Me v we
The second is the rise of the individual. This may have started during the Enlightenment. It gathered momentum in my lifetime. As with the internet, there is so much that is good about this change. But there is a dark side too. Now more than everf, an individual’s entitlement tends to overwhelm his or her responsibility to the others. Me not we.
China
After 600 years of wilful absence, China is back as a global player. China withdrew from the world in the 1360s. There was a moment of forced re-opening in 1840s. But the modern re-opening started in 1978. Since then the country has been on tear. I was born in the American century and could die in the Chinese one that succeeds it. Again, a mixed blessing. One that needs to be reckoned with.
I’ll write more about these challenges in the coming weeks. You can, for now, delve into how these challenges informed the blog’s creation.