Hey, Vsauce.
Michael here. Skeletons are scary and spooky, but you know what else is?
Teenagers.
Their attitude, the way they dress and the music they listen to. Can you even call
it music? Pff, kids these days. But what are kids these days? What's with all the concern and what's a generation?
Why do we think that coevals, groups of people of roughly the same age, act so
much alike? The sheer number of articles and papers and internet posts published
daily comparing then and now, both sincerely and ironically, is astonishing.
We can't seem to get enough about kids these days and just how different and
awesome it was to be a kid back in the good old days.
Generational labels make human history look ordered and discreet, instead of scary
and messy. They also have a delightfully suspicious tendency to flatter
those using them. George Orwell put it well. "Every generation imagines itself to be
more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes
after it." There's a name for this sentiment.
Juvenoia. Sociologist David Finkelhor coined the term. It means "an exaggerated
fear about the things that influence kids these days." Juvenoia is a
concerned disappointment that because of iPhones or the Internet or TV or rock
music or those pesky horseless carriages the world just isn't fit for
kids like it used to be. Generational conflict really has been going on for
that long. After all, "honor thy [your] father and thy [your] mother" was an ancient commandant
for a reason.
In the 4th century BC, Aristotle remarked that youths mistakes are due to
excess and vehemence, they think they know everything. Here's an engraving from
1627 admonishing the 'now,' compared to the ways of 'old.' In the early 1900's
Romain Rolland complained that the new generation of young people were,
quote, "passionately in love with pleasure and violent games, easily duped." New
people and the direction society is headed in
has always been seen with some disapproval. Xkcd famously collected a
brief history of juicy examples. In 1871, the Sunday Magazine published a line
that may as well have been written today about texting. "Now we fire off a
multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good
talk over a real sheet of paper." And the Journal of Education in 1907 lamented
that at a modern family gathering, silent around the fire,
each individual has his head buried in his favorite magazine. The point is there's
nothing new under the Sun. Not even the Sun, in fact. The Sun is believed to be a
third generation star. This constant cycle of generation clashing can
sometimes sound like a broken record. Are these commentaries really providing
insight
into the minds of future leaders or prematurely judging a coeval based on
how it acts as teens? Despite the incessant concerns otherwise, the
proverbial 'kids these days' seem to be better off than ever before.
Drug use is down, exercising is up,
math and writing proficiency have increased, crimes committed by young
people have decreased, hate comments reported by children have dropped, the
number of 9th to 12th graders who have been in fights has dropped, and the
number of teens who fear attacks at school has dropped. But still, juvenoia
persists.
But why?
Well, it kinda makes sense. I mean, children are the future of a species, so
it's reasonable to assume that nature would select for features in a species
that cause adult members to prefer the way they were raised and distrust
anything different. After all, parents, by definition, were a reproductive success
for the species. They made new members. So whatever choices and influences brought
them to that point must have been good enough. Any deviation from that could be
a problem. So worrying about the young may have been naturally selected, just like
eyes and fingers and breathing air and pooping. But here's the thing.
Our brains don't accurately remember the past or apply memories fairly or
rationally. That kind of thinking has a plethora of interesting causes. First, at
a social level, concerns for and about the youth are often exaggerated, because
exaggerating is effective. You'll generate greater mobilization around the
cause if you can convince people that we're on the cusp of a crisis here, folks.
Also, our increasingly connected world means more potential contacts with
people outside the family, the tribe, the neighborhood. Even though juvenile
problems often involve people the juvenile already knows, stranger danger
is a more powerful fear. "My kids have good friends, who are good influences, so
why should I worry?" can be replaced today with "even so, people you don't know are
threats, so worry." Other reasons for juvenoia are personal and often it's not so
much the world that's changed, it's you. Are drivers today really worse than they
were when you were young or do you simply have new responsibilities and
experience that makes you more aware of dangers that were always there? We
remember the past abstractly. There just isn't enough room in our brains or a vital
need for complete voracity when recalling things. Thus, we are more likely to
remember the general way we felt in the past, without the petty annoyances, more
salient still, for the present. Secondly,
loss aversion and the endowment effect. People perceive a loss as greater than an equal
gain. In one famous study, when asked how much they would pay for a coffee mug,
people gave prices that were significantly lower than what people
given the mug first said they'd be willing to sell it for.
This may play a role in how we value what we already have - our memories and
favorites - over what's new.
There's even neuroscience backing up why new stuff seems so bad to you.
It's called the reminiscence bump. Storage of autobiographical memories,
memories about yourself,
increases during times of change.
Incidentally, this is why you remember exciting things as lasting longer than
they really did, but rarely remember times of boredom in detail. I've
discussed before the ways in which this causes us to feel like time slowed down
during particularly quick but significant events. Anyway,
adolescence and early adulthood, particularly ages 10 to 30, are major
times of change. Many important things happened during those years that define
your identity. So, it's no surprise that along with things that have happened
recently,
memories from this bump period are greater in number and more emotional. The
books and songs and movies and slang words and behaviour you loved and used
during this time
correlates quite well with what you will, when you're older, remember the most
fondly.
