COPing with young bucks and old farts

This month's episode explores why we have an intergenerational struggle to get things changed in the world and what we can perhaps do to help each other achieve more in the future.

Transcript

COPing with young bucks and old farts


In recent weeks we have just finished COP26 in Glasgow Scotland. I have to admit that I have had to go away and look up what COP actually means as the only word I could match with the letter C was Climate. It turns out COP stands for “Conference of the parties” and doesn’t include a mention of the climate in the title at all. I’m not even sure that Conference of the parties is even a very useful title for any gathering around a subject matter and perhaps that has something to do with the lack lustre performance of the organisation since its inception in 1995.

What has become abundantly clear throughout this process is that there is a a strong and emerging split between the youth of today who are passionate about the subject of climate change and the older generation of today who seem incapable of meeting the expectations placed upon them by the younger generation. This is one of the oldest conundrums we face as humanity: how does one bridge the old and the new, or the experienced and inexperienced?

On the face of it, it always seems that the older generation are recalcitrant in their desire for change and the Young are always frustrated by this lack of desire for quick and rapid change. 

Today I want to explore this aspect of human society as I am not sure it is all quite as it seems. Recent events in my own life have led me to contemplate the context within which this question of the young and the old sits and whether what we perceive as an intergenerational desire to hold on to the status quo, is actually what it appears to be, or if in fact it is something quite different and we are in fact able to work more effectively in the future if we understand what is going on a bit more.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

Let’s start with the young - When we are children we tend not to have to make many decisions for ourselves, we are in effect swept along by our parents and families in the life they lead and the world in which we find ourselves. In some ways we have boundless curiosity and energy, but very little knowledge or understanding. We are to some extent a blank slate upon which life writes itself. Gradually as we grow up and leave home we start to become more independent in our thinking and we start to question some of the things that we have just taken for granted as we grew up. We start to meet people outside our close family circle who may have different ideas and we start to formulate a complex and rich version of our own view of the world as a result. At this stage in our lives we have what can only be termed as an almost inexhaustible amount of energy available to us, truly boundless. Our ability to recover from long stretches without sleep and our ability to concentrate and “do” stuff is unmatched during this period in our lives. At this stage we overcome massive obstacles through a mixture of sheer will power and energy. To those of us of a slightly older disposition our main objective is to try and keep all this youthful exuberance, happy and occupied as we know there is nothing more destructive than a bored, unhappy and frustrated young person.

So now let’s talk about older generation. There are a few things that define the older generation and may account for this view by the younger generation that we are slow and unwilling to change. On first appearance older people do seem to take a long time to do anything compared with the youngsters - I mean they go to bed early for a start! and that wastes hours of precious time when they could be doing something useful. They also seem to be quite rigid in terms of when they want to get up in the morning and the various routines they have during the day - like wanting to have lunch as 12:30 every day  or stopping for a coffee break at 11 am for example.

We must ask ourselves why for example, just the same way as all youngsters seem to have the same behaviours, so to, do older people? There is as always very good reasons for it, and one of the main reasons is that the older generation were all young once, so perhaps, being young and behaving in a young way means you get old in a certain way.

Let’s look at a simple example of health. When we are young, we don’t think twice about our health because it simply doesn't affect us, we have a brand new shiny car for a body and an unlimited mileage warranty, we simply do not require servicing. But at some stage, the engine breaks down or something goes wrong - normally when you are about 40 if you have been behaving correctly as a young person and burning the candle at both ends. This is a bit of a shock to the system for most and we all try to get fit again and go on diets of different shapes and sizes in an attempt to burnish the rather sad looking Ferrari we took ourselves for. If we are lucky and with a bit of work we end up with a rather impressive looking Ford Mondeo instead. Reliable, comfortable and with a fairly low maintenance bill. Not quite the Ferrari we had hoped for, but then again we are grateful that we are not in a Fiat Panda or worse on the scarp heap. At this stage the “older” person has had to adopt some structure and some limits in their life in order to continue moving forward. It is worth mentioning too that at this stage in life most 40 year olds are flat out at work, they are bringing up a young family, and are busier then they have ever been, whilst adapting to a new driving position - quite a lot of change. In fact although they may be interested in the issues of today, the average 40 year old probably has no time at all to get involved in the issues of the day or to support the younger generation in their ideas of what the world should look like. To some extent the average 40 year old is focussed on the next generation of youngsters (Their children) and at best, hope to be able to bring them up to at least know about the the issues of today - that is their contribution. So all in all from the 40’s to the 50’s the older generation don’t have a great deal of time to help the under 30’s in their quest for change. This is deeply frustrating for the under 30’s as many of these middle aged generation are at their prime and hold very senior and influential positions in the world and are naturally the people that could and can make these landmark decisions to change things.

