By Muhammod Abu Sayed
Bridging Generational Divides
We’ve all heard about Gen Z lamenting Boomer sayings. We’ve noticed the subtle, yet important differences between Millennials and Xennials. Sure, Generation X is getting a little long in the tooth, but they still have a lot to give. We revere The Greatest Generation for their sacrifices in WWII – and rightly so, I might add. And then there’s Gen Alpha, the apple of everyone’s eye – for now.
Being a Millennial, I’ve defended myself against my fair share of negative comments. Millennials are lazy. Millennials don’t want to work. Millennials want to brunch it up instead of knuckling down and getting on the property ladder. I’m guilty of rolling my eyes at a Boomer or two in my day, unable to understand their opinions on certain subjects. Many of the people I look up to are Generation X – a little younger than my Baby Boomer parents but with a marked difference in their childhoods and upbringings. And now Millennials, and the newly coined Xennials, are finally starting to prove themselves in the workplace. It turns out we’re not all feckless, hapless fools with no ambition or work ethic.
However, I fear that shift is only because we’ve found a new generation to pick on. Gen Z are being ridiculed for the trend of quiet quitting, their obsession with social media apps, and of course, their slang. How dare they pervert our beautiful language with their new slang terms, their London Multicultural English sprinkled with Patois and Creole and (gasp) bad grammar. There is a saying in French which loosely translates to “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Perhaps it’s just Gen Z’s turn under the microscope before we all just accept their differences, recognise their unique skills and then turn our wrath on Gen Alpha. How long before that darling 7-year-old with pigtails becomes everything that’s wrong with the workforce today?
I say we collectively break this cycle of dumping on the second-to-last generation. It is a story as old as the hills and is a practice which has never served any use. An excerpt from The Gloucester Citizen in 1936 reads: “The Chairman alluding to the problem of young people and their English said his experience was that many did not seem able to express or convey to other people what they meant. They could not put their meaning into words, and found the same difficulty when it a came to writing.” The Washington Post published a piece in 1993 called The Boring Twenties, criticising the coming-of-age late Generation X and early Xennials, saying “What really distinguishes this generation from those before it is that it’s the first generation in American history to live so well and complain so bitterly about it.” Surely, it would be hard to envision saying this about Generation X now! No one has ever been immune from this scorn, either. Even Aristotle was a vocal critic of younger generations. He’s been quoted as saying “They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it”.
Each generation has its own unique perspective and positives. You could say “We were all young once”, but when I was young in the ‘80s and ‘90s, that was a different experience to someone who was young in the ‘60s, or the 2010s. We cannot expect younger generations to grow the same way we did when they are growing up in a different world.
So, how does this apply to the working environment? With so much talk about inclusion, acceptance and tolerance, I can’t help but notice that many of us only seem to be able to uphold these golden standards for the characteristics that are prescribed to us. Shouldn’t be it the norm, across the board? We shouldn’t care if Gen Z phrases something in a way we wouldn’t. Instead, we should focus on the basis of their message and get on with the real work that needs to be done. Let’s make some change and consign this generational intolerance to the past, for the sake of Gen Alpha and whichever generations come after them.