As we can see, juvenoia is natural. In fact, a healthy dose of it is
important. There are plenty of things we should be fired up about improving.
What's sometimes lost though, when explaining that juvenoia occurs in every
generation is the fact that the nature of juvenoia hasn't always been the same.
The generation gap of antiquity, or of the 1300's, wasn't the same as it is today.
The more rapid speed of change may be one reason, but another is the appearance
of a new type of creature around the turn of the last century - the teenager.
The word teenager wasn't even used as a stage of life until 1922. John Savage's
'Teenage' is a fantastic read on how human society sort of accidentally invented
the teenager. You see, as factories generated new unskilled jobs,
young people could acquire something neat - their own money. Suddenly, marketers
realized that products could be made for the youth. They were no longer stuck with
what their parents decided on. Also, the surge in immigration at the time
highlighted for a new generation the view that identity wasn't something you're
stuck with. It's fluid, personal,
decided. Furthermore, calls for compulsory education around that time,
that is, making it the law that children go to school,
further solidified the segmented identity of children by forcing them out
of the world at large and into common places surrounded mainly by their coevals.
In that environment they could develop behaviors and opinions and
culture shared just with themselves.
Compulsory schooling also increased literacy in adolescence, which gave them
all the more power to hear stories written for them and about them in books
they could buy with their own money.
Kids these days suddenly weren't just young humans waiting for life experience, they
were separate beings with their own culture and voice. A fact that caused
juvenoia to change from the edible skirmishes of the past into the
full-fledged panics we know and love today. This brings us to a bigger
question, though.
Sure, you may say, that makes sense, but even someone who didn't grow up in this
society could plainly see that in the old days
culture wasn't as dumbed down as it is today.
Things used to be made by the elites, for the elites. Now they're made for the
masses who demand sensational atavistic pablum instead of rational critical
thought, like scholars, and, well, you know, me. Those examples sure are convincing but
the plural of anecdote isn't data. You can pick different examples and argue
the opposite point. Mozart wrote poems about farts. There is amazing work and there
is simple work made at all times in history. In fact, as Steven Johnson points
out in "Everything Bad is Good for You," if anything, when given the chance to buy or
participate as they choose, the tendency we find in humans is a preference for
more cognitive demands, for smarter entertainment. What it takes to keep up
with the increasing density and intricacies of narratives in media these
days
is impressive. To be fair, of course, beneath the stimulating organization
there is no substance anymore, right?
I mean, here's what one noted critic said of today's easy brainless mass culture. "We
do not turn over the pages in search of thought, delicate psychological
observation, grace of style, charm of composition, but we enjoy them like
children at play
laughing and crying at the images before us." Wait, sorry, that's something literary
critic G. H. Lewes wrote about Dickens in 1872. The point is, taste is subjective.
Art to 1 percent is garbage to another. You may dislike the language or violence or
morals depicted on TV today, but there's no denying the fact that entertainment,
including popular entertainment, is requiring more and more thinking on the
viewers' part than ever before. Johnson created this visual comparing narrative
threads in episodes of different TV shows over time, and this shouldn't be
surprising. Our brains crave stimulation. A lump that sits and stares into space isn't
naturally selected form in the same way as a brain that learns and synthesizes
and organizes. Now that entertainment can be made for niche audiences and watched
and re-watched on demand and discussed ad nauseam online that natural desire can
be sated by media. Johnson goes so far as to say that reruns have made us
smarter. They've enabled entertainment to be made that rewards being watched and
thought about over and over again. The names and stories and relationships and
dramas people today have to keep straight in their heads to be
functioning consumers of modern media are impressive by historical standards
and affect more of us than ever before. Johnson points out that in his time
Dickens was only read by 0.25% of his country's population, while today
innovative shows like 'The West Wing' or 'The Simpsons'
easily reach twenty times that proportion. Okay, but how about this?
Where are the Mozart's and Dostoyevsky's of today?
Well, they're probably here, but the reputation of Dostoyevsky is built by time,
something the judgments of contemporary artists haven't had enough of yet.
Finally, when it comes to judging works that merely tease the base emotions
let's not forget the quote from
Unamuno I've discussed before. "More often have I seen a cat reason than laugh or weep."
Cats and humans are curious and can problem solve, but only humans can laugh
at fart videos. So, what really ought we be treasuring? There's a problem here, though. Although
writers like Johnson have been able to put forth convincing arguments that
movies and TV have been serving more and more cognitive complexity, they've failed
to find the same evidence for pop music. Nearly all studies on the subject have
found that, unlike other forms of popular media, pop music has, in fact, become, since
the 1950's, less complex in its structure and more homogeneous.
