the new generation essay

What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

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Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future . It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.

MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count

It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people

Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast : much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.

While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel . Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion , it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.

MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be.

Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more . Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more: Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better

Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain ?

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people . Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?

MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.

For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.

Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.

The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book.

That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.

MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future.

The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation , safe development of artificial intelligence , reducing risks from nuclear war , and other threats to humanity.

Read more: Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations

Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).

MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions.

For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?

The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective.

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours , which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism .

Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.

• Climate change
• Generations
• Future generations
• Effective altruism
• longtermism

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How teens today are different from past generations, a psychologist mines big data on teens and finds many ways this generation—the “igens"—is different from boomers, gen xers, and millennials..

Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. Today’s teenagers are no different—and they’re the first generation whose lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media.

In her new book, psychologist Jean Twenge uses large-scale surveys to draw a detailed portrait of ten qualities that make today’s teens unique and the cultural forces shaping them. Her findings are by turn alarming, informative, surprising, and insightful, making the book— iGen:Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us —an important read for anyone interested in teens’ lives.

Who are the iGens?

Twenge names the generation born between 1995 and 2012 “iGens” for their ubiquitous use of the iPhone, their valuing of individualism, their economic context of income inequality, their inclusiveness, and more.

She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the 1960s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions (and some new ones) of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies. Here are just a few of her conclusions.

iGens have poorer emotional health thanks to new media. Twenge finds that new media is making teens more lonely, anxious, and depressed, and is undermining their social skills and even their sleep.

iGens “grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet,” writes Twenge. They spend five to six hours a day texting, chatting, gaming, web surfing, streaming and sharing videos, and hanging out online. While other observers have equivocated about the impact, Twenge is clear: More than two hours a day raises the risk for serious mental health problems.

She draws these conclusions by showing how the national rise in teen mental health problems mirrors the market penetration of iPhones—both take an upswing around 2012. This is correlational data, but competing explanations like rising academic pressure or the Great Recession don’t seem to explain teens’ mental health issues. And experimental studies suggest that when teens give up Facebook for a period or spend time in nature without their phones, for example, they become happier.

The mental health consequences are especially acute for younger teens, she writes. This makes sense developmentally, since the onset of puberty triggers a cascade of changes in the brain that make teens more emotional and more sensitive to their social world.

Social media use, Twenge explains, means teens are spending less time with their friends in person. At the same time, online content creates unrealistic expectations (about happiness, body image, and more) and more opportunities for feeling left out—which scientists now know has similar effects as physical pain . Girls may be especially vulnerable, since they use social media more, report feeling left out more often than boys, and report twice the rate of cyberbullying as boys do.

Social media is creating an “epidemic of anguish,” Twenge says.

iGens grow up more slowly. iGens also appear more reluctant to grow up. They are more likely than previous generations to hang out with their parents, postpone sex, and decline driver’s licenses.

More on Teens

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Explore how to help teens find purpose .

Twenge floats a fascinating hypothesis to explain this—one that is well-known in social science but seldom discussed outside academia. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on their perceptions of their environment: When the environment is perceived as hostile and competitive, teens take a “fast life strategy,” growing up quickly, making larger families earlier, and focusing on survival. A “slow life strategy,” in contrast, occurs in safer environments and allows a greater investment in fewer children—more time for preschool soccer and kindergarten violin lessons.

“Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly,” says Twenge—a phenomenon she neither champions nor judges. However, employers and college administrators have complained about today’s teens’ lack of preparation for adulthood. In her popular book, How to Raise an Adult , Julie Lythcott-Haims writes that students entering college have been over-parented and as a result are timid about exploration, afraid to make mistakes, and unable to advocate for themselves.

Twenge suggests that the reality is more complicated. Today’s teens are legitimately closer to their parents than previous generations, but their life course has also been shaped by income inequality that demoralizes their hopes for the future. Compared to previous generations, iGens believe they have less control over how their lives turn out. Instead, they think that the system is already rigged against them—a dispiriting finding about a segment of the lifespan that is designed for creatively reimagining the future .

iGens exhibit more care for others. iGens, more than other generations, are respectful and inclusive of diversity of many kinds. Yet as a result, they reject offensive speech more than any earlier generation, and they are derided for their “fragility” and need for “ trigger warnings ” and “safe spaces.” (Trigger warnings are notifications that material to be covered may be distressing to some. A safe space is a zone that is absent of triggering rhetoric.)

Today’s colleges are tied in knots trying to reconcile their students’ increasing care for others with the importance of having open dialogue about difficult subjects. Dis-invitations to campus speakers are at an all-time high, more students believe the First Amendment is “outdated,” and some faculty have been fired for discussing race in their classrooms. Comedians are steering clear of college campuses, Twenge reports, afraid to offend.

The future of teen well-being

Social scientists will discuss Twenge’s data and conclusions for some time to come, and there is so much information—much of it correlational—there is bound to be a dropped stitch somewhere. For example, life history theory is a useful macro explanation for teens’ slow growth, but I wonder how income inequality or rising rates of insecure attachments among teens and their parents are contributing to this phenomenon. And Twenge claims that childhood has lengthened, but that runs counter to data showing earlier onset of puberty.

So what can we take away from Twenge’s thoughtful macro-analysis? The implicit lesson for parents is that we need more nuanced parenting. We can be close to our children and still foster self-reliance. We can allow some screen time for our teens and make sure the priority is still on in-person relationships. We can teach empathy and respect but also how to engage in hard discussions with people who disagree with us. We should not shirk from teaching skills for adulthood, or we risk raising unprepared children. And we can—and must—teach teens that marketing of new media is always to the benefit of the seller, not necessarily the buyer.

Yet it’s not all about parenting. The cross-generational analysis that Twenge offers is an important reminder that lives are shaped by historical shifts in culture, economy, and technology. Therefore, if we as a society truly care about human outcomes, we must carefully nurture the conditions in which the next generation can flourish.

We can’t market technologies that capture dopamine, hijack attention, and tether people to a screen, and then wonder why they are lonely and hurting. We can’t promote social movements that improve empathy, respect, and kindness toward others and then become frustrated that our kids are so sensitive. We can’t vote for politicians who stall upward mobility and then wonder why teens are not motivated. Society challenges teens and parents to improve; but can society take on the tough responsibility of making decisions with teens’ well-being in mind?

The good news is that iGens are less entitled, narcissistic, and over-confident than earlier generations, and they are ready to work hard. They are inclusive and concerned about social justice. And they are increasingly more diverse and less partisan, which means they may eventually insist on more cooperative, more just, and more egalitarian systems.

Social media will likely play a role in that revolution—if it doesn’t sink our kids with anxiety and depression first.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations

Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?

Millennials have brought more racial and ethnic diversity to American society. And Millennial women, like Generation X women, are more likely to participate in the nation’s workforce than prior generations.

Compared with previous generations, Millennials – those ages 22 to 37 in 2018 – are delaying or foregoing marriage and have been somewhat slower in forming their own households. They are also more likely to be living at home with their parents, and for longer stretches.

And Millennials are now the second-largest generation in the U.S. electorate (after Baby Boomers), a fact that continues to shape the country’s politics given their Democratic leanings when compared with older generations.

Those are some of the broad strokes that have emerged from Pew Research Center’s work on Millennials over the past few years. Now that the youngest Millennials are in their 20s, we have done a comprehensive update of our prior demographic work on generations. Here are the details.

Today’s young adults are much better educated than their grandparents, as the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher has steadily climbed since 1968. Among Millennials, around four-in-ten (39%) of those ages 25 to 37 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with just 15% of the Silent Generation, roughly a quarter of Baby Boomers and about three-in-ten Gen Xers (29%) when they were the same age.

Gains in educational attainment have been especially steep for young women. Among women of the Silent Generation, only 11% had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree when they were young (ages 25 to 37 in 1968). Millennial women are about four times (43%) as likely as their Silent predecessors to have completed as much education at the same age. Millennial men are also better educated than their predecessors. About one-third of Millennial men (36%) have at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly double the share of Silent Generation men (19%) when they were ages 25 to 37.

While educational attainment has steadily increased for men and women over the past five decades, the share of Millennial women with a bachelor’s degree is now higher than that of men – a reversal from the Silent Generation and Boomers. Gen X women were the first to outpace men in terms of education, with a 3-percentage-point advantage over Gen X men in 2001. Before that, late Boomer men in 1989 had a 2-point advantage over Boomer women.

And despite a reputation for job hopping, Millennial workers are just as likely to stick with their employers as Gen X workers were when they were the same age. Roughly seven-in-ten each of Millennials ages 22 to 37 in 2018 (70%) and Gen Xers the same age in 2002 (69%) reported working for their current employer at least 13 months. About three-in-ten of both groups said they’d been with their employer for at least five years.

Of course, the economy varied for each generation. While the Great Recession affected Americans broadly, it created a particularly challenging job market for Millennials entering the workforce. The unemployment rate was especially high for America’s youngest adults in the years just after the recession, a reality that would impact Millennials’ future earnings and wealth.

Income and wealth

The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. But this belies a notably large gap in earnings between Millennials who have a college education and those who don’t. Similarly, the household income trends for young adults markedly diverge by education. As far as household wealth, Millennials appear to have accumulated slightly less than older generations had at the same age.

Millennials with a bachelor’s degree or more and a full-time job had median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, roughly equal to those of college-educated Generation X workers in 2001. But for Millennials with some college or less, annual earnings were lower than their counterparts in prior generations. For example, Millennial workers with some college education reported making $36,000, lower than the $38,900 early Baby Boomer workers made at the same age in 1982. The pattern is similar for those young adults who never attended college.

Millennials in 2018 had a median household income of roughly $71,400, similar to that of Gen X young adults ($70,700) in 2001. (This analysis is in 2017 dollars and is adjusted for household size. Additionally, household income includes the earnings of the young adult, as well as the income of anyone else living in the household.)

While young adults in general do not have much accumulated wealth, Millennials have slightly less wealth than Boomers did at the same age. The median net worth of households headed by Millennials (ages 20 to 35 in 2016) was about $12,500 in 2016, compared with $20,700 for households headed by Boomers the same age in 1983. Median net worth of Gen X households at the same age was about $15,100.

This modest difference in wealth can be partly attributed to differences in debt by generation. Compared with earlier generations, more Millennials have outstanding student debt, and the amount of it they owe tends to be greater. The share of young adult households with any student debt doubled from 1998 (when Gen Xers were ages 20 to 35) to 2016 (when Millennials were that age). In addition, the median amount of debt was nearly 50% greater for Millennials with outstanding student debt ($19,000) than for Gen X debt holders when they were young ($12,800).

The rise in young adults living at home is especially prominent among those with lower education. Millennials who never attended college were twice as likely as those with a bachelor’s degree or more to live with their parents (20% vs. 10%). This gap was narrower or nonexistent in previous generations. Roughly equal shares of Silents (about 7% each) lived in their parents’ home when they were ages 25 to 37, regardless of educational attainment.

Millennials are also moving significantly less than earlier generations of young adults. About one-in-six Millennials ages 25 to 37 (16%) have moved in the past year. For previous generations at the same age, roughly a quarter had.

But it’s not all about delayed marriage. The share of adults who have never married is increasing with each successive generation. If current patterns continue, an estimated one-in-four of today’s young adults will have never married by the time they reach their mid-40s to early 50s – a record high share.

Millennial women are also waiting longer to become parents than prior generations did. In 2016, 48% of Millennial women (ages 20 to 35 at the time) were moms. When Generation X women were the same age in 2000, 57% were already mothers, similar to the share of Boomer women (58%) in 1984. Still, Millennial women now account for the vast majority of annual U.S. births, and more than 17 million Millennial women have become mothers.

Younger generations (Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z) now make up a clear majority of America’s voting-eligible population . As of November 2018, nearly six-in-ten adults eligible to vote (59%) were from one of these three generations, with Boomers and older generations making up the other 41%.

In the 2016 election, Millennials and Gen Xers cast more votes than Boomers and older generations, giving the younger generations a slight majority of total votes cast. However, higher shares of Silent/Greatest generation eligible voters (70%) and Boomers (69%) reported voting in the 2016 election compared with Gen X (63%) and Millennial (51%) eligible voters. Going forward, Millennial turnout may increase as this generation grows older.

Generational differences in political attitudes and partisan affiliation are as wide as they have been in decades. Among registered voters, 59% of Millennials affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with about half of Boomers and Gen Xers (48% each) and 43% of the Silent Generation. With this divide comes generational differences on specific issue areas , from views of racial discrimination and immigration to foreign policy and the scope of government.

