There is other stuff to ruminate about this morning, in fact a swirl of the big messaging machine that has many of us in an uproar. A congressman from Texas just got indicted for something corrupt, which he and his wife deny. We don’t know if that is a reflection of the old corruption which has been around forever and the new corruption, which is systemic to the way things work across the generations of humans who share the planet.
That prompted the discussion that follows. When did our current system emerge? It wasn’t this way when we started service to our government, and we are pretty sure it was not permitted when we left. But look at us now- we seem to have had some sort of generational change imposed upon us, and we tried to figure out when it started.
That discussion got us onto the topic of “generational change,” and how long those things take. Second Clinton term? There was something like agreement on some things- budgets and welfare- that are unthinkable now. Others point to a shorter time frame, partially defined by the four-year increments of the American Presidential terms.
We argued about it until Splash produced his white-board and black marker and outlined the equation with which we started this morning. , one things then to a less on the system in which we were raised. We are just glad we could clear up the dispute on the duration of generations. We really don’t need to drone on about it.
As Splash noted in his presentation after a sip of Monkey Shoulder single-malt, “Just follow the equation-defining character “T” and you get the answer, plain as day.
What was the question again? Oh, right. We were trying to figure out the term “generation” and its direct application to whatever one of those things we seem to be occupying at the moment. Specifically, the discussion pivoted on the matter pertaining to the last “generation” of human chronology we are entering. Some of the generations are epic enough to have their own names, as the folks at the website “MyEnglishTeacher.com” point out in the table below:
You can see the teachers range widely around the 20-30 year range, with some memorable ones only lasting a little more than a dozen years.
This is more complicated than it used to be. We used to assume “twenty or thirty” years as being reasonable generational span for our species. There is now a progression of them. Our parent’s generation, for the most part, has transitioned to eternal rest. But their lives were a common reference point all our lives.
Here is where some of the confusion reigns. We never met either of our biological grandfathers since they both passed at the beginning of the big break point of the second War. Our grandmothers lasted to almost ninety, which put the extent of their lives to nearly three generations longer than that of their first husbands.
So, that is one aspect of the issue. We were still breathing at breakfast, so we presume there to be other ones on the horizon. Our kids, bless their hearts, are active and vibrant. So, that is the one after the one we live now in the shadow of the one-or-three generations our parents shared. So, that could be a fourth, and their kids, those saintly grand-kids, are a fifth or eighth just in relation to where we currently reside.
Beyond those assorted generations, we have only vast swathes of “past” and “future” where our parents now reside and our grand-children’s children may- should there be any- have their turn in history’s spotlight. We wonder about the name for that generation.
The process used to be shorter and fairly simple. As humans, we get gestated by nice people in places like Detroit. They raise us with some turmoil to child-bearing age of our own, and then work with wild abandon to repeat the process which then assumes a life of its own.
Let’s attempt to be precise. In population and demographic theory, “generation time” is considered to be “the average period between two consecutive generations in the lineages of a population.” In our species Homo Sapiens, that generational time typically has ranged between 20 and 30 years. Adding to the confusion, there is a wide variation based on gender and society that accounts for a nearly 1/3rd disparity in the average.
Historians get dragged into the fight, of course, even the ones who share our generation. They have all the generations that preceded our times to play with and for which to account. Those scrupulous professionals sometimes use the generational periods to place events in chronological order by converting generations into discrete periods of years to yield rough estimates of time’s relentless march.
The existing definitions of generational time this fall into two categories: those that treat generation time as a renewal time of the population and those that focus on the distance between the individuals of one generation and the next. There are three commonly-used formulas to account for the vriation.
The first is one is major change as a species, or “the time it takes for the population to double as a factor of its Net Reproductive Rate (NPR).”
That is subject to change, of course, and we will be hearing more about it as India surpasses China in total population and the old imperial populations of the West no longer have exploding population bombs. Instead, there will be new ones described in Dramatic Population Declines (DPDs). We reached out to Dr. Paul Ehrlich about his earlier predictions of doom, but he claimed to be unavailable due to finding himself Suddenly Out of Town (SOOT).
You can see the complexity, and that is a little longer than any of the time or generations we are likely to enjoy. Or as short as the duration of a suborbital rocket path. But it is a useful place to start, even if not particularly helpful from a personal standpoint.
A second useful average would be the difference in age between parent and offspring, which naturally comes into play with the generational passing of modest gee-jaws and vast estates.
That has some wrinkles within the species, since many demographic models are oriented to female-based biologic systems better described as the “mother-daughter distance.” In shorthand, that is often expressed as the average age of mothers when they deliver their daughters.
One could naturally also derive a father-son generational difference, or an even simpler (and hence less accurate) one that does not take sex into account. Men are useful in that regard, as we often note these days. But despite the controversy over ‘identification” issue, only biological women can work the miracle of generational creation. Don’t hesitate to correct us if we are wrong on that.
The three-letter word factor (“Sex!”) has always added a certain mystery to our lives. But we are relatively confident that going with rough definition of twenty or thirty years per generation, we have been here for the better part of four or six generations.
Which strikes us a generation longer than things used to last, but what the heck. When you are having a good time, why not go with it?
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com