Mathematically speaking, more pop songs today sound alike
than they used to. What's up with that, music?
Well, here's the thing. Pop music is just one type of music being made today and
it's role, what its its listeners want from it and who they are
are much more specific than the wider spectrum of genres a movie theater or
Netflix caters. A pop song needs to provoke quick mood, stick into your head
and fit anticipation and pay off into a fairly regular amount of time. There are
only so many ways to do that. So, perhaps, pop music producers have simply gotten
better at scratching the specific itch they're challenged to scratch.
I mean, imagine criticizing doctors for using penicillin nowadays.
Uh, back in the good old days treatment was innovative.
There were leeches and onion plasters, amputation and good luck charms. Now it's all just
penicillin, penicillin, penicillin. It's all the same. Criticizing popular music
for all sounding the same ignores the sameness of every pop song's goal. But what
about generations? What are they exactly? I mean, humans don't have babies all at
once every twenty years or so. New people just keep showing up, about four more
every second.
But that said, there are biological changes humans go through as they grow
and age, roughly creating a few life stages. Alright? Now, this list of
generations goes all the way back to the mid 1400's. It applies mainly to the
western world, especially the US, and is the work of William Strauss and Neil
Howe, whose landmark 1991 book "Generations," contains one of the most
influential and ambitious generation theories of our time. These are the guys
who coined term 'millennial,' by the way. They set forth and have continued to
expand a theory that society follows a predictable cycle of moves, each lasting
about 20 years - about how long it takes for everyone in a life stage to move on
to the next.
The social mood and the common life stage a coeval experiences it during are
what distinguishes one generation from the next. Strauss and Howe call each
social mood
a turning. A turning describes the way society will act, by either establishing,
accepting, challenging or fracturing in lieu of established customs. To
illustrate the cycle, let's start just after the American Civil War, in the
so-called Gilded Age. Here we find American society in the first turning,
what they call a "high." This is a twenty year period when society is largely in
agreement about the direction it wants to go in, because it recently
coalesced in the face of a crisis. Institutions are strong and thus young
adults are cautious and conformist.
But then people tire of social discipline and call for reform, a period
of awakening occurs. The majority consensus is attacked in the name of
greater and broader individual autonomy. The distrust in institutions left in the
wake of an awakening leads to the next turning, an unraveling, where in place of
broad cultural identity, moral crusades polarize society over what should come
next.
Finally, a renewed interest in consensus that responds to crisis by banding
together occurs. Society's mood shifts to a belief that coalescing and building
together are the answer. The cycle then starts again with a high - the majority
agrees on society's directions and institutions strengthened during the
crisis until people tire of this majority structure and an awakening leaves
those institutions week and armed with less public consensus. This is
followed by an unraveling, where individuals polarize over moral issues
and the youth, raised in the previous two atomizing moods,
feel alienated. Which brings us to, well, today.
Strauss-Haus theory, if true, tells us that this will be an era where society
will band together and build institutions from the ground up in the
face of crisis. It's not clear what that crisis will be, but if their theory has
predictive power, the climax of that crisis will occur in 2025. The whole
theory is a great way to learn about you as history.
Al Gore once even gave a copy of Generations to every member of Congress.
But it is unscientific and unfalsifiable. You can find a pattern in anything if you pick and
choose the right examples.
As for the usefulness of its generalizations, well, Philip Bump points out that
the US Census Bureau only recognizes one official distinguishable generation.
Baby boomers. Do you think you are a Generation X, a millennial, Generation Z?
Well, that's fine, he says, you call yourself whatever you want. It's all made up. The
baby boomers are a cohort, significant in that no matter where they were born
or who they are,
their size alone determines a lot about their path. But other population segments,
based solely on birth year, just don't mean much. A more useful way to divide them
into cohorts might focus on some other less age-related trade that correlates
better with behavior.
Wealth, region, sexuality, etc.
Regardless of its accuracy there's one thing generational theory and its
critics do at least agree on. People change as they age and the larger
society surrounding people influences the degree to which generations feel
conflict. So, generational thinking is a kind of guidance.
It's one that helps take us on a journey, manned by an ever changing and changing
crew. Some crews are different than others, for sure, and you need worry and
concern to stay safe. But at the end of the day, it's still the same boat and the
same waters. Generations and juvenoia are like what Picasso said about art -
they are lies that tell the truth.
And as always,
thanks for watching.
Here's a bonus. While doing research I found a website that will allow you to find what word was
first used the year you were born. It's pretty cool. It's also a DONG. That's right,
something you can do online now, guys. In fact, here's some DONG news for you.
The shows that you know and love on the Vsauce network now have their
own home, where they can flourish and be who they want to be. The channel's name is
DONG. Go over there right now to check it out, we've got some cool things from the
Internet. That's what DONG's all about. It's an Internet Safari. It's neat things that
we all find as we research for these episodes. So I'll see you over there on DONG.
And thanks for watching.