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For me, there are some glaringly obvious reasons why there are differences in both the amount of pride and the perceptions of past/present and future UK prospects between the young and old.
Firstly, there is the universal effects of living, being young and growing older:
a) young people have little true experience of the comparative pits falls and advantages they face in comparison to both to what came before and also relative to the more established adults with families, mortgages and careers at present.
b) young people are generally looking to make their mark on the world, have all the energy and none of the responsibilities that makes it seem possible.
c) old people are young people who remember what it was like when they were full of energy and none of the responsibilities, but have had 40 years of jobs, kids, mortgages and other bloody people draining the life out of them.(Slightly tongue in cheek, but still pretty true  )
Secondly, time and place:
The amount of change in pace of life, technology, information and society has been historically accelerating since time began.
Each successive generation by and large experiences change through out their lives at slightly increasing rates relative to the previous ones.
Essentially, ideas, inventions and the social changes they drive have iterativaly increased the environment that helps generate new ideas and inventions, ever increasing the ability to be more efficient and effective at coming up with further ideas.
That started off very slowly and took many generations to have any noticeble effects.
However, at some point the rate of change started fall within the life span of the average human, meaning that there was a potential for society and how we view the world to change within a persons lifetime.
Jump forwards to the industrial revolution and the pace of change was begining to reach a point where you could expect dramatic changes within your lifetime rather than not.
After world war II and we were first able to build a working transistor (invented in the 1920's but not possible to actually make until the 1950's).
That ushering in an changed in the rate of progress that has led to not just changes in a life time, but changes between generations.
People alive today have and will experience at least several dramatic changes in the world, how we view it and our societies as well as our selves and our place within them.
There are of course other factors that have effected the rate of change, including events and ideas that have caused the rates of change to temporarily increase, decrease or even jump backwards such as world wars, plagues, ideologies and natural disasters.
However, they are merely isolated blips in the relatively smooth exponential rate of change.
Young people look forwards to the future because for them, change hasn't yet thrown them a curve ball to confuse and destabelise their understanding of the world - and they want to be part of changes to leave their mark.
Old people have experienced changes for the better or worse, but have nostalgia for the time when everything was simple, made sense and was exciting as a youth.
Some changes are good, some bad and some neutral, but it is more a case of our ability as a species and as individuals, to cope with changes that effects our perceptions than the actual benefits of the change itself. |
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Author: Cliff
26-11-2019 02:02:04
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