Population change and the future

By 2019, Millennials are projected to number 73 million, overtaking Baby Boomers as the largest living adult generation . Although a greater number of births underlie the Baby Boom generation, Millennials will outnumber Boomers in part because immigration has been boosting their numbers.

Looking ahead at the next generation, early benchmarks show Generation Z (those ages 6 to 21 in 2018) is on track to be the nation’s most diverse and best-educated generation yet. Nearly half (48%) are racial or ethnic minorities. And while most are still in K-12 schools, the oldest Gen Zers are enrolling in college at a higher rate than even Millennials were at their age. Early indications are that their opinions on issues are similar to those of Millennials .

Of course, Gen Z is still very young and may be shaped by future unknown events. But Pew Research Center looks forward to spending the next few years studying life for this new generation as it enters adulthood.

All photos via Getty Images

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We asked young people what changes they want for the future. Here's what they said

How will Millennials and Generation Z shape an inclusive post-COVID future? Image:  Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash

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Have you read, youth recovery plan, how do millennials and generation z see their future.

Over the past year, the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community has organized dialogues and surveys on what young people see as the most pressing issues facing society, government and business.

On the Shapers’ tenth anniversary the community has published Davos Labs: Youth Recovery Plan – a series of 40 policy recommendations on 10 key issues to help policy-makers integrate the voices of the next generation.

In parallel, the Millennial Manifesto offers a modus operandi to young people as they mobilize to shape an inclusive post-COVID period.

Transparency, accountability, trust and a focus on stakeholder capitalism will be key to meeting this generation’s ambitions and expectations. We must also entrust in them the power to take the lead to create meaningful change.

Why are young people critical to the recovery?

15% of the world’s population – some 1.2 billion people – are aged between 15 and 29 . The world gets ever younger, with 10 billion more people yet to be born in this century.

This exponential growth will continue to be uneven, with concentration in more populous and less developed countries, resulting in more mouths to feed, more young people to educate and more jobs to provide.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected young people, and especially young women and girls. It has disrupted their education, their training, their jobs, their relationships and their mental health.

On last week's International Youth Day, the YMCA, together with other key youth organizations, called for this to be redressed and for young people to be given a platform , “They knew all these challenges prior to the pandemic, and then they became its pariahs: largely ignored in policy response and often blamed for the spread.”

What changes do young people want?

The youth recovery plan: 10 pillars, 1. conscious consumerism.

Current global rates of consumption require the resources of about 1.6 earths. At this rate, we risk exhausting our planet's life support systems that provide us with fresh water, nutritious food and clean air.

• Incentivize sustainable consumption and penalize production that’s not
• Corporate accountability and executive compensation to follow specific ESG targets
• Investors to work with consumer groups to transform the way big business operates
• All stakeholders to take urgent action to safeguard nature and future food production.

2. Digital access

• $2 trillion Digital Access Plan to increase global internet connectivity to over 80%
• Telecoms to provide affordable data priced at no more than 2% of monthly GNI per capita
• Sanctions against institutions that resort to internet blackouts to supress citizen freedoms
• Activists to share connectivity indicators to put digital inequity higher on the global agenda.

3. Digital literacy: Tackle misinformation

• Tech companies to be transparent about misinformation and its spread on their platforms
• Governments to implement policies to protect individual citizens against harmful content
• Media entities to appoint trusted flaggers and experts to identify misleading information
• Capacity-building programmes and education to help citizens better identify fake news.

4. Democracy with a future

• Philanthropic donors to support young progressive voices into government
• Strengthened laws against media monopolies to protect democratic freedoms
• A Global Convention for Cybersecurity to uphold the integrity of political systems
• Capacity-building and incubation programmes to ignite ambitious policy-making.

2021 can be a turning point but only if inclusive political participation is prioritized.

5. Inclusive jobs and social safety nets

The turn of the decade has given rise to the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. Nearly half of the global workforce is at risk of losing their livelihoods, with the most acutely affected being the working poor, youth, women and minorities.

• A global wealth tax on assets worth more than US$ 50 million to fight growing inequality
• Tax credits for companies and investors who spend revenue on reskilling employees
• Universities to end the exorbitant tuition fees that stifle social mobility
• Universities to reformed curricula for job acquisition in today’s labour market.

6. Mental healthcare

• Governments to guarantee universal access to mental health services
• Investors to support mental health awareness campaigns to reduce stigma
• University curricula to tackle the mental health crisis growing on campuses
• Media entities to shape positive perceptions and attitudes about mental health.

7. Net Zero: Limit global warming to 1.5°C

• Governments to invest in communities most at risk from climate change
• Financial institutions to stop bankrolling companies initiating fossil fuel exploration
• Companies to significantly reduce the GHG emissions of their operations and supply chains to help keep global heating within 1.5°C
• All stakeholders to ensure accountability for urgent green recovery plans.

8. Next generation ESG: Stakeholder capitalism

• Governments to implement fit-for-purpose policies and regulations on big tech
• Universities to ensure ESG literacy is integrated into business and tech curriculums
• Companies to integrate technology ethics into the design of their products and services
• Incubators to provide ESG upskilling to early-stage founders to deliver long-term value.

9. Equitable access to healthcare worldwide

• World leaders to safeguard equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines
• Governments to prioritize the immediate needs of healthcare workers and their families
• Companies to drive digitalization in healthcare services to improve patient care
• Increased support for community health workers to rebuild public trust in health systems.

The Global Shapers Community is a network of young people under the age of 30 who are working together to drive dialogue, action and change to address local, regional and global challenges.

The community spans more than 8,000 young people in 165 countries and territories.

Teams of Shapers form hubs in cities where they self-organize to create projects that address the needs of their community. The focus of the projects are wide-ranging, from responding to disasters and combating poverty, to fighting climate change and building inclusive communities.

Examples of projects include Water for Life, a effort by the Cartagena Hub that provides families with water filters that remove biological toxins from the water supply and combat preventable diseases in the region, and Creativity Lab from the Yerevan Hub, which features activities for children ages 7 to 9 to boost creative thinking.

Each Shaper also commits personally and professionally to take action to preserve our planet.

Join or support a hub near you .

10. Public safety

Public security policies involve rethinking the educational system, drugs policy, fighting structural racism that targets black and poor people's likings.

• Governments to end qualified immunity in law enforcement for police officers
• Increased action against gun violence, including bans on homemade firearms
• All stakeholders to take a stand to end domestic sexual and physical violence
• Criminal justice training reform to protect the safety of vulnerable communities

How will young people achieve those changes?

The millennial manifesto.

To mount the response required to usher in this new world, the Millennial Manifesto team - a component of the Davos Lab - held dialogues on what a matured form of youth activism could look like. Through a process that engaged diverse Global Shapers from every continent, some of the world's most impactful social entrepreneurs, and experienced grassroots activists, the purpose of the dialogues was to devise principles to guide young people as they advocate for a more inclusive post-COVID period.

Two critical questions guided these dialogues: What are the barriers that have hindered progress? And, what key values, principles and practices will enable us to foster long-lasting systemic impact for the next decade?

6 principles for a Millennial Manifesto emerged from this process:

1. We will create space for intergenerational dialogue

2. We will ask big questions to advance bold solutions

3. We will pursue systems change and collective action

4. We will make space for diverse lived experiences

5. We will embrace uncomfortable conversations

6. We will care for ourselves, others and our ecosystem

Youth Recovery Plan in numbers

Cities hosted dialogues, countries hosted dialogues, dialogues conducted in total, young people surveyed, cities where surveys were conducted, total reach of the dialogues, policy recommendations emerged, pillars of recovery.

As many around the world push for the creation of a more just, equitable and sustainable future we must remember that technology is one of the greatest tools for achieving these goals , but without ethical considerations at the fore... this will likely only perpetuate the very inequalities that we hope to address.

Optimism and justice

Experts say youth engagement is 'crucial'.

The red line that runs through the Youth Recovery Plan and the Millennial Manifesto – the surveys, dialogues, and recommendations – is optimism.

Abdullahi Alim, Specialist, Africa and Middle East, Global Shapers Community, and Natalie Pierce, Community Lead, Experiences and Partnerships, Foundations at the World Economic Forum believe , “Young people are fighting these crises and reimagining a better future…Behind the plan is the conviction that by giving young people a say in decision-making, solution-building and lasting change – post-pandemic recovery plans will be more effective, sustainable and inclusive, and ensure a better future for generations to come.”

And Wadia Ait Hamza , Head of the Global Shapers Community explains, “Now more than ever, the world needs young people to step up to address the many other challenges ahead of us. But hurdles remain. While the last decade saw the power of youth activism to highlight and uproot systemic problems, it also showed that young people face challenges of experience and credibility.”

He warns that it is crucial to engage young people in decision-making – but in parallel – it’s also important for young people to think differently about how they want to engage. The sweet spot will be the balance between the energy, optimism and fierce sense of justice that Millennials and Gen Z bring to the table, combined with the conviction of policy-makers to see these ideas through to realization.

Young people hold the key to creating a better future

The 'millennial manifesto' outlines principles for an inclusive future, the 'millennial manifesto' will elevate and empower youth activism, why young people must be at the heart of the covid-19 recovery, international youth day: the global challenge of unemployment, how ethical, inclusive tech can help us create a better world, how can we create a youth-led recovery 10 global shapers explain.

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The Trayvon Generation

By Elizabeth Alexander

This one was shot in his grandmother’s yard. This one was carrying a bag of Skittles. This one was playing with a toy gun in front of a gazebo. Black girl in bright bikini. Black boy holding cell phone. This one danced like a marionette as he was shot down in a Chicago intersection. The words, the names: Trayvon, Laquan, bikini, gazebo, loosies, Skittles, two seconds, I can’t breathe, traffic stop, dashboard cam, sixteen times. His dead body lay in the street in the August heat for four hours.

He was jogging, was hunted down, cornered by a pickup truck, and shot three times. One of the men who murdered him leaned over his dead body and was heard to say, “Fucking nigger.”

I can’t breathe , again. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds of a knee and full weight on his neck. “I can’t breathe” and, then, “Mama!” George Floyd cried. George Floyd cried, “Mama . . . I’m through!”

His mother had been dead for two years when George Floyd called out for her as he was being lynched. Lynching is defined as a killing committed by a mob. I call the four police officers who arrested him a mob.

The kids got shot and the grownups got shot. Which is to say, the kids watched their peers shot down and their parents’ generation get gunned down and beat down and terrorized as well. The agglomerating spectacle continues. Here are a few we know less well: Danny Ray Thomas. Johnnie Jermaine Rush. Nania Cain. Dejuan Hall. Atatiana Jefferson. Demetrius Bryan Hollins. Jacqueline Craig and her children. And then the iconic: Alton Sterling. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Walter Scott. Breonna Taylor. Philando Castile.

Sandra Bland filmed the prelude to her death. The policeman thrust a stun gun in her face and said, “I will light you up .”

I call the young people who grew up in the past twenty-five years the Trayvon Generation. They always knew these stories. These stories formed their world view. These stories helped instruct young African-Americans about their embodiment and their vulnerability. The stories were primers in fear and futility. The stories were the ground soil of their rage. These stories instructed them that anti-black hatred and violence were never far.

They watched these violations up close and on their cell phones, so many times over. They watched them in near-real time. They watched them crisscrossed and concentrated. They watched them on the school bus. They watched them under the covers at night. They watched them often outside of the presence of adults who loved them and were charged with keeping them safe in body and soul.

This is the generation of my sons, now twenty-two and twenty years old, and their friends who are also children to me, and the university students I have taught and mentored and loved. And this is also the generation of Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old Minneapolis girl who came upon George Floyd’s murder in progress while on an everyday run to the corner store on May 25th, filmed it on her phone, and posted it to her Facebook page at 1:46 A.M., with the caption “They killed him right in front of cup foods over south on 38th and Chicago!! No type of sympathy </3 </3 #POLICEBRUTALITY.” When insideMPD.com (in an article that is no longer up) wrote, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction,” Frazier posted at 3:10 A.M. , “Medical incident??? Watch outtt they killed him and the proof is clearlyyyy there!!”

Darnella Frazier, seventeen years old, witnessing a murder in close proximity, making a record that would have worldwide impact, returned the following day to the scene of the crime. She possessed the language to say, precisely, through tears, “It’s so traumatizing.”

In Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” which is set across the bleak black stretch of Ohio after the First World War, the character Hannah plaintively asks her mother, Eva Peace, “Mamma, did you ever love us?” To paraphrase Eva Peace’s reply: Love you ? Love you ? I kept you alive.

I believed I could keep my sons alive by loving them, believed in the magical powers of complete adoration and a love ethic that would permeate their lives. My love was armor when they were small. My love was armor when their father died of a heart attack when they were twelve and thirteen. “They think black men only die when they get shot,” my older son said in the aftermath. My love was armor when that same year our community’s block watch sent e-mails warning residents about “two black kids on bikes” and praising neighbors who had called the police on them. My love for my children said, Move . My love said, Follow your sons , when they ran into the dark streets of New York to join protesters after Eric Garner’s killer was acquitted. When my sons were in high school and pictures of Philando Castile were on the front page of the Times , I wanted to burn all the newspapers so they would not see the gun coming in the window, the blood on Castile’s T-shirt, the terror in his partner’s face, and the eyes of his witnessing baby girl. But I was too late, too late generationally, because they were not looking at the newspaper; they were looking at their phones, where the image was a house of mirrors straight to Hell.

My love was both rational and fantastical. Can I protect my sons from being demonized? Can I keep them from moving free? But they must be able to move as free as wind! If I listen to their fears, will I comfort them? If I share my fears, will I frighten them? Will racism and fear disable them? If we ignore it all, will it go away? Will dealing with race fill their minds like stones and block them from thinking of a million other things? Let’s be clear about what motherhood is. A being comes onto this earth and you are charged with keeping it alive. It dies if you do not tend it. It is as simple as that. No matter how intellectual and multicolored motherhood becomes as children grow older, the part that says My purpose on earth is to keep you alive has never totally dissipated. Magical thinking on all sides.

I want my children—all of them—to thrive, to be fully alive. How do we measure what that means? What does it mean for our young people to be “black alive and looking back at you,” as June Jordan puts it in her poem “Who Look at Me”? How to access the sources of strength that transcend this American nightmare of racism and racist violence? What does it mean to be a lucky mother, when so many of my sisters have had their children taken from them by this hatred? The painter Titus Kaphar’s recent Time magazine cover portrays a black mother cradling what should be her child across the middle of her body, but the child is literally cut out of the canvas and cut out of the mother, leaving a gaping wound for an unending grief that has made a sisterhood of countless black women for generations.

My sons were both a little shy outside of our home when they were growing up. They were quiet and observant, like their father, who had come to this country as a refugee from Eritrea: African observant, immigrant observant, missing nothing. I’ve watched them over the years with their friends, doing dances now outmoded with names I persist in loving—Nae Nae, Hit Dem Folks––and talking about things I didn’t teach them and reading books I haven’t read and taking positions I don’t necessarily hold, and I marvel. They are grown young men. With their friends, they talk about the pressure to succeed, to have a strong public face, to excel. They talk their big talk, they talk their hilarity, and they talk their fear. When I am with them, I truly believe the kids are all right and will save us.

But I worry about this generation of young black people and depression. I have a keen eye—what Gwendolyn Brooks called “gobbling mother-eye”—for these young people, sons and friends and students whom I love and encourage and welcome into my home, keep in touch with and check in on. How are you, how are you, how are you. How are you, baby, how are you. I am interested in the vision of television shows like “Atlanta” and “Insecure,” about which I have been asking every young person who will listen, “Don’t you think they’re about low-grade, undiagnosed depression and not black hipster ennui?” Why, in fact, did Earn drop out of Princeton? Why does Van get high before a drug test? Why does Issa keep blowing up her life? This season, “Insecure” deals directly with the question of young black people and mental-health issues: Molly is in and out of therapy, and we learn that Nathan, a.k.a. LyftBae, who was ghosting Issa, has been dealing with bipolar disorder. The work of the creative icon of their generation often brings me to the question: Why is Kendrick so sad? He has been frank about his depression and suicidal thoughts. It isn’t just the spectre of race-based violence and death that hangs over these young people. It’s that compounded with the constant display of inequity that has most recently been laid bare in the COVID -19 pandemic, with racial health disparities that are shocking even to those of us inured to our disproportionate suffering.

Black creativity emerges from long lines of innovative responses to the death and violence that plague our communities. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” Toni Morrison wrote in “ Beloved ,” and I am interested in creative emergences from that ineluctable fact.

There are so many visual artists responding to this changing same: Henry Taylor, Michael Rakowitz, Ja’Tovia Gary, Carrie Mae Weems, lauren woods, Alexandra Bell, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, Steffani Jemison, Kerry James Marshall, Titus Kaphar. To pause at one work: Dread Scott’s “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday,” which he made in the wake of the police shooting of Walter Scott, in 2015, echoes the flag reading “A man was lynched yesterday” that the N.A.A.C.P. flew outside its New York headquarters between 1920 and 1938 to mark the lynchings of black people in the United States.

I want to turn to three short films that address the Trayvon Generation with particular power: Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes” (2012); his “Never Catch Me,” with Kendrick Lamar (2014); and Lamar’s “Alright” (2015).

In “ Until the Quiet Comes ,” the director, Kahlil Joseph, moves us through black Los Angeles—Watts, to be specific. In the fiction of the video, a boy stands in an empty swimming pool, pointing his finger as a gun and shooting. The bullet ricochets off the wall of the pool and he drops as it appears to hit him. The boy lies in a wide-arced swath of his blood, a portrait in the empty pool. He is another black boy down, another body of the traumatized community.

In an eerie twilight, we move into the densely populated Nickerson Gardens, where a young man, played by the dancer Storyboard P, lies dead. Then he rises, and begins a startling dance of resurrection, perhaps coming back to life. The community seems numb, oblivious of his rebirth. That rebirth is brief; he gets into a low-rider car, that L.A. icon. The car drives off after his final death dance, taking him from this life to the other side. His death is consecrated by his performance, a ritual that the sudden dead are not afforded. The car becomes a hearse, a space of ritual transport into the next life. But the young man is still gone.

What does it mean to be able to bring together the naturalistic and the visionary, to imagine community as capable of reanimating even its most hopeless and anesthetized members? What does it mean for a presumably murdered black body to come to life in his community in a dance idiom that is uniquely part of black culture and youth culture, all of that power channelled into a lifting?

A sibling to Joseph’s work is Hiro Murai’s video for Flying Lotus’s “Never Catch Me.” It opens at a funeral for two children, a black boy and girl, who lie heartbreak-beautiful in their open caskets. Their community grieves inconsolably in the church. The scene is one of profound mourning.

And then the children open their eyes and climb out of their caskets. They dance explosively in front of the pulpit before running down the aisle and out of the church. The mourners cannot see this resurrection, for it is a fantasia. The kids dance another dance of black L.A., the force of black bodily creativity, that expressive life source born of violence and violation that have upturned the world for generations. The resurrected babies dance with a pumping force. But the community’s grief is unmitigated, because, once again, this is a dreamscape. The children spring out into the light and climb into a car—no, it is a hearse—and, smiling with the joy of mischievous escapees, drive away. Kids are not allowed to drive; kids are not allowed to die.

What does it mean for a black boy to fly, to dream of flying and transcending? To imagine his vincible body all-powerful, a body that in this society is so often consumed as a money-maker and an object of perverse desire, perceived to have superhuman and thus threatening powers? In the video for Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” directed by Colin Tilley, Lamar flies through the California city streets, above sidewalks and empty lots, alongside wire fences.

“Alright” has been the anthem of many protests against racism and police violence and unjust treatment. Lamar embodies the energy and the message of the resonant phrase “black lives matter,” which Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi catapulted into circulation when, in 2013, they founded the movement. The phrase was apt then and now. Its coinage feels both ancestral in its knowledge and prophetic in its ongoing necessity. I know now with certainty that there will never be a moment when we will not need to say it, not in my lifetime, and not in the lifetime of the Trayvon Generation.

The young black man flying in Lamar’s video is joyful and defiant, rising above the streets that might claim him, his body liberated and autonomous. At the end of the video, a police officer raises a finger to the young man in the sky and mimes pulling the trigger. The wounded young man falls, slowly—another brother down—and lands. The gun was a finger; the flying young man appears safe. He does not get up. But in the final image of this dream he opens his eyes and smiles. For a moment, he has not been killed.

Black celebration is a village practice that has brought us together in protest and ecstasy around the globe and across time. Community is a mighty life force for self-care and survival. But it does not protect against murder. Dance itself will not free us. We continue to struggle against hatred and violence. I believe that this generation is more vulnerable, and more traumatized, than the last. I think of Frederick Douglass’s words upon hearing slaves singing their sorrow songs in the fields. He laid waste to the nascent myth of the happy darky: “Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.” Our dancing is our pleasure but perhaps it is also our sorrow song.

My sons love to dance. I have raised them to young adulthood. They are beautiful. They are funny. They are strong. They are fascinating. They are kind. They are joyful in friendship and community. They are righteous and smart in their politics. They are learning. They are loving. They are mighty and alive.

I recall many sweaty summer parties with family friends where the grownups regularly acted up on the dance floor and the kids d.j.’d to see how quickly they could make their old-school parents and play-uncles and aunties holler “Aaaaayyyy! That’s my jam!” They watched us with deep amusement. But they would dance, too. One of the aunties glimpsed my sons around the corner in the next room and said, “Oh, my God, they can dance! They’ve been holding out on us, acting all shy!”

When I told a sister-friend that my older son, during his freshman year in college, was often the one controlling the aux cord, dancing and dancing and dancing, she said, “Remember, people dance when they are joyful.”

Yes, I am saying I measure my success as a mother of black boys in part by the fact that I have sons who love to dance, who dance in community, who dance till their powerful bodies sweat, who dance and laugh, who dance and shout. Who are able––in the midst of their studying and organizing, their fear, their rage, their protesting, their vulnerability, their missteps and triumphs, their knowledge that they must fight the hydra-headed monster of racism and racial violence that we were not able to cauterize––to find the joy and the power of communal self-expression.

This essay is not a celebration, nor is it an elegy.

We are no longer enslaved. Langston Hughes wrote that we must stand atop the racial mountain, “free within ourselves,” and I pray that those words have meaning for our young people. But our freedom must be seized and reasserted every day.

People dance to say, I am alive and in my body.

I am black alive and looking back at you.  ♦

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By Kyle Chayka

By Anthony Lane

By Justin Taylor

Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age Essay

The relations between the generations were always complicated. The older people always indicate that it their time the situation was different and people behaved in the different way. At the same period, the younger generation says about the impact of the modern tendencies, changes of the way of life that give an opportunity to claim that the younger generation is more advanced.

However, as it clearly seen though the history, such attitude of the generations to each other was always the same. Therefore, although the technical facilities, cultural and economical changes impact the society, it is possible to claim that there are no significant changes in the relations between the generations, they are neither improving, nor getting worse.

Analyzing the cultural aspect within the conflict between generations, it is necessary to admit that such cultural issues as art, music, fashion have a tendency of the permanent change. Thereby, it is obvious that the different generations which do not have the same tastes and fashion, cannot understand each other’s needs. And especially this aspect is sharp within the relations between teenagers and their parents.

Today, the tradition hierarchy of family is different than two centuries ago. Elder members of family feel themselves as the intruders. From the other side, their children can easily send parents to the social houses. During the past century, the patterns of solidarity in friend and family relations had been changed (Allan 2008).

The transformation of the family and friendship aspects influences the Western communities since 1970s. People got more freedom and, as the result, the gap in the relations between young people and their parents increased (Thompson 1998).

From the other hand, the flexibility in the constructing of personal life and relations within the social groups is also increased. As the diversity in the priorization provided more facilities and made the personal choice more complex, the cultural changes of the past century can be considered as positive.

The relations between adult and old people can be also considered from the mentioned below position (Edmunds & Turner 2002, Huntley 2006). Thus, in the article Building Positive Relationships (2008) is written about the relations between 57-years old woman and her 89-years old mother.

As it understandable from the article, the conflict between the generations still exists, however, due to the physical disability of old mother, both woman try to find a solution and to rebuild their relations.

Being in the difficult situation, old people need more attention. For adult people, “the decline of a parent’s health, death of one parent or financial pressures often mean an aging parent will need increased social and emotional support or services from family – such as help with meals, cleaning, transportation or financial matters” ( Building Positive Relationships 2010).

In this context, it is necessary to admit the position of Klinenberg (2001) who indicates the tendency of increase of a number of old people who are estranged from their previous social circle and who live alone without a strong connection with their children.

