The Generation Game.
Counting in fuzzy numbers
I tend to think of maths as the art of precision, that part of the point of counting things is to be accurate, to be right. However not all quantities are designed to be in sharp focus. “Several” is a lovely concept that doesn’t mean “seven of”, simply “more than two but not many”. Come to that, how many is “many”?
A generation is an engagingly fuzzy quantity. Closer to 20 years than 30, but probably more than 15, it’s a category that can expand and contract to allow for circumstance. Generations are shaped by events not numbers, by data not sums. Sandwiched between Boomers and Millennials, Gen X are perhaps best defined by what they missed out on. Too young for the summer of love, too old for native adoption of the internet. We are the last to have used payphones non-ironically, the last to have been truly lost in a city. Even “Generation X” isn’t actually ours. First coined by journalists Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett as the title of a book of interviews with teenage Mods in 1964, the original Gen X were actually still Boomers. Richard Hell attempted to coin “the Blank Generation” but in truth we remained actually blank until 1991 when Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X finally caught (what then hadn’t yet become popularly known as) the zeitgeist. Some suggest he took the name from Billy Idol’s backing band, who were, satisfyingly, named after Deverson and Hamblett’s book, a copy of which Idol’s mum owned. Whatever the inspiration, the intention was clearly just to sum up the age with all that fuzzy desolate mystery so eloquently contained in Elon Musk’s favourite letter, X. Certainly it was never meant to be an attempt to alphabetise. There should never have been a Gen Z.
Yet here they are and, indeed, there they go. Apparently the last of Gen Z, born in 2012, are now 11. Thanks to their parents stunning lack of forethought or care, their generation got nothing but the final letter of the alphabet and suddenly revisionism has taken hold. Millenials are now referred as Gen Y. Boomers, Baby Boomers for most of their lives, like Donald Trump (1946) are Gen W and the “Silent Generation” of 1928-1945, including Joe Biden and the Beatles, are all I presume actually Generation V.
If we run this fuzzy number of roughly 15-20 years back through history then the original Generation A are, roughly speaking, the kids born somewhere around the mid 1500s, like William Shakespeare and Galileo (both 1564). Classic Gen A behaviour clearly being to humanise power by diminishing the sense of scale. As a whole, life spans across this period have grown hugely, yet Biden and McCartney are still both well within the four-score years and ten suggested by the Bible so I think it holds that across this whole period the idea of “within living memory” comfortably holds 4 generations at a time. For instance, cellist Steven Isserlis tells how his Russian grand father knew a 102 year-old woman in Vienna who remembered Beethoven as "a filthy old man prone to spitting on the floor”. Looked at from this perspective, Shakespeare, Galileo and the rest of Generation A are less than 7 lifetimes away from us.
Sadly it seems my children, the cohort following Gen Z, are already being cast as “Generation A”, which infuriates me and makes no sense. Surely we can do better? “Generation AA” at least? Or “Generation ?!” their time marked by urgent angry questions like “why send journalists on flights to cover wildfires caused in part by the pollution of flying?” In some places I’ve seen the new Generation A referred to as “Generation Alpha”, but if we are to nose dive into the Greek Alphabet then surely my pandemic babies should become “Generation Omnichron”, born to forever wash their hands without being able to rid themselves of our mistakes.
Accidentally starting our labelling at the end reminds me of a different problem of fuzzy numbering. It’s not the end of the world but I for one can’t stand the Doomsday Clock.
Invented in 1947 when it was set at 7 minutes to midnight, the clock was a deeply laudable attempt to warn of the impending danger of a man-made apocalypse in the form of nuclear war, with “midnight” as the end of days. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the body who set our chronological proximity to the end, first started taking into account climate change as well as nuclear war in 2007 and now also include “disruptive technologies”, which is why they say we currently sit only 90 seconds from midnight.
Chilling, until you realise it’s a guess. Not even a guess, just a posture contrived to terrify. Here the fuzziness works against the message. If you actually plot the 4.5 billion year history of our planet on a single clock face, even the dinosaurs don’t show up until 11:28. They stomp about until about twenty-to-twelve and the whole of human existence only accounts for roughly 38.5 seconds. Even if you radically alter the time scale, skip the dinos and start the clock with the oldest homo sapiens fossil, then we start wearing clothes around one-thirty, learn to control fire around quarter-past four but don’t start cave painting until nine thirty which suggests most of human history has been classic procrastination. The Great Pyramid of Giza is built at a quarter to midnight. Cleopatra dies 31/2 minutes to midnight and our clock stood at 90 seconds to midnight at the start of the 30 years war in 1618, when Galileo was 54, Shakespeare having died two years earlier.
It’s not just that the time scale is off. Whatever point you chose to start from we are inevitably going to be close to midnight if you make our present moment the end of the period you’re measuring. Yet we cannot reliably use any future date. Were we actually 90 seconds to midnight now then the human race would end in the year 2,428 or in roughly 24 generations. If I’ve been sounding bullish about our chances until now then I have to admit that currently strikes me as tragically unlikely.
Crucially though, as my mum used to repeat in the last weeks of her life, no one knows the sum of their days. This mantra was her way of coping with the worst fuzzy number, that given as the prognostication of a terminal illness. “Weeks to live” is sentence in every meaning of the word. However I feel my mum did much to illuminate this illusory certainty which is as insubstantial as the impression the rest of us have that our future is somehow unbounded by numbers. We all have only weeks to live and no one can ever count them in advance. I don’t want to agree with Elon Musk, but however good or bad the evidence is, the future is always X.
I have written more about our perception of time and evolution here and, should you be interested, more about the end of my mum’s life here.