Things unfortunately don’t get any better the older you get, from your 50’s to your 60’s most people find the maintenance bill on the Mondeo going up. They find that their capacity for doing things gradually reduces and so they retreat to being more tactical in their behaviour. So when presented with an opportunity to change legislation for example, to perhaps reduce carbon emissions, the 50-60 year old will look at the effort and time required to do this and rapidly understand that they simply do not have enough hours in the day nor the energy to complete such a task despite being supportive of it, so they will find another way of achieving it, perhaps by setting up a committee, where more experience can be brought together and through sharing the available time of the members a reasonable contribution in effort can be made towards achieving something. This of course is like a red rag to a bull for the under 30’s as it is seen as effectively kicking the idea into the long grass. But there are a few things worth remembering at this stage.


Life and change is complex and the people who are probably the most knowledgeable about how to navigate and implement change are the ones that have had the most experience. Youngsters in my experience do not have the patience or the tactical ability to implement change and end up frustrated, dejected and depressed when invited to get involved in these initiatives. 

What we have described today is in fact a modern day paradox - and it is as follows:

The youngsters who have all the energy, will, passion and drive to change things, do not have the necessary skills or position to influence, manage and deliver the change they require. The older generation that has all the skills, and knowledge to deliver the changes do not have the time to do so.

So finally we get to the core question of this Podcast and that is “how do we find a way to allow these two paradoxical aspects of humanity to work together more effectively so that more progress can be made?”

The answer is for us all to understand each others position a bit better. As an older person, I need the youngsters of today - I need their boundless energy and time in order to achieve things, I no longer have the time to do myself. As a youngster I need the knowledge and skill and life experience, even the patronage of the older generation if I am to have any hope of achieving anything practical. The curse of youth is that we always think we know better, we always think we can create a better mousetrap. In most cases we can’t - we forget that as humans we have been developing mousetraps for hundreds of thousands of years, we do actually have a lot of experience of doing a lot of things already.

I once sat next to a man on a train, he was a recently retired human rights lawyer. As we were chatting he explained that his decision to retire came when he finally managed to get a piece of legislation signed in to law at the European court of Human rights. He explained it had taken 26 years of his life to accomplish this task, but it was a significant  piece of legislation and he was very proud of it. I remember thinking at the time how remarkable this seemed to me for someone to dedicate all of his working life to one objective like that. It occurred to me that perhaps that is what is required to create change at a large scale globally, that to understand and navigate the level of complexity to achieve something like this takes years and years.

I didn’t think much more about this episode until a few years later when I was once again sitting next to someone on a train. This time it was a young lady perhaps in her early twenties and as you do you get to chatting about things. I asked her where she was going and she told me she was going to a demonstration on climate change in London. I asked her what the objective of the demonstration was and she replied “to stop climate change”. I thought this was a very interesting idea and couldn’t help asking how demonstrating was going to stop climate change? At this stage, I admit, I had taken a wrong turn in the conversation and I was immediately seen as some old fart who understood nothing about how the world worked and was given a stern lecture on climate change and why demonstrating was the only way to raise awareness and force the politicians into action.

Instead of entering into this wildly earnest debate, I decided ask her what she planned to do with her life. Bizarrely and serendipitously for me she was just finishing a law degree and this gave me an opportunity to tell her the story of the man on the train who a year or so had retired having passed legislation into law. I explained that I thought that what she was doing was worthy, after-all who could not support a better climate, but I mentioned that in order to bring about real change it required a lifetime of effort on behalf of people who cared about these matters. I asked her, “would you consider giving your career to furthering legislation at an international level for the protection of the climate?”