Many old people have to live in the social establishments due to unwillingness of their younger relatives to care about them. This tendency demonstrates that the traditional cultural attitude to family, marriage and old parent is changed.

Obviously, the economic conditions influence generations. Wyn (2006) explores the rupture of the educational and employment outcomes as the peculiarity of the current situation of the young generation.

As it was normal order of things, today, such disbalance is widely spread that makes young people face with a number of problems while searching a job as “the transition processes for the majority of young people born after 1970 are different from those of the majority of their parents’ generation” (Wyn 2006, p. 6).

From this point of view, it is possible to notice that the younger generation has a significant reason to claim that the current situation on the labor market is more difficult than it was years ago.

According to the statistics provided by Wyn, “by the year 2000, at the age of 27, 68 per cent of the respondents had achieved permanent jobs, and 76 per cent were in full-time jobs” (Wyn 2006, p. 10). However, from the other hand, the elder generation has much more problems within this aspect. Although old people are more experienced, many employers prefer to accept a young person than the elder one.

Analyzing Mannheim’s essay The Problem of Generation , Pilcher (1994) indicates that “the notion of generation being widespread in everyday language as a way of understanding differences between age groups and as a means of locating individuals and groups within historical times” ( Mannheim’s sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy , p. 481).

Thereby, it is possible to say that the present problem existed during the history and never turned into the tendency of improvement or worsening. Different social models, tendencies, fashion and other issues dictate the rules of the relations between generations. Although a number of researchers indicate the increasing way of generation gap, history demonstrates that such tendencies were presented at all times.

Today, teenagers and young people feel themselves free and independent as the world is controlled by them. The number of old people is growing day by day as the result of the demographic characteristics. The present century requires more fast reaction, creative ideas and flexibility which are typical for younger generation. Wyn claims that today the process for becoming adult is different and emerging.

The typical issues of those changes are “an increasingly flexible labor market, dissolution of occupational boundaries, deregulation of labour, and increases in contrast, part-time employment” (2006, p. 12). At the same period, the cultural aspect also changes. Thus, the attitude of the young people to marriage and family is different while the level of fertility reduces.

Privatization of educational services diminishes the capability of young people to get better education. Changed attitude to the elder relatives led to a big number of the old people abandoned in the social houses. Generation gap is the key moment within the understanding of the relations between generations.

There is possible to say about the sharp conflict which is concerned with different parts of life and particularly with economic and cultural aspects. Young adults and elder people have the different possibilities to find a job, to increase their financial status according to the current tendencies in the society and they have different cultural tastes and traditional values.

However, although the cultural and economical changes impact the society and the generation gap is significant, it is necessary to claim that the relations between the generations are neither improving, nor getting worse. The historical knowledge provides the demonstration that such situation was always actual and topical.

Reference List

Allan, G 2008, ‘Flexibility, Friendship and Family’, Personal Relationships , 15: 1-16.

Building Positive Relationships 2010. Web.

Edmunds, J & Turner, B. S 2002, ‘Introduction: Generations, War and Intellectuals’, Generations, Culture and Society , Open University Press, Buckingham, pp. 1-23.

Huntley, R 2006, ‘From X to Y’, The World According to Y: Inside the New Adult Generation , Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, pp. 1-23.

Klinenberg, E 2001, ‘Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation’, Ethnography , 4:2, pp. 501-531. Web.

Pilcher,J (1994), ‘Mannheim’s sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy’, BJC, Vol. 45, Issue 3: pp. 481-495.

Thompson, K 1998, ‘The Classic Moral Panic: Mods and Rockers’, Moral Panics , Routledge, London, pp. 31-56.

Wyn, J 2004, ‘Becoming Adult in the 2000s: New Transitions and New Careers’, Family Matters , 68: pp. 6-12.

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IvyPanda . "Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age." December 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/generation-gap-childhood-adulthood-old-age-essay/.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Generation Gap — Generation Gap: The Differences Between New Generation And Parents’ Generation

Generation Gap: How Today's Generation is Different from Their Parents' Generation

• Categories: Generation Generation Gap

About this sample

Words: 1119 |

Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 1119 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, difference between old and new generation, works cited:, jobs fields, educational prospects.

• Bergsteiner, H., & Avery, G. C. (2010). The importance of learning styles: Understanding the implications for learning, course design, and education. Education Sciences, 1(2), 116-125.
• Kinsella, E. A. (2010). The Kolb Learning Style Inventory—Version 3.1 2005 technical specifications. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 31(2-3), 271-276.
• McDonald, J., & Boud, D. (2003). The impact of self-assessment on achievement: The effects of self-assessment training on performance in external examinations. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 10(2), 209-220.
• Murphy, J. (2004). Exploring Kolb's learning styles in management education. Journal of Management Education, 28(2), 191-210.
• Nicol, D., Macfarlane‐Dick, D., & Macfarlane, S. (2006). Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(2), 139-149

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• Generate topic ideas for an essay or paper | Tips & techniques

Generate Topic Ideas For an Essay or Paper | Tips & Techniques

Published on November 17, 2014 by Shane Bryson . Revised on July 23, 2023 by Shona McCombes.

If you haven’t been given a specific topic for your essay or paper , the first step is coming up with ideas and deciding what you want to write about. Generating ideas is the least methodical and most creative step in academic writing .

There are infinite ways to generate ideas, but no sure-fire way to come up with a good one. This article outlines some tips and techniques for choosing a topic – use the ones that work best for you.

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Table of contents

Understanding the assignment, techniques for generating topic ideas, tips for finding a good idea, other interesting articles.

First, you need to determine the scope of what you can write about. Make sure you understand the assignment you’ve been given, and make sure you know the answers to these questions:

• What is the required length of the paper (in words or pages)?
• What is the deadline?
• Should the paper relate to what you’ve studied in class?
• Do you have to do your own research and use sources that haven’t been taught in class?
• Are there any constraints on the subject matter or approach?

The length and deadline of the assignment determine how complex your topic can be. The prompt might tell you write a certain type of essay, or it might give you a broad subject area and hint at the kind of approach you should take.

This prompt gives us a very general subject. It doesn’t ask for a specific type of essay, but the word explain suggests that an expository essay is the most appropriate response.

This prompt takes a different approach to the same subject. It asks a question that requires you to take a strong position. This is an argumentative essay that requires you to use evidence from sources to support your argument.

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Getting started is often the hardest part. Try these 3 simple strategies to help get your mind moving.

Talk it out

Discussing ideas with a teacher, friend or fellow student often helps you find new avenues to approach the ideas you have and helps you uncover ideas you might not have considered.

Write down as many ideas as you can and make point form notes on them as you go. When you feel you’ve written down the obvious things that relate to an idea, move on to a new one, or explore a related idea in more depth.

You can also cluster related ideas together and draw connections between them on the page.

This strategy is similar to brainstorming, but it is faster and less reflective. Give yourself a broad topic to write about. Then, on a pad of paper or a word processor, write continuously for two or three minutes. Don’t stop, not even for a moment.

Write down anything that comes to mind, no matter how nonsensical it seems, as long as it somehow relates to the topic you began with. If you need to, time yourself to make sure you write for a few minutes straight.

When you’ve finished, read through what you’ve written and identify any useful ideas that have come out of the exercise.

Whichever strategy you use, you’ll probably come up with lots of ideas, but follow these tips to help you choose the best one.

Don’t feel you need to work logically

Good ideas often have strange origins. An apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head, and this gave us the idea of gravity. Mary Shelley had a dream, and this gave us her famous literary classic, Frankenstein .

It does not matter how you get your idea; what matters is that you find a good one.

Work from general to specific

Your first good idea won’t take the form of a fully-formed thesis statement . Find a topic before you find an argument.

You’ll need to think about your topic in broad, general terms before you can narrow it down and make it more precise.

Maintain momentum

Don’t be critical of your ideas at this stage – it can hinder your creativity. If you think too much about the flaws in your ideas, you will lose momentum.

Creative momentum is important: the first ten in a string of related ideas might be garbage, but the eleventh could be pure gold. You’ll never reach the eleventh if you shut down your thought process at the second.

Let ideas go

Don’t get too attached to the first appealing topic you think of. It might be a great idea, but it also might turn out to be a dud once you start researching and give it some critical thought .

Thinking about a new topic doesn’t mean abandoning an old one – you can easily come back to your original ideas later and decide which ones work best.

Choose a topic that interests you

A bored writer makes for boring writing. Try to find an idea that you’ll enjoy writing about, or a way to integrate your interests with your topic.

In the worst case scenario, pick the least boring topic of all of the boring topics you’re faced with.

Keep a notepad close

Good ideas will cross your mind when you least expect it. When they do, make sure that you can hold onto them.

Many people come up with their best ideas just before falling asleep; you might find it useful to keep a notepad by your bed.

Once you’ve settled on an idea, you’ll need to start working on your thesis statement and planning your paper’s structure.

If you find yourself struggling to come up with a good thesis on your topic, it might not be the right choice – you can always change your mind and go back to previous ideas.

Write a thesis statement Make an essay outline

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If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Shane Bryson

Shane finished his master's degree in English literature in 2013 and has been working as a writing tutor and editor since 2009. He began proofreading and editing essays with Scribbr in early summer, 2014.

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Student Essay: Helping the Older Generation Embrace Technology

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Jordan Mittler, a sophomore at The Ramaz Upper School in New York City and a participant in the Wharton Global Youth Summer Program, is the founder of Mittler Senior Technology, a company that helps senior citizens adapt to the world of technology. In this student essay, Jordan shares the story of how he started his business and why it has become so critical during this time of social isolation — especially in New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.

In the next few months, Wharton Global Youth will be featuring a new essay every week, written by students around the world who are at home and eager to share their stories of entrepreneurship, leadership and experiences with business.

Five years ago, I gifted my grandparents, Janet and Mark Mittler, iPhones because it was painful for me to watch them still using flip phones! I have always been passionate about technology. I needed to get my grandparents, with whom I am very close, on board with the latest gadgets. It never even occurred to me that they would have no idea how to use an iPhone. They did not know how to perform many of the basic functions that come so easily to my generation, such as texting, Facetiming, photographing — and the list goes on.

And so, the idea for my business was born. I knew I needed to help this older generation, who missed the technology boom and was literally scared of trying to figure out our new connected world. As a result of this very real fear, they were often left alone and out of touch because they couldn’t communicate like everyone else.

Bonnie’s Got Mail

I decided to test my market concept at the local nursing home. I will never forget walking through those doors. I was only 11 at the time, and the director looked at me as if I had 10 heads. I went to the recreation floor and asked over a microphone: “Who would like free technology help?” I only had one taker. Her name was Bonnie Fisher, and I sat with her one-on-one for more than a year providing technology lessons. You should have seen Bonnie light up when she figured out how to connect with her sister and friends over email! I needed to figure out a way to reach a bigger audience.

I reached out to my synagogue, Congregation Kehilath Jeshrun, and asked if they would send a letter by mail promoting free technology help to all of their members over the age of 65. The synagogue was flooded with phone calls from interested seniors looking to enroll in tech class each Sunday. My temple, affiliated with my school, also let me use the school’s computer lab to hold my weekly classes. So many seniors showed interest that I had to maintain a waitlist. I got them into the classroom and taught them everything from texting to FaceTime and how to navigate the internet.

Fast forward to February 2020, and my classes were booming. I had even inspired some of my friends to join me in volunteering their time as teaching assistants. I had just added another class to fit in as many beginner and intermediate seniors as possible, and I felt like I was in a very good position to start scaling my business to reach even more learners.

We all know what happened next. Coronavirus swept through the world and our country, hitting the senior population the hardest and having a grim impact on New York City (reporting nearly 4,500 deaths through the beginning of April). During this time, I canceled my Sunday classes as my own schedule moved to at-home online learning.

I also realized, however, that senior citizens were suddenly even more cut off than ever. This new world of distancing was going to throw the older generation into more social isolation than they had ever experienced. One of my students, Roz Zuger, is 94 years old. I knew she would be disappointed without her weekly dose of tech class. So, I decided that I would attempt to continue my classes online via Zoom and walk all of my seniors through setting up the application and account. I started with Roz, spending endless phone calls with her to get her set up and comfortable with the online meeting platform. Roz had lots of trouble with the audio function on Zoom, and we slowly worked through this together.

After missing only one in-person class – and sending multiple texts and reminder calls — I had my whole class plus others online with me for our first virtual session. I updated my curriculum to be most helpful for seniors during this time when they were homebound and alone. For example, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the Rabbi Emeritus of my synagogue and Principal Emeritus of my school, needed help creating a group chat so he could communicate with all his children at one time. He was having particular trouble setting this up. I was able to show him virtually how to work through all the issues.

