Every period claims to be complete. We have seen our elders praising their time, and they are mostly used to criticizing the present time by comparing these two different periods. Such criticism has different targets, including social, moral, and political values. This criticism is mostly considered a matter of fun for the present generation. Like our elders, most probably our parents, uncles, and aunts used to say, in our time, we used to post letters for communication, and there was no concept of digital communication. When we hear such things, we take all these as amusement, as common sense doesn’t allow us to prioritize letter posting over immediate communication channels.
If we look into history, such changes are not sudden, they took years to get their place in our society. Continuing the example of letter posting. The tradition of letter posting, first there were changes in the mode of letter posting. First, letters were moved via channels like a postman taking the posts via carts, then it changed to cycles, cycles changed to motorcycles, followed by motorcars, trains, and so on. So, there were initial changes in the channels used by different communication systems. Mobile phones, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook have evolved very late. After changing the modes, slow progress was made to evolve the use of mobile phones. First, there were telecoms with limited access, which means accessible only to a specific class. Later, they were made accessible to most people, and the same process continued till the phone became a daily need of our society.
We overlook this process, and as a result, our elders used to blame only the new generation for such evolution. However, this integration took a year to become a part of our lives, and somehow reality is that our elders were either intentionally or unintentionally unable to stop such integration. The sense of dislike for modernized society may be a sense of regret.
Rest, this is true when our elders claim their generation has better moral values than the present generation. When we analyze the present situation and compare it with our past one. We may see different reasons, but one of the most important reasons is the prevailing sense of independence. Independence was not common in our previous generations. This doesn’t mean that independence is a thing we must not adopt but we need to acknowledge the boundaries. Like, if a young boy slaps an elder lady just for a few disagreements and used to call it independence, this is wrong. This clarifies the fact that independence is somehow outreached and we have adopted the definition of independence that may be linked with extremism.
When we compare the social values, we can favor the previous generation for its effective social values. We presently are limited to our lives, our own matters, and our own profits or losses. The most common thing we see different people saying, digital media, mobiles, etc may be the reason for unawareness or poor social interaction. This may be true to some extent, but not the sole cause of the downfall of social values.
The other reason for poor social interaction may be the improper division in our minds. The roots of colonialism are still somewhere that are inherited from our ancestors. Here is a pretty important question: why the colonialism skip our parents’ generation and evolve during our generation? There might be different reasons, but I think enough knowledge may be the reason. Our parents hardly know what colonialism was, but as we are comparatively progressed age concerning education. It’s our nature, what we read and like, we use to implement. So, such things as considering oneself not from the class of a neighbor suffering from a deadly disease limit us to staying away and being limited. This leads to poor social values.
The political values of the present generation are the only values that we can claim are better than our previous ones. The past generations were mostly limited to thoughts of livelihood earnings. This might be because they did not have suitable access to political happenings. Still today, we see different populations generally focusing on livelihood earnings with no interest in politics. Political literacy is a thing that is not considered a priority. We can say that in societies where it is not difficult to earn a livelihood, political literacy is considered important.
So, the present generation not only struggles to find their space within the present society, but they also have to fight the thinking philosophy, the generation gap, and the priorities of their elders.
Till the next discussion, stay tuned. If you have any question, please reach out to us via the “Contact Us” form.