At this stage, to be fair to her, she paused as she considered what had been said. I could see that now, she understood that romping around on the streets of London shouting “Save the planet” didn’t seem all that useful when one considered the herculean efforts required to ACTUALLY achieve any change and she suddenly had to consider whether she was genuinely committed enough to pursue an entire career in the furtherance of something she believed.

I never got an answer from that conversation as she clearly had a lot to think about.

I am telling you this story because it highlights a number of things:

Young people are passionate and uninhibited about their beliefs and are willing to throw large amounts of effort at things if they believe in them.
Young people are not always aware that the things they are throwing large amounts of effort at will not achieve anything.
Young people are not stupid, they are simply unaware of life's full tapestry or how things actually work in reality, they are in effect inexperienced. That’s not a criticism, its just a fact of life that we all had to learn at one stage or another.
As older people we have moments, or opportunities, when if conducted in the right way we can offer help, knowledge and advice to the younger generation that can influence the rest of their lives if done correctly.
Our job as older generations is not to offer soundbites to the younger generation, but to enter into the complexity of their world with the benefit of all our experience and offer options to them that they cannot see.
As a young man, I have have had moments like this with older and hugely experienced people in my life and I can attest to the enduring influence they have had over my life and continue to do so.

So if there is anything to conclude form this podcast today it is as follows:

Somehow the older generation need to find ways to bridge their experience and match it to the energy and passion of the younger generation, we need to be accessible to them in this respect and that requires us not to be judgemental or patronising in how we treat and talk to them.
We need to find ways of creating quality time in our own busy schedules to be able to support them in the activities they want to pursue. This is not an easy ask when you consider how busy everyone is these days, but even if it an hour on a regular basis when you can either coach or support in some way either through a committee or just networking on behalf of people and making introductions. These are all worthy contributions.
We need to stop the sound-bytes, the frivolous comments and try to enter the world the younger generation inhabit and try to understand their perspective and the complexity they have inherited and try to use our experience to help them navigate that space.

The younger generation also have a part to play in this as well :



I remember a great quote that was given to me years ago from Mark Twain : “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Young people should be encouraged to respect knowledge and experience and to understand the huge lexicon of knowledge that is at their disposal. They should be discouraged from thinking that their job is to create the next new mousetrap or invent a solution for whatever thing Google has decided we need next tuesday. They should be taught that they have an integral and incredibly important part to play in the matters of humanity and that  if they start early enough and work hard enough for long enough they can make truly gargantuan changes to the way the world works and for the betterment of humanity. Now not every young person will want to do this and it is in the nature of young people that when faced with a proposition like this, they would much prefer to be partying instead, but some will yield to the larger cause and with those few, we will possibly help to ensure that the world improves its situation.

In the end and by way of rounding off this podcast it seems that the absence of “climate” in the COP 26  description may well have a reason after-all - perhaps the answer is for all of us to seek a conference of the parties, these parties being old and young, past and future, wealthy and poor.  Perhaps we should refer to the COP27 as the Community of the parties next time as we reflect on better cooperation from all parties globally as we seek to improve our world in the future.

So to the old and the new the young and elders of our planet, I offer you a pact of joint responsibility, to seek to join in some form of community that enables the experience of the older generation to guide the exuberance of the next generation and together to guide us all into a better place.

As always, the pleasure is all mine when it comes to this little podcast project. I enjoy the emergent process that ideas have and how I can blend events in the world today with ideas and create little projects for myself to broadcast. As always I do this in the hope that some of these ideas are helpful to you as an audience.

As one of my regular listeners said to me one day “I don’t always agree with what you say, but I support the reasons why you do it”. I think this was an important statement. The ideas I put forward in these podcasts are not meant to be taken as gospel truths, they are simply ideas that support a point of view I am trying to make. Disagreeing with me is just as important as agreeing with me, as with each challenge comes new insight and understanding.

If you enjoy these podcasts, then perhaps you might consider sharing a link with friends that you also think might enjoy listening. In this day of clicks and likes, the only real way of sharing knowledge and help is to share with others. At this moment the podcast is listened to in a 182 locations in 29 countries worldwide. This alone gives me so much pleasure to know that I am reaching such a wide audience. So for that I say thank you very much.