Founding Myths, Passing Traumas, and the Paradox of Mistaking Our Past for Someone Else’s Environment.
There is a well-known anecdote by the writer David Foster Wallace that captures one of the most pervasive biases in the way we try to understand other people. Two young fish are swimming along when they meet an older fish coming the other way. He nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a while until one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
When we look at the distance between generations, bewilderment is almost always mutual. Adults look at the screens that shape the lives of Generation Z and Generation Alpha, often seeing little more than addiction or an escape from reality. In return, younger people look at the structural rigidity and attachment to formal hierarchies that characterise many older generations, finding them outdated and largely devoid of meaning. This is the paradox of recognising something only through the memory of our own experience of change. What one generation remembers as disruption and transition, another simply experiences as the natural environment from which everything begins.
The Invisible Thread Between Founding Myths and Existential Anxieties
Yet if we move beyond first impressions and look a little deeper, those distances begin to appear far less clear-cut than they initially seem. The ways in which we make sense of reality, the frameworks through which we understand time, space and our collective relationships, all appear to be shaped—albeit in different forms and with varying intensity—by a set of founding myths and recurring existential questions. One possible way of reading these differences is to observe how, beyond historical and cultural distinctions, successive generations appear to grapple with remarkably similar concerns: making sense of uncertainty and seeking forms of protection against loneliness and vulnerability.
What changes, perhaps, is not so much the nature of those questions as the languages through which each era attempts to express them. For those who came of age during the Boomer years, the authority of institutions and the stability of a linear sense of time provided essential points of orientation. For many members of Generation Z, by contrast, safe spaces and digital communities may fulfil a similar role, offering places in which to seek security, recognition and belonging. Where previous generations often saw the sacrifice required by stable, lifelong employment as part of building a coherent sense of self, many young people today appear to recognise authenticity and the protection of mental wellbeing as responses better suited to a future experienced as uncertain and fragile. Although expressed through languages and practices that evolve over time, both experiences can be understood as attempts to build continuity, protection and meaning in the face of vulnerability.
From Generation X’s Defensive Individualism to Generation Alpha’s Synthetic Worlds
Generation X, seemingly caught in the grip of a quiet transition, developed its own ways of responding to social transformations that were reshaping the relationship between the individual and the collective. As traditional civic institutions and intermediary social structures weakened, the ideal of self-sufficiency was gradually relocated into circles of intimacy and networks of everyday solidarity, creating forms of private stability as public ones steadily eroded. Seen through this lens, similar threads can also be recognised in the experiences of Millennials, often navigating the pressure to prove their worth through professional achievement, and of Generation Alpha, whose need for connection and play increasingly unfolds within synthetic worlds and digital interfaces that, to them, feel as ordinary and transparent as the air they breathe.
The generational misunderstanding begins to dissolve the moment we stop focusing on the device or the formal rule and start paying attention to the emotional architecture beneath them. Rather than revealing an anthropological rupture, this perspective suggests a continuous hall of mirrors, in which recurring human needs find new forms of expression. Understanding one another today means tracing how these enduring needs for meaning, protection and belonging are reflected against different cultural backdrops. It means recognising that, despite everything, we are all swimming in the same water.
A Timeline of Generational Formation
To explore the complexity of generational cohorts through a chronological lens, we draw on Karl Mannheim’s work on the formation of generational consciousness. The timeline below uses the period between the ages of 15 and 25 as an indicative window during which historical events tend to leave a particularly strong imprint on the development of a shared historical experience. From this perspective, the timeline highlights—necessarily in simplified and illustrative form—some of the major geopolitical, economic and technological turning points that have shaped successive generations.
| Generation | Birth Years | Period of Generational Consciousness Formation** | Key Events and Transformations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boomers | 1946–1964 | 1961–1989 | Student protests (1968) • Moon landing (1969) • Oil crisis and austerity (1973) |
| Gen X | 1965–1980 | 1980–2005 | Chernobyl disaster (1986) • Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) • Widespread adoption of the Internet (1993–2000) |
| Millennials | 1981–1996 | 1996–2021 | September 11 attacks (2001) • Rise of social media (2004–2007) • Global financial crisis (2008) |
| Gen Z | 1997–2012 | 2012–2037 | COVID-19 lockdowns (2020–2021) • Rise of generative AI (2022–present) • Climate crisis (2018–present) |
| Gen Alpha* | 2013–2024 | 2028–2049 | Ubiquitous AI (projection) • Algorithmic ecosystems (projection) • Widespread robotics (projection) |
A Voice in Conversation
Understanding is never a one-way process. That is why we chose to complement this reflection with the voice of Sofia Carosso, who kindly agreed to share her own perspective. Not to speak on behalf of a generation, but to add a voice shaped by a different way of inhabiting the same reality. A way of moving beyond clichés and continuing to practise one of the most demanding intellectual exercises of all: changing our point of view.
