It’s a story as old as time: a generation is born; it steps up to push the previous one off the stage. The older generation may resist – the god Saturn did it by eating his children, Millennials do it by trashing Gen Z for being “lazy” or “no fun” – but the script never seems to change. The oldies fade into the wings, and Generation Now steps into the limelight.
But must life be so winner-take-all? Maybe the problem is the way we imagine generations.
As anthropologist Tim Ingold notes in his 2023 book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, we like to picture generations as geological strata: neat layers laid down one after another, each rising only by burying what came before. It’s orderly, dramatic – and deeply unhelpful. This geology metaphor encourages every cohort to think of itself as a completely fresh start – the Millennial Age, the Zoomer Age – to treat the past as something to escape rather than something to work with. In that worldview, every cohort becomes “Generation Now” by necessity, not because the labels mean anything, but because each group feels obliged to reinvent the world from scratch.
According to Ingold, however, there’s another way we could choose to see it.
Instead of geological strata, imagine rope. A rope is made of individual plant fibres twisted together into strands. As one fibre comes to an end, another must be fed in so the strand can continue. One strand is not enough – it takes multiple strands. As strands twist around one another, the rope gains strength from their tension and overlap. Nothing is buried or finished, but everything is carried forward.
Once, we pictured time more like that. More like a queue, with our ancestors and elders not behind us, but in front. Everyone facing forward, moving through life in the same direction. You learned by watching those ahead of you, and someone younger would eventually learn by watching you.
But in recent generations, we’ve spun the formation around. We face the future with our backs to the past, convinced that progress requires rupture. The future becomes a problem each generation must solve alone, because the people who might once have been ahead of us are now imagined as trailing behind. No wonder each new generation seems so anxious.
Modern life doesn’t make things easy. Society segregates us by age: children spend their days with children at school, adults with adults in offices and factories, and older people with older people. Families live far apart, we move for work, communities churn. The strands still exist, they just don’t seem to intertwine nearly as much as they used to.
But maybe it’s just a question of seeing – and saying. What if instead of talking about generational conflict, we talked of generational continuity? Perhaps every generation is Generation Now. Not because we’re all locked in mortal combat, but because, just like our ancestors, we’re all still pulling through life together – as part of the same rope.