Facetiming and Ordering Groceries Online

The key to my teaching success with the older generation is showing, not just explaining. For seniors, talking in technology terms is less effective than presenting them with a visual of how to do something. They’re just not used to the language of technology. Roz, for example, was only able to launch Zoom after I Facetimed with her and sent her pictures via text of the next steps she needed to take. I helped Rabbi Lookstein by sharing visuals with him from my own computer screen.

In the past few weeks, we have been figuring this out as we go along – and it’s working. I started to record all of my Zoom sessions, so the seniors could replay any section of our class for review. After each online session, I send out a link to the recording, as well as a message with everything covered in class that day. My updated curriculum includes showing my students (which total some 80 seniors) how to order groceries online, how to order from Amazon, how to Facetime to stay connected, how to access online newspapers, and, of course, how to mute and unmute their Zoom audio.

It has been really rewarding for me to help so many people become tech-savvy during a time when technology has never been more fundamental to our daily lives. Social distancing has helped me bridge even further the gap between generations – and empower older people with the very valuable tool of connection.

Related Links

• Teen Vogue: Teens Are Helping Seniors Stay Connected

Conversation Starters

How did Jordan Mittler think like an entrepreneur in a time of crisis? Need help? Check out this Wharton Global Youth article for guidance.

Initially, Jordan only had one customer. Why was Bonnie so important to the growth of his idea and his business?

Have you used innovation to respond to needs during the coronavirus pandemic? Share your story in the Comment section of this article.

33 comments on “ Student Essay: Helping the Older Generation Embrace Technology ”

Wow! It’s incredible how technology can connect everyone. Many people often say that technology drifts us apart, but I’d like to disagree. In the current age, technology lets people from all walks of life to seamlessly connect. From Jordan’s example of how he helped local senior citizens be accustom to technology, it indeed shows how something as small as a smartphone can bridge generational divides.

Moreover, I’d like to add that I’ve seen a similar experience with my grandparents. My grandparents currently reside in India while I live in the US. This poses a problem as we cannot communicate readily. However, I found a solution to that vexing issue last summer. My family and I decided it was time for a change in the technology my grandparents were using, so we bought them iPhones. I helped them understand the ins and outs of how to use the technology which they were not familiar with. Because of this, they often facetime us from India and have even become like teenagers, as now they are glued to their phones.

Hi Vishnu, I really enjoyed reading your anecdote about your grandparents in India. I could relate to this issue since my grandparents live in Maryland, while I reside in New Jersey. Pre-isolation, my extended family and I would visit them almost bimonthly. This was crucial to their well-being, as they live alone in a rural area. During the quarantine, I helped introduce them to Zoom, which has been a useful online tool. Now that they are capable of using it, our entire family has weekly digital chats. In relation to this article, our examples of giving help to our grandparents exemplify the responsibility of younger generations to take initiative with technology. Jordan allowing the Rabbi Emeritus of his synagogue to communicate with all his children at once is an important example of lending knowledge and skills to older generations to maximize efficiency and happiness during these times of uncertainty.

I understand that technology helps connect people, especially during this time of endless quarantines. It is beneficial that the older generation is taking an interest in technology, breaking the stereotype that the elderly reject new ideas. After all, technology was and is made to make humans’ lives easier. However, while reading both your comments, Vishnu and Charlie, along with the article, I see that in all the cases of older people using technology, it is because the elderly generation have no other ways to stay connected. Now, this sparked a curious thought inside me—the elderly are using tech because especially during this time period, they really need it to prevent themselves from becoming isolated. But when it comes to young people, we just use tech because we are so addicted to it. We reach for a phone because it’s just what teens do. We text, FaceTime, and play multiplayer games with each other simultaneously. For the elderly, the chance to be able to connect with their loved ones is a big highlight in their life. They have not experienced such ease and luxury for much of their lives.

In contrast, teens have grown up around technology. We should try to bring back a culture that is less focused on technology usage to grow up appreciating the time we use technology, especially to connect with others. The younger generation is so desensitized by constant interaction through texting and voice/video calls that we often fail to appreciate it. I was surprised by the enthusiasm of the elderly when Jordan offered classes, but now I realize that it’s because they have realized its value and are taking efforts to gain the most out of it. For me, it took spending some time in quarantine to realize this. My friends and I are always complaining how we are so lonely, when we have actually been texting and calling daily before the COVID-19 outbreak. Teens need to shift a little bit away from the constant technology usage and take time to do other things that do not require technology—perhaps even teaching their elderly relatives about technology, as Jordan did.

I also have another major concern: older people are already at huge risk to scams and privacy issues, and presenting them with increased technology would give others more opportunities to take advantage of the elderly. I already admire Jordan very much for being able to accomplish the feat of teaching the elderly about technology, and I am also very impressed at how he runs his program so professionally and in such an organized way. But I also hope that Jordan, along with you, Vishnu and Charlie, for your grandparents, have presented the gift of technology as well as explained the dangers that come with technology. There are many scammers and hackers that target the elderly, as they are known to take weaker security measures without knowing the consequences. They are more susceptible to common false alerts on the internet and on phone calls. When we think of introducing technology to the elderly, thinking about their tech security and scam-awareness are not the first things that come to mind, so I think there should be further steps taken to make that a priority. Still, I understand that connecting with loved ones is a priority in this case, as it is a good thing that your grandparents have been able to establish a system of communication to maximize the time you all share. I hope there will be more cases similar to that of yours and Jordan’s students. That way, the world can truly be connected and everyone will FEEL connected!

Daniel It is interesting that you note that students now are doing school from home and despite being tech savvy, they miss the socialization of school and may have to find other ways of relating to their friends or spending their time. They can stimulate their minds thinking about how they can contribute to society, or better their reading and writing skills.

Charlie It is important for children and grandchildren to recognize that their senior relatives can benefit from learning technology, and a little patience in instructing them will make them so happy. On a personal note, my Rabbi has done so much for my family and has been there for all of our family’s life events, so it gave me personal pleasure to help teach him how to connect with his family in new ways during these challenging times.

I love your personal experience with your grandparents. Your thoughts remind me that helping the older generation learn the use of technology also help us connects our lives with theirs.

Vishnu This is wonderful to hear that you got your grandparents iPhones and they are now using FaceTime. It is interesting that you point out that technology sometimes causes people to drift apart, maybe because it is often something people do alone without communicating with others. There are so many elements of technology like face time or zoom that allow people to connect virtually.

Hey Vishnu,

It sounds like we both share Jordan’s experience with the elderly population. I definitely agree that technology has connected us all and bridged generations. While your grandparents are in India, mine are in Florida. I know it’s not quite as far away, but for them, it’s far enough. Similar to how you guys had to cater your lessons to what their generation was used to, I have had my share of challenging but also rewarding experiences. For Jordan, it was FaceTime and Zoom; for me, it was Gmail.

My grandpa called me one day because his friend had sent out a party invite as a list. Grandpa spent about forty minutes trying to find it. I told him to look carefully and like Santa, check his list twice. He didn’t think that was funny. I realized that his friend’s email probably went to his Spambox. I told him to look to the left to find Spambox and click on it. He replied “My Gmail must be different from yours; I don’t have a Spambox folder.” After a few minutes of trying to describe it to him, I FaceTimed him. I looked on his screen and realized that he needed to scroll down in order to find Spambox.

For me, I had always automatically scrolled down to find it without even realizing that I did this. To me, every action or click is like a knee-jerk reflex, but I realized that for grandpa, his reflexes needed a bit more time to kick in. Jordan is absolutely right in that the elderly need more hands-on and visual support. Remember, they grew up with things that required more physical interaction like holding a thick hardcovered book or applying their index finger on a rotary phone. Even my mom tells me she used to love watching each digit of the rotary phone make its way back!

Anyways, thank goodness for FaceTime. I showed grandpa how to scroll down to find his Spambox. And sure enough, the mysterious party invite miraculously appeared. I thought about teaching Grandpa how to move that conversation to his Inbox, but he was so elated that I decided to save this lesson for another day.

I found this article very relatable as I have as well tried to teach my grandparents how to use a mobile phone. At the end I was only able to teach my grandmother how to play candy crush and how to select who she wanted to call without needing to type the number every time. But nothing more. She kept refusing to learn the “new and unnecessary technologies”.

What he is doing very important, specially during the coronavirus epidemic. I have found the elderly are the ones who suffer the most isolation, as they are the ones that are less connected. It reminds me of a video what was viral in social media about a grandmother who sang happy birthday to herself, alone, in her house. It broke my heart. This is why seemingly-small ideas like these can really make an impact and change people’s lives for the better.

Hi Alejandra! I can totally relate to your experience. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been sympathizing for the elderly in nursing homes, who are not able to interact with families. Therefore, I started Facetime sessions with the elderly, either playing piano for them or chatting with them to help time pass by for them. However, I came across some obstacles, such as having difficulties getting on the video chat. She told me that although she enjoys having a companion to talk to, it is really hard for her to work with the technology, such as logging onto the computer. I was dejected for not being able to teach her about technology usage due to the quarantine lockdown.

Furthermore, I live on the opposite side of the globe from my grandmother. The only form of communicating and interacting is through technology. However, she also has hard time using it as well, and it really is painful to think that I am not able to spend most of the time actually talking rather than being lost on using the technology to communicate, especially when I want to spend as much time with her.

As of in the near future, I would like to create a nonprofit business, putting an emphasis on sharing our knowledge of technology to those who are not efficient with it.

Alejandra Seniors are often fixed in their ways and unwilling to change. They like what has been working for so many years. They have to be told that is ok to try things with their phone and not to be afraid to make a mistake. Your grandmother liked to make calls but she may like to learn how to text if she is encouraged to do so, and understand this is a popular way to communicating these days. If she tries it maybe she will like it. She may appreciate someone texting her an image or picture, something you can’t do over the phone.

This article really reflects the present situation of contemporary society.In just 20 years, from cover phones to smartphones, from 2G to 5G, from 8GB to 512GB, the change is so fast and dramatic that the elderly feel disjointed by the society. Take my family for instance. In the 5 years ago, my grandparents don’t know how to use the smartphones. But now, they can use the app like Wechat to communicate with others. When they go out and buy stuffs, they use the apple pay instead of paying the cash. This paves the convenient for them because the elderly will be easy to lost cash or coins on the way home. You know that they will be disappointed and complaint when they know they just lost several dollars. This problem can be solved now. The another advantage that I discovered is that seeing the doctor online. In the past, my grandfather had to get up early around 5.am and go to the hospital to make an appointment. In the morning, the temperature is very low and it is so tired for him to register. But now, they can make the appointment online through the app. This can largely save the time on the way to the hospital and queuing outside the gate. After finishing the doctor, The medicine will be mailed to the home, so that grandpa would not have to go to the hospital to get it again and again. This class sounds great since it helped a lot of “students” to learn the advanced technology. Nowadays, many young people are busy with their work and don’ have enough time to teach their parents to use the phones. This class just solves this embarrassment. Recently, my grandparents know a lot of knowledge about the prevention of COVID-19 and buying the food online without going to the market to reduce the risk of infection. The phones really make the life more convenient and these classes should be encouraged by the public. We should try our best to make the contribution to the society.

I agree with you, YuTao. The article really emphasizes the change that technology has brought onto the modern world and the transformational effect it can have on someone’s life. As technology evolves every day, so does mankind. And in this time and day, it’s up to the newer generation to educate the older generations about this change. Being part of the new generation myself, I’ve had to teach many family members about technology as well, such as setting up an app, purchasing something, or helping them understand how to communicate with their friends through the use of WeChat and similar apps. A couple of years ago, we went back to China to visit our family, and at the end of the trip, because the thought of saying goodbye and not speaking to them for a long time was so painful, we decided to get them new phones and teach them how to use them so we could communicate with the touch of a button whenever we missed each other. My cousin and I had to teach our uncles, aunts, and grandparents how to set up their new phones and WeChat because technology was still foreign to them at the time. And now, they use their phones just like anyone would in this day and time, despite the large age gap between us. At home, my mom constantly asks me questions about technology because she isn’t very technologically advanced, due to the fact that she immigrated here from China back when there was little technology available. However, now that she has one, she constantly asks me how to set things up, how to search things up, or how to manage her WeChat when she wants to call or FaceTime some of her friends. She’s also learned to use her phone to go places by using Google Maps. Using handheld maps and knowing the routes by heart is no longer needed with the advancement of technology. Because of the elderly’s age, getting places and doing things by themselves is not as easy as it was when they were younger. They aren’t able to support themselves, and their kids may be too busy with work and their own lives to be around them every hour of the day. With their newfound technology, they can call for assistance by simply pressing a button that will notify help, or call someone in case of an emergency. Technology could very well save someone’s life. Moreover, I feel like the class that Jordan has decided to teach could end up helping everyone, not just his students. His teaching the classes means that the elderly’s kids don’t need to teach them themselves, and instead can focus on working and supporting their family as a whole. They can rest assured knowing that their parents are safe and that they know what to do in case of an emergency. In addition, they could also learn to download some games for their own entertainment. It’s important to acknowledge Jordan for everything he’s done and to appreciate him for giving us this opportunity to experience something new that can help many. This example shows just how much technology has evolved over these years.

