When I started, my students were mostly from the borderland between Generation X and the Millennials. Now I’m teaching Gen Z, and the Alphas are coming. I’m not really one for labels and categories — and I see more variations within generations than I do between generations. But there seems to be a cottage industry built around pitting generations against each other. For the record, I think Gen Z is all right.

Taking the long view — the Far Backward — there’s nothing new about generational conflict and back-biting. Aristotle said the the young people of his own time “are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. . . . They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” I suspect that those young people thought Aristotle was a crabby old man.

But this business of naming generations seems to be a relatively new thing. I think my generation was the first to get a name — the Baby Boomers of the post-WWII years. (Yeah sorry I’m a Boomer.) Gen X got a name and a label in 1987. My parents generation, the “Greatest,” didn’t get the label until Tom Brokaw published a fawning book in 1998. And having one cohort called “The Greatest Generation” doesn’t seem likely to encourage intergenerational peace. I’ll probably have more to say about generational theory in another post.

What I actually came here for was to do what I’ve been doing these days with my classes — addressing my Gen Z’ers as a Boomer profoundly disappointed with my own generation. When I was my students’ age, we were the generation that would save the world and usher in the Age of Aquarius. We were not going to be rigid or materialistic like our parents. We were going to protect the environment, and end poverty and racism. (No, really!) And then I watched my generation move out into the world and become what we had hated. There aren’t many people my age that I care to hang out with any more.

Maybe that’s the tragedy of every generation. Your vocabulary word for today is an uncommon one: enantiodromia — the gradual turning of everything into its opposite. It’s a word out of Jungian psychology. You should look it up, see if it doesn’t explain, well, everything. Not just about generations, but about what goes on in our heads.

And so my generation of idealists created the cynical and cruel world that Gen Z must inherit and try to redeem. The good news is that I see so much promise in my Gen Z’ers. Listening in to the discussions where you have tried to make sense of how we’ve gotten here, I almost think you have a chance to turn it around — once the olds let loose of the reins of power.

Just watch out for that enantiodromia!