There’s a noticeable increase in the divide between not only left and right, but all different segments of society (not just partisanship).
Being of a younger generation myself, there’s an easily perceivable resentment among my peers towards older generations. The divide readily emerges from both in person conversations and online discussions, which generally quickly devolve into complaints regarding the age at which people are able to buy their first home, the ease with which one is able to find a job and value and cost of education.
While there’s no doubt that, statistically speaking, these points are factually true, it’s not a full comparison.
Yes, the average age at which millennials buy their first home is later than their parents’.
Yes, good jobs are harder to come by.
And yes, a university education is more expensive and less valuable.
The problem with these increasingly polarizing comparisons, whether old to young, by political fraction, race, gender, is that they only tend to look at what’s gotten worse without considering what’s gotten better.
In the case of age, my millennial peers seem to fail to recognize what they have that many of their parents didn’t have at their age:
While my parents and grandparents would take vacations, they would go camping in the next town over, not in other countries or on other continents.
Especially in our area, there were far more people in previous generations who didn’t have electricity and other basic utilities, than there are in the current generation.
While the cost of education has gone up substantially, there are also substantially more people in the millennial generation that get the opportunity to pursue an education (as opposed to being forced into the family business).
Furthermore, there are several things that used to be fairly common, such as multiple generations living in the same house, that now seems to be coming back but with a social stigma.
Overall, too many of us have been looking at the glass as half empty, leading to increasing division and polarization. I would ask everyone, the next time you start complaining or comparing, whether you’re a Conservative complaining about the Liberals (or vice versa), a young person complaining about how much easier the previous generation had it, or a Christian complaining about Muslims, to consider not only what’s gotten worse about the other group but also what’s better and how you’ve gotten closer together. You might just find that things have actually improved.
