Sunday Posts

Being on the start-up scene in my mid-forties, I am right in the middle of the discussion about age and generations. In summary, the point most investors make is that one needs to be twenty-something to have a realistic chance of founding a billion-dollar business, an assertion that, unlike many other assumptions of the investment community, can be empirically proved. Of course, I, and people like me, can only feel bad about this - with little chance of becoming billionaires and no chance of becoming twenty-something - and be compelled to build counter-arguments, such as older entrepreneurs are better at building businesses in sectors like Education. However, whatever one may try, the common-sense logic of younger people having more energy and less commitments are hard to beat, and indeed, for most of us, pointless to contend against. However, this does not stop me from musing about age and generations. I am from that generation which fell right in the middle of the switching of ...

At a recent event, the oft-mentioned terms - Digital Native and Digital Immigrant - were invoked, with the cast-iron borders set by birth on or before 1985. I come from the wrong country here, but that is only part of my discomfort with the doctrine. This, and other generational divides, handy as they are, represent, for me, both a tendency to generalise and at the same time, to divide, representing two wrong ideas at once. My first problem with this doctrine is even more personal than my age. Are the immigrants not the drivers of change and innovation? At a time when immigrants are being called Feral Human Beings by The Sun, the hateful British newspapers which would give up decency for sensation at the drop of a hat, being hunted down by bullies in South Africa, being demonised in Mexico and Germany, they are still proof of human energy and human enterprise, an essential part of what made the world we live in. Civilisations, as much as they may seem to be, are not monoculture -...

This post refers to the Guest Post made on this blog by Angelita Williams, but also more broadly to the public discourse on generational labelling, in particular Kenneth Gronbach's The Age Curve . I have always thought Generational Labelling to be a bit mindless, particularly as generational wars are being fought around them. Disliking Generation Y, undermining Generation X, admiring Baby Boomers etc are necessary for newspapers to sell copies, but not necessary for us in our family and work lives and friendships that we form. There are three clear problems with generational labelling. First, it stereotypes: How can we assert that someone born on the 1st of January 1985 will be fundamentally different from someone born at some point of time in 1984. Going by Mr Gronbach's categorization, 31st December 1984 will be the dividing line between Generation X and Generation Y. One can indeed argue that the person born on or after a certain date may have a fundamentally different l...

In August, the New York Times Magazine ran a rather lengthy article entitled What Is It About 20 Somethings ?, which received quite a bit of buzz on the Internet. The article was essentially a proclamation of what's wrong with the so-called Generation Y. The article came amidst a slew of related opinion editorials in which young adults have been pigeonholed as addicted to technology, spoiled, and directionless. While the article did accurately describe those who are now just finishing school, it seems that the cause-and-effect reasoning behind it is off-base. The implications that so many so-called "experts" are making is that young adults are changing jobs more frequently, traveling more, and putting off commitments like marriage and having kids simply out of a desire to stave off the responsibilities of adulthood. In other words, 20 somethings are being cast as immature. However, instead of looking at the decisions of Gen Y as intrinsic, why don't we consider how tr...