YuTao Thank you for your kind words. More people are no longer using money, so it would be helpful for seniors to use their phone to pay for things, maybe with credit card or Apple Pay. It is very helpful for seniors to be able to use electronics for medical purposes, like emailing with a doctor. I also teach in my class about a healthcare app where seniors can keep all of their medical information.

Experience is key in entrepreneurship. One of the few ways we have to better ourselves as entrepreneurs, and our businesses as life experiences, is going through an initial process of practice and learning, often a synonym for failure. Bonnie’s role in the case of this fantastic entrepreneurial story is exactly this one: giving Jordan a starting point, from which acknowledging the actions necessary to improve the quality of the business. As often stated throughout the article, connecting people has never had such an importance in the terrible crisis we are facing due to the Coronavirus outbreak. Older people are being left behind, not only technologically, but unfortunately socially too: missing tools, such as the previously discussed iPhones and laptops, and absent experience, make it much more difficult for grandmas and grandpas to go beyond the standard, old-fashioned phone call, in a world, in a time, where the closer we can get to having real-life meeting with our loved ones is joining a Zoom call. I personally find this a wonderful example of how we, as youngsters, can personally engage in making these terrible times lighter and less burdensome: each small action can make a difference, regardless of the size of our targeted audience, and our duty as world-citizen, I think, has never had such an important role in our everyday life.

Jacopo I’ve been very fortunate to have this entrepreneurial experience at this early age, and I hope to continue through my high school years so that I will be able to expand this program and scale it so it helps so many more people.

Similar to your experiences, I am also a sophomore and also volunteer to aid senior individuals in adapting to new technology! As a branch director in an organization called Teach Seniors Technology, I could not relate more on the initial difficulties in gaining customers. A few years ago, when I walked into my local community center to give my first lesson, there were only one or two students. In fact, there were many times during my first couple of months volunteering where no students had signed up for my weekly lessons! Though I wasn’t necessarily successful at first, I was also forced to adapt for these reasons. After reaching out to the community center staff, I was able to secure a classroom and promotion materials for my service which now serves several seniors each week.

Yet, I believe the “success” of my organization is determined by much more than the number of seniors who I teach. I often serve seniors from China, who have to bridge both the language barrier and the technological gap here in the United States. One of the ladies at my branch literally burst into joy when I taught her how to use Google Translate! In a world which is becoming increasingly interconnected and reliant on technology, I find that “success” of my volunteering branch rests on reintegrating these seniors into the technological area of society. I am overjoyed by the fact that there are other who share so much similarity with me. As more and more technological advancements are made, we must learn to bridge generational gaps so that our society as a whole can progress together with the technology that is being invented.

Jason It is wonderful to hear of another sophomore participating in a similar type of program.

Just like you, I help senior citizens but also adults from Central and South America with the technology and language barrier that thousands of people face in the United States. Technology is not common for lower classes in third world countries which makes it difficult for these adults and senior citizens to understand what seems like the basics of a smartphone for the majority of people in the US. It is such a joy when I see those which I help finally being able to communicate through Google Translate (An incredible tool I must say) and doing tasks like buying on Amazon, Instacart, or any online store. Observing this has made me come to the conclusion that we must come together as the new technology generation and help all of those individuals who have not gotten the opportunity to learn the incredible benefits the tech world brings; together we can close the digital divide across all ages, races, and socioeconomic statuses. We are the future and have yet to see great things created through technology.

Great response, Rossana! Do I see a team of digital-divide change makers forming here?

Technology helps join people, specially for the duration of this time of infinite quarantines. It is recommended that the older era is taking an hobby in technology, breaking the stereotype that the elderly reject new ideas. After all, technological know-how was once and is made to make humans’ lives easier. However, whilst analyzing each your comments, Vishnu and Charlie, alongside with the article, I see that in all the instances of older humans the use of technology, it is due to the fact the aged era have no different approaches to remain connected. Now, this sparked a curious thinking internal me—the aged are the use of tech due to the fact particularly at some stage in this time period, they genuinely want it to forestall themselves from turning into isolated. But when it comes to younger people, we simply use tech due to the fact we are so addicted to it. We attain for a smartphone due to the fact it’s simply what teenagers do. We text, FaceTime, and play multiplayer video games with every different simultaneously. For the elderly, the hazard to be in a position to join with their cherished ones is a massive spotlight in their life. They have no longer skilled such ease and luxurious for a great deal of their lives.

Despite efforts to teach the older generation about the newest developments in technology, it is saddening how much of the older generation is still very ignorant about it, especially since it is an era of technology.

One summer, I went to China to see my relatives, especially my grandmother. My grandmother lived in more rural parts of Sichuan, in Dazu. She didn’t need to use any technology; as long as she knew how to open the television and call using her corded home telephone, she could live happily growing plants in the back yard and raising chickens. She rarely went into the city to where my other relatives lived, they always visited her instead. However, to my delightful surprise, she proactively volunteered to wait for my arrival in Chongqing, one of the busiest cities in Sichuan.

When I arrived at my aunt’s apartment, where my grandma stayed, I asked jokingly why she decided to finally come to the city, she replied that it was because she hadn’t been here for so long. It was boring back home, and my grandma wanted to experience what life is like in the city for a while. She said that she would stay in the city until I left for America in a few weeks.

I was delighted and planned to take her to all sorts of fun places with great food that I had remembered from my last visit here. In Dazu, you could hardly find such boisterousness due to the lack of crowds. I was sure that she would enjoy it.

One morning, after I had officially settled in at my aunt’s house, my aunt and her husband told me that they were going to go somewhere for the rest of the day and needed me to take care of my grandmother. They said I could take my grandmother out to walk or do some other activities, but to be careful. I agreed with a smile.

My grandma was very happy this particular morning as well. She told me that she wanted to try exercising in the nearby park with some other old people; she wanted to make some friends here. I happily agreed. I walked her to the park and watched her dance and make merry with the folks there. After a few minutes, she could tell that I was a little restless and told me to play on my own and insisted that she could manage herself well. She said that she would go home when she wanted to and told me not to worry. I reluctantly agreed, told her the directions to the apartment building, and gave her the corresponding card. The apartment wasn’t that far, only one block away from the park. Then, I went off to a nearby stationary store to buy some souvenirs for my friends in America.

After some time, I picked the gifts that caught my fancy and went on the line to pay. The store was very popular and so the line was very long as well. After waiting for a quarter of an hour, I finally got out of the line and started my way home. In the distance, I saw a familiar figure. I panicked and hurriedly ran to the entrance of the apartment.

My grandma stood in the burning sun, her arms hung down at her sides, watching the pedestrians. Apparently, she had a squabble with the people from the park almost immediately after I left. She wasn’t in the mood to dance anymore, so she went home. However, the problem is that she didn’t know how to open the more technologically advanced apartment door. To me, the door system was very simple, you just had to swipe a card, but my grandmother never had to use this sort of system, she only ever needed a key. My grandma thought that you just had to press the card against the door or something. She also forgot how to call using the smartphone that was given to her. I also didn’t think it was necessary enough to teach my grandmother how to open the door since it seemed natural to me.

This story truly shows the importance of communication and the need to help the older generation with technology.

“When are you coming back?” These words were music to my 15-year-old ears. I had just helped fix the internet connectivity issue for Ms. Jacobson, one of the residents at Sequoias’, a senior residential facility, where I was volunteering to help seniors with their tech issues in the summer after my freshman year. Ms. Jacobson sent a very nice thank you note about the help she received from me to the Services Director at Sequoias who passed it on to me. The note, painstakingly written in spidery cursive must have taken Ms. Jacobson some time to write and is still cherished by me. The experience with helping seniors with their tech issues and entertaining them with piano recitals helped me get more attuned to the needs of my own grandparents. My two sets of grandparents are separated by a decade and come from similar backgrounds but have very different life experiences. One set of grandparents who live with us are older, technologically challenged, and can call on us anytime to help them operate the phone, the TV and other gadgets. They prefer to read the actual newspaper despite efforts to get them to read news online, and prefer talking on the phone instead of using Facetime. The younger set of grandparents who live in India have a large social circle, live on their own, and while still technologically challenged, have learned the basics of how to use a smartphone, browse the internet, and order online. Jordan’s article made me reflect on my experience working with seniors, both in my own family and outside and I realized that seniors face the same challenges that students of all ages face. First of all, every student learns in their own unique way, much like some of Jordan’s students – Roz and Rabbi Haskel. Some are visual learners, some need more time to read and absorb information on their own, etc. Secondly, each student has different capabilities and interests. Some like one set of my grandparents did not have much interest in learning how to use technology as they were happy with the old ways and could always ask us for help if they needed it. The other set of grandparents found ways to learn the basics that they needed to fulfill their needs as they were living on their own. There is also a social and cultural context to this. More and more seniors are now forced to live on their own, either in their homes or in senior facilities. Those that do not live with family face loneliness among other issues, and do need to know some basics such as texting, online searching and ordering, connecting with their medical provider online, etc. to stay safe, independent, and connected. The need to stay connected has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the issue with being connected is that not only are seniors more vulnerable to scams, they are also very gullible when it comes to fake news. I have had to constantly remind my grandparents who treat WhatsApp and Facebook as reliable news sources that everything they read there is not always true. The other issue is the plethora of apps, tools, and websites that can be overwhelming for seniors. I noticed this issue after working with a couple of seniors at Sequoias and created a home page for every senior I worked with, that contained shortcuts/icons for their most frequently used apps and websites for easy access. Perhaps in all of this, there is an opportunity to create senior-friendly apps and devices, but unfortunately, this is not a coveted demographic for tech companies and marketers. There is certainly a need to help seniors learn tech basics which can enrich and simplify their life. I applaud Jordan’s efforts to provide this valuable service to seniors in his community. However, the bigger question I ponder is that why are seniors put into this position in the first place where instead of enjoying time with their families, they are forced to learn new skills, especially when many have impacted cognitive skills which makes learning new things harder. Additionally, we are only talking about a subset of the senior population. There is a big population of seniors living in poverty who have more pressing issues such as survival to deal with. My own experience with my grandparents and with seniors I worked with is that every single one of them would have preferred to live with their families, surrounded by their children and grandchildren instead of connecting with them over facetime and group chats. In fact, the percentage of multigenerational families in the United States has continued to rise, primarily due to financial necessity. While one size does not fit all and every family has their own unique challenges, perhaps it’s time for us as a society to take a closer look at how best to support the needs of our senior population, given the increased life expectancy in the United States.

Hey, Jatin. I really enjoyed reading your thoughtful post and response. What I love most is that you bring up some broader issues that really add value to the “seniors and technology” conversation. I’ve always admired certain cultures — India for one — where families place more emphasis on caring for and living with their elders, the people without whom they would not even exist. The questions you raise about supporting our senior population are so important! We deliver them meals, help them connect, even give them a ride to the market, but we don’t go beyond to the point of human companionship and connection at a time when they need it most.

The age of smartphones has progressed so quickly that the fact the first iPhone originated just over ten years ago may come as a surprise to many. This development is only one example of a world industrializing at an unprecedented rate. Despite making communication and practically every other aspect of life easier, this revolution may not apply to all — the elderly, as you stated, are often not kept up to date to these new technologies. However, it must be noted that other adults may also not be kept up to date. I believe my parents are a prime example of this. They both immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and made a decent living running a restaurant. However, when it came time to digitalize, they struggled and required my older sister’s assistance to facilitate this new aspect of the business. Now that she’s off to college, it’s my turn to fulfill this position of filling out online documents and forms. This is a growing problem as it is a given that technology will only advance forward, regardless of whether there are those who are unable to utilize these new advantages. That is why I find programs like yours to be so fascinating and thoughtful. My mother has recently taken up taking computer classes, where she learns basic computer navigation skills. It is essential for the whole population to collectively adapt as a whole.

