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I've long accepted that any kids I have will seem at least slightly alien to me. I'm somewhat baffled that any reasonably intelligent person has had children within the last 50 years without expecting the same. Have you ever wondered what your twenty-times-great grandparents would think of your modern ways? Values change over time, even the most conservative RETVRN poasters are ideologically very different from medieval farmers -- and happily so. I don't want to dictate to future generations, any more than I'd want the ghosts of my ancestors dictating to me.
Maybe this goes wrong? Say economic doubling times continue to accelerate and the disconnect between generations grows larger than we can bear. Or maybe Aubrey de Grey wins and it goes the other way, with 200-year-old fogeys clogging up politics? It's all very uncertain to me, I'm worried about one or the other on alternate days of the week.
I agree that my kids will be somewhat alien. I guess I just want to make sure that this trajectory seems right to me? I don't know I find the whole framing a little stifling. We don't actually operate in a system when each generation takes a turn and then hands it off to the next generation. I don't want to dictate anything to the next generation, I just think I've actually figured some of all this complex living stuff out. It didn't come easy and some of it even came from the lessons of previous generations, part of each generation's process is to distill all of this understanding and pass it on. It's like the corporate speak concept of institutional knowledge. If they refused to take on that generation gift I think bad things might happen.
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