Alvin I appreciate the idea of showing seniors how to fill out forms online, and all of the elements involved in that process.

I certainly agree with Jordan that technology helps us stay connected. It is very important that we help the elderly members of the society on the use of technology. It is not easy to teach the older generation to use technology, as they are not quite familiar with it.

Moreover, I have also had a similar experience with my grandmother who just got a new iPhone and she did not know how to use it properly. Though she was able to make her daily phone calls and read her WhatsApp messages, she did not know how to access the Internet, do Face time and little other stuff. One day during the never-ending lockdown, I decided to teach my grandmother how to use her new phone. Since, she was having sleepless nights due to the change in her sleep cycle because of lockdown, I first taught her how to use YouTube so that she could put spiritual music on it and have good sleep. As days progressed I taught her how to access the daily news online, face timing, texting and many more things. This also gave me an opportunity to spend quality time with my grandmother, which I could not during my school days. My grandmother had a habit of doing all her office-work on paper so, later I started teaching her to use the laptop to check few mails and tally her accounts. This whole process not only helped her a great deal by making her work a lot easier, but also it helped me become more patient by answering the same quarries that she had again and again.

There have been vast advancements in technology over the years and it has helped us in many ways, such as online classes and courses, which are the most helpful things at the moment. By helping the elderly members of the society as to how technology can be used, bridges the generation gap and will help the society progress faster.

I’ve spent a lot of time helping relatives with technology and sometimes it can get very frustrating but I remember that they didn’t grow up with this like we did. So I am more patient and don’t get mad because I love my relatives. What Jordan is doing is really important, especially during this pandemic. The elderly are the most impacted in my opinion, because many of them lack technological experience. His Zoom meetings are a great idea though, keeping the elderly learning and up to date with technology so they can stay connected.

The younger generation is lucky. Since we were young, we have had access to electronic products. Elders often see their grandchildren typing like a speed of light with two thumbs on the keyboard or on the phone, while they themselves can only type letter by letter or word by word with their index fingers. Many elders have only had access to technologies in the past 15 to 20 years. We sometimes get annoyed when they want to learn how to use technology. But when thinking about our situations, aren’t we like them when we are trying to figure out how to solve a simple math question? We see the technologies are easy for us to learn and use, but the elders must take a long time to get used to using technologies.

The last time I saw my grandmother in person was five years ago, but we are able to FaceTime each other at least once a week. When I visited her in China five years ago, I saw her struggling to send a message on WeChat or even make a simple phone call. She would forget which group chat is which and would constantly send private messages in group chats with other family members in it. When I started teaching her how to use WeChat, I saw my grandma was listening to what I was saying very carefully. I taught her how to use WeChat for video calls, voice calls, and many other functions of the app. Later, she took her cellphone and just pressed on it casually trying to use the phone herself. This makes me think that the elders are still very curious to learn new things and look forward to more connections with others so as not to be disconnected from society.

Although she still struggles with using keyboards, my grandma has greatly increased her ability to use her phone. Now she is able to shop online and play simple games on her phone like mahjong and Candy Crush. She sends us many photos of places she has visited and writes that she wishes to take me on one of her trips. Communication is a bridge to build interpersonal relationships. From sharing feelings to expressing ideas, the world requires us to communicate with others. Not just through face-to-face communication, but also through technologies, we are able to share our feelings with others through a simple call or message. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we find communication important with family members or friends or co-workers through technologies. We have stayed home for more than one and a half months, and we would need to communicate with our parents almost every day and stay with them 24/7 face-to-face. We might not know how to have a conversation with them before, but with this pandemic, we might have no choice but to speak with them. We have learned that communicating with them is not as hard as we thought, and moreover, it is enjoyable to hear stories from our parents or other elders in the family. The elders are aging every day and we are growing up every day. It is hard for us to frequently see each other in real life, so technology is how we would connect and communicate with them.

What a sensational experience, Jordan! I enjoyed reading your stories, and I was astonished at how your involvement with elders related to mine.

As another member of Generation Z, technology and the rapid advancement of modern devices have always piqued my interest. Due to my eagerness, I grew up as a tech nerd, earning the title of “tech guy” in the family. “Alvin, why is my wifi not connecting?” “Alvin, what’s wrong with our TV?” “Alvin, why is my Bluetooth not connecting?” At least five times a day, I would hear such questions from my parents and brothers. From simple wifi connection problems to complicated home appliance control systems, I had to be present if the issues involved technology.

My title became significant as COVID invaded our lives. Similar to your experience, my grandparents struggled the most as the majority of platforms and services turned online. Since my grandparents were in a higher-risk group for exposure to COVID, they had to be extremely cautious. They could not go outside to get food or to their workplace. Whether they liked it or not, they had to stay home and adapt to online platforms to order food and attend Zoom meetings. And, as the “tech guy” of the family, I was responsible for providing comfort for my grandparents. Starting from scratch, I had to water down difficult technological terminologies such as Airdrop, iCloud, and Bluetooth to help them rapidly adapt to new lifestyles. Such experiences were similar to teaching elementary schoolers about calculus, in which I realized how uncomfortable it was for my grandparents to utilize new technologies. For instance, Bluetooth features offer wireless connections within the comfort of one’s own vicinity, which is one of the reasons why younger generations utilize Bluetooth: it provides comfort. On the other hand, older generations have an arduous time figuring out how to connect devices using Bluetooth since they are unfamiliar with such features. It is true that consumers are attracted to more comfortable features, and businesses provide new technologies that could reduce time management for consumers. However, it creates a downside for older generations, making them take longer to do something. While convenience for the younger generations increases with the use of technology, the older generations are having difficulty adapting to rapid technological advancement.

By observing the hardships of older generations from my grandparents’ perspective, I thought there was a need for action. Although there are various ways to address such issues, I focused on a fundamental need for everyone: food.

Therefore, I gathered up my close friends, Robert and Kaiden, who shared similar visions regarding this issue, and we came up with an accessible software that will make it approachable for elders to order food from nearby food centers. Essentially, our solution focused on a sustainable, healthy, and accessible approach that is similar to your experience helping elders order groceries. We developed a food ordering app that sends prepackaged, nutritious meals to seniors who sign up for it. Our sign-up system is very simple since it could be pre-installed on phones, involves one click of a button, and has well-explained and accessible payment methods; for example, this service allows the program to automatically extract money from the elder’s source of payment which minimizes the complicated process of payment process every. Ultimately, elders can readily receive healthy and hearty meals at their doorstep. We also utilized the Zoom recording function to create tutorials to help elders navigate through our process. These methods of solution could sound ironic at first, but I believe the most effective solution for elders who are uncomfortable with technology is to expose them to an extent of unfamiliarity to reduce their discomfort.

Like most other start-ups, our application lacks feasibility, so initially, we must test it on a small group of elders and make adjustments. If our test proves to be successful, we will launch our application, which will familiarize elders with technology and aid them in accepting and embracing modern devices. Moreover, I would like to expand this business into providing food and holding online classes about ordering goods, entertainment, media, and safe technology use for elders. I would happily like to share words with you about this matter, and I want to resemble your helping and enthusiastic attitude towards social advancement.

Wow! This is a really beautiful essay. It inspires me to see a fellow teenager making such a positive impact in the world today.

Technology is one of the major generational gaps we have today, and it is very refreshing and encouraging to see someone trying to bridge that gap. I love your teaching strategy of showing instead of just telling. That is truly one of the best ways to explain. You made an astounding impact in a dreary and challenging time for many. As someone who teaches children in a local orphanage home, I can relate to the indescribable feeling of joy you get when your student finally understands.

I will also like to place emphasis on not just teaching seniors how to navigate the internet, but also on teaching them how to be safe while navigating the internet! Cyber crimes are increasing in a very tremendous way all over the world, as more people look for illegal means to usurp unknowing people. This is one of the major fears of seniors and the older generation concerning technology. I believe that teaching them how to best stay safe in the ‘dangerous’ global world provided by the internet would not just be beneficial to them, but it would also help in further bridging the generational gap.

Chidera, your comment is one that caught my attention. Your comment highlights a crucial aspect of our society today: the technology generation gap. Most importantly, the issue of cyber crimes. Indeed, with the rapid advancement of technology, it becomes increasingly challenging for elderly to keep up. Even some of us from younger generations struggle with mastering the intricacies of various tools and software, like navigating Google spreadsheets.

But you draw attention to the pressing issue of cybersecurity and cybercrime, which poses a significant threat to people of all ages, including the elderly. Even myself, who is clearly not an elderly person, receives tons and tons of spam messages and emails trying to trick me of my money. While these scams may not work on us, they can be extremely tempting for the elderly, who may be more vulnerable to such tactics.

For example, my friend’s grandma was a victim to these scams, falling victim to a company promising to save money for her granddaughter’s college tuition fee. This just highlights your point on the emphasis and awareness that should be put on cyber crimes. It demonstrates how easily elderly individuals can be targeted and deceived and the urgency of addressing the dangers they face while navigating the Internet.

Likewise, in the effort to bridge the technology generation gap, I believe that it is crucial to not only teach the elderly how to use technology but also raise awareness to the public about the prevalence of cybercrime and the importance of robust cybersecurity. By empowering people of all ages with knowledge and strategies to protect themselves online, we can help them become more confident and secure users of digital tools.

I truly believe that with stronger cybersecurity implementation and the awareness we can teach people about, the challenges of cyber crimes is one we can focus less on. Allowing us to focus more on bridging this generational gap, being able to facetime our loved ones, and even send them cool gadgets.

I think this is an amazing and much needed program! People tend to alienate the elderly from our evolving world, waving them off as they say, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” This is incredibly isolating and unfair to them. A month ago, I helped organize a ceremony for my high school, and many senior citizens came to support their grandchildren. The program for the ceremony was online, and I watched many of them struggle to scan a QR code. It was clear they were embarrassed, and they deserve to spend the day celebrating their family rather than feeling ashamed.

It’s also important to recognize that technology can help them stay busy. Many of the elderly cannot drive or live very far from their families. My grandparents live across the world in India. They are retired, and travel is very hard for them. They don’t typically have much to do, and they can get bored and demoralized. However, my grandpa stays busy and keeps his mind sharp by playing sudoku on his iPad. My grandma loves to play candy crush or call her relatives. Teaching the elderly how to use technology can be more helpful than most realize.

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• Solar Eclipse 2024

What the World Has Learned From Past Eclipses

C louds scudded over the small volcanic island of Principe, off the western coast of Africa, on the afternoon of May 29, 1919. Arthur Eddington, director of the Cambridge Observatory in the U.K., waited for the Sun to emerge. The remains of a morning thunderstorm could ruin everything.

The island was about to experience the rare and overwhelming sight of a total solar eclipse. For six minutes, the longest eclipse since 1416, the Moon would completely block the face of the Sun, pulling a curtain of darkness over a thin stripe of Earth. Eddington traveled into the eclipse path to try and prove one of the most consequential ideas of his age: Albert Einstein’s new theory of general relativity.

Eddington, a physicist, was one of the few people at the time who understood the theory, which Einstein proposed in 1915. But many other scientists were stymied by the bizarre idea that gravity is not a mutual attraction, but a warping of spacetime. Light itself would be subject to this warping, too. So an eclipse would be the best way to prove whether the theory was true, because with the Sun’s light blocked by the Moon, astronomers would be able to see whether the Sun’s gravity bent the light of distant stars behind it.

Two teams of astronomers boarded ships steaming from Liverpool, England, in March 1919 to watch the eclipse and take the measure of the stars. Eddington and his team went to Principe, and another team led by Frank Dyson of the Greenwich Observatory went to Sobral, Brazil.

Totality, the complete obscuration of the Sun, would be at 2:13 local time in Principe. Moments before the Moon slid in front of the Sun, the clouds finally began breaking up. For a moment, it was totally clear. Eddington and his group hastily captured images of a star cluster found near the Sun that day, called the Hyades, found in the constellation of Taurus. The astronomers were using the best astronomical technology of the time, photographic plates, which are large exposures taken on glass instead of film. Stars appeared on seven of the plates, and solar “prominences,” filaments of gas streaming from the Sun, appeared on others.

Eddington wanted to stay in Principe to measure the Hyades when there was no eclipse, but a ship workers’ strike made him leave early. Later, Eddington and Dyson both compared the glass plates taken during the eclipse to other glass plates captured of the Hyades in a different part of the sky, when there was no eclipse. On the images from Eddington’s and Dyson’s expeditions, the stars were not aligned. The 40-year-old Einstein was right.

“Lights All Askew In the Heavens,” the New York Times proclaimed when the scientific papers were published. The eclipse was the key to the discovery—as so many solar eclipses before and since have illuminated new findings about our universe.

To understand why Eddington and Dyson traveled such distances to watch the eclipse, we need to talk about gravity.

Since at least the days of Isaac Newton, who wrote in 1687, scientists thought gravity was a simple force of mutual attraction. Newton proposed that every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe, and that the strength of this attraction is related to the size of the objects and the distances among them. This is mostly true, actually, but it’s a little more nuanced than that.

On much larger scales, like among black holes or galaxy clusters, Newtonian gravity falls short. It also can’t accurately account for the movement of large objects that are close together, such as how the orbit of Mercury is affected by its proximity the Sun.

Albert Einstein’s most consequential breakthrough solved these problems. General relativity holds that gravity is not really an invisible force of mutual attraction, but a distortion. Rather than some kind of mutual tug-of-war, large objects like the Sun and other stars respond relative to each other because the space they are in has been altered. Their mass is so great that they bend the fabric of space and time around themselves.

Read More: 10 Surprising Facts About the 2024 Solar Eclipse

This was a weird concept, and many scientists thought Einstein’s ideas and equations were ridiculous. But others thought it sounded reasonable. Einstein and others knew that if the theory was correct, and the fabric of reality is bending around large objects, then light itself would have to follow that bend. The light of a star in the great distance, for instance, would seem to curve around a large object in front of it, nearer to us—like our Sun. But normally, it’s impossible to study stars behind the Sun to measure this effect. Enter an eclipse.

Einstein’s theory gives an equation for how much the Sun’s gravity would displace the images of background stars. Newton’s theory predicts only half that amount of displacement.

Eddington and Dyson measured the Hyades cluster because it contains many stars; the more stars to distort, the better the comparison. Both teams of scientists encountered strange political and natural obstacles in making the discovery, which are chronicled beautifully in the book No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity , by the physicist Daniel Kennefick. But the confirmation of Einstein’s ideas was worth it. Eddington said as much in a letter to his mother: “The one good plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein,” he wrote , “and I think I have got a little confirmation from a second plate.”

The Eddington-Dyson experiments were hardly the first time scientists used eclipses to make profound new discoveries. The idea dates to the beginnings of human civilization.

Careful records of lunar and solar eclipses are one of the greatest legacies of ancient Babylon. Astronomers—or astrologers, really, but the goal was the same—were able to predict both lunar and solar eclipses with impressive accuracy. They worked out what we now call the Saros Cycle, a repeating period of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours in which eclipses appear to repeat. One Saros cycle is equal to 223 synodic months, which is the time it takes the Moon to return to the same phase as seen from Earth. They also figured out, though may not have understood it completely, the geometry that enables eclipses to happen.

The path we trace around the Sun is called the ecliptic. Our planet’s axis is tilted with respect to the ecliptic plane, which is why we have seasons, and why the other celestial bodies seem to cross the same general path in our sky.

As the Moon goes around Earth, it, too, crosses the plane of the ecliptic twice in a year. The ascending node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic. The descending node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic. When the Moon crosses a node, a total solar eclipse can happen. Ancient astronomers were aware of these points in the sky, and by the apex of Babylonian civilization, they were very good at predicting when eclipses would occur.

Two and a half millennia later, in 2016, astronomers used these same ancient records to measure the change in the rate at which Earth’s rotation is slowing—which is to say, the amount by which are days are lengthening, over thousands of years.

By the middle of the 19 th century, scientific discoveries came at a frenetic pace, and eclipses powered many of them. In October 1868, two astronomers, Pierre Jules César Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer, separately measured the colors of sunlight during a total eclipse. Each found evidence of an unknown element, indicating a new discovery: Helium, named for the Greek god of the Sun. In another eclipse in 1869, astronomers found convincing evidence of another new element, which they nicknamed coronium—before learning a few decades later that it was not a new element, but highly ionized iron, indicating that the Sun’s atmosphere is exceptionally, bizarrely hot. This oddity led to the prediction, in the 1950s, of a continual outflow that we now call the solar wind.

And during solar eclipses between 1878 and 1908, astronomers searched in vain for a proposed extra planet within the orbit of Mercury. Provisionally named Vulcan, this planet was thought to exist because Newtonian gravity could not fully describe Mercury’s strange orbit. The matter of the innermost planet’s path was settled, finally, in 1915, when Einstein used general relativity equations to explain it.

Many eclipse expeditions were intended to learn something new, or to prove an idea right—or wrong. But many of these discoveries have major practical effects on us. Understanding the Sun, and why its atmosphere gets so hot, can help us predict solar outbursts that could disrupt the power grid and communications satellites. Understanding gravity, at all scales, allows us to know and to navigate the cosmos.

GPS satellites, for instance, provide accurate measurements down to inches on Earth. Relativity equations account for the effects of the Earth’s gravity and the distances between the satellites and their receivers on the ground. Special relativity holds that the clocks on satellites, which experience weaker gravity, seem to run slower than clocks under the stronger force of gravity on Earth. From the point of view of the satellite, Earth clocks seem to run faster. We can use different satellites in different positions, and different ground stations, to accurately triangulate our positions on Earth down to inches. Without those calculations, GPS satellites would be far less precise.

This year, scientists fanned out across North America and in the skies above it will continue the legacy of eclipse science. Scientists from NASA and several universities and other research institutions will study Earth’s atmosphere; the Sun’s atmosphere; the Sun’s magnetic fields; and the Sun’s atmospheric outbursts, called coronal mass ejections.

When you look up at the Sun and Moon on the eclipse , the Moon’s day — or just observe its shadow darkening the ground beneath the clouds, which seems more likely — think about all the discoveries still yet waiting to happen, just behind the shadow of the Moon.

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As Gen X-ers Inch Toward Retirement, They’re Considering Where to Live

The oldest members of Generation X are several years from stopping work, but some are already seeking homes that will suit their later years.

By Gregory Schmidt

When they were raising their four children, Billy and Erin Shipley had space for their family to grow: a two-story, five-bedroom house in Sugar Land, Texas, with a large yard and a pool. But as the children became adults and moved out, the second floor was deserted and maintaining the lawn and pool became a burden.

Like many members of Generation X facing an empty nest, the Shipleys decided to look for a home better suited to their needs where they could eventually live in retirement. They chose a three-bedroom, single-story house in Bridgeland, a planned community about 35 miles away. “I did not look at it as a temporary exercise,” Mrs. Shipley, 46, said. “We could live here forever.”

Mr. Shipley, 54, added that the single story was a draw. “It’s going to be great not having to walk up stairs later,” he said.

Gen X is typically defined as those born between 1965 and 1980. Its oldest members are several years away from retirement, but they are already starting to think about where they will live in their 70s, 80s and even 90s.

The desire to grow older in one’s own home — rather than having to move in with family or to a retirement home — is common among many generations. In 2021, 88 percent of older adults, defined as people at least 65 years old, lived in their own home, according to a report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“Overall demand is for maintaining quality of life as you age,” said Joanna Frank, chief executive and president of the Center for Active Design, a nonprofit organization that developed the Fitwel standard used by architects, designers and developers to foster wellness at home and in the workplace.

But home builders say they are starting to see rising demand among Gen X-ers for homes they can age into.

“We are at the cusp,” said David O’Reilly, the chief executive of Howard Hughes Holdings, which builds planned communities, including Bridgeland in Texas. Many Gen X-ers still have children at home, he said, but they will soon be empty nesters. “That’s normally the tipping point,” he added.

Those who can afford it are willing to pay for extra space in case they need to take care of other family members, like grandchildren, adult children and aging parents — and in many cases, they already are. In new developments, they are seeking access to health and wellness amenities, like hiking trails and tennis courts, as well as opting for home features like showers instead of bathtubs, for instance, and asking for the latest gadgets to help them as they age.

“They have more market power than younger buyers,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. “They have a lot of wealth and are ready to make changes.”

Gen X home buyers have a median income of $126,900, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Association of Realtors , or NAR, a trade group, and they are still amassing wealth. “They are in their peak earning years,” said Jessica Lautz, the group’s deputy chief economist and vice president of research.

They are also sitting on a pile of home equity. Homeownership among Gen X-ers was 72 percent in 2023, which was significantly higher than for millennials, at 55 percent, according to a report from Redfin , a real estate services company.

Another factor prompting Gen X to consider moving sooner to purchase a home for their retirement years is the crunch in the housing market , which was stuck in a deep freeze for most of 2023 as high interest rates kept many buyers and sellers on the sidelines. Home prices rose 6 percent in January from the same month a year ago, according to the Case-Shiller home price index , and many potential buyers worry that prices will continue to soar, hampering their ability to afford a home later.

“If they are shopping for homes, given the tightness of the market and remote work, I do believe you see more Gen X-ers seeing a home purchase as a home for the rest of their lives,” said Cristian deRitis, deputy chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

They are not necessarily trading down in terms of space or quality, he added. In fact, some may be looking to trade up, especially if they are buying what will be their last home. “‘This is my 30-year home, not my five-year home,’” he said.

Many members of Gen X find themselves in the sandwich generation, or simultaneously supporting children (some of whom are adults themselves) and parents. To manage caregiving, some home buyers are choosing three- and four-bedroom homes to accommodate their multigenerational households.

“It’s a stubborn trend; it’s not a flash in the pan,” said Dr. Lautz, the economist at NAR, which found that 19 percent of Gen X-ers who bought a home in 2023 purchased a multigenerational home. “Gen X-ers seem to be caring for parents and having younger adults boomeranging back into their homes.”

Now that their children are grown and have moved out, the Shipleys in Texas have to care only for their labradoodle, Clyde, but having three bedrooms means they can accommodate family if necessary. “We want our kids to come back and have a place to sleep when they visit,” said Mr. Shipley, who added that he and his wife have room for their parents, who are in their 70s and may have to live with them someday.

GL Homes, a developer in Sunrise, Fla., with a dozen planned communities in the state, has noticed a shift in demand, the company’s president, Misha Ezratti, said.

“People are moving to their forever home a little earlier,” he said. “You would think they would downsize, but after the pandemic, they still need the space.”

GL Homes has responded by designing floor plans that cater to Gen X-ers, including Melissa Radin, a career coach in Livingston, N.J., who owns several rental properties in Florida. When she found out recently that her real estate investments had doubled in value, she and her husband, Michael, decided to buy their retirement home now.

“I wasn’t going to buy a house this early, but I know I would have to pay more, so I jumped,” said Ms. Radin, 57. She scooped up a three-bedroom house in a community developed by GL Homes in Port St. Lucie, Fla.

Thinking ahead to a time when their bodies might not work as well, Gen X-ers are asking for features like raised electrical outlets and toilets with higher seats.

“I requested custom pullouts because I don’t want to bend to open a cabinet,” Ms. Radin said. She wanted a shower in the primary bathroom, but made a concession for younger family members. “I’m going to have grandchildren, and I need a bathtub in the house,” she said.

Part of the customization also includes incorporating technology to help people as they age, like sensors in floorboards that can tell if someone has fallen and even send alerts for help, said Ms. Frank of the Center for Active Design. “Developers are aware that this generation is health conscious and much more tech savvy,” she said.

Frank C. Parker III, a certified financial planner for Wells Fargo Advisors in Cincinnati, said he and his wife, Mika, sought a state-of-the-art setup for their retirement home in Boca Raton, Fla., to help them regulate lights, music and a security alarm.

“We wanted a smart home that we could control from phones and apps and the wall,” Mr. Parker, 49, said.

He added that the Florida lifestyle was also a draw. “We are tennis players,” he said. “We like the beach, the ocean and the pool.”

Others say they want to stay healthy as they approach retirement. Mr. Shipley said he and his wife liked to stay fit, and Bridgeland had amenities like pools, biking trails and fitness classes within walking distance.

GL Homes is adding more amenities for active adults, including a cold plunge tub and pickleball courts.

“We did not expect fitness to be such a big thing,” Mr. Ezratti said.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the median income earned by members of Generation X. People within this age group who are home buyers have a median income of $126,900; that is not the median income of the entire age group.

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Gregory Schmidt covers breaking news and real estate and is the editor of the Square Feet column. More about Gregory Schmidt

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