Why We Struggle with Change, Why It Isn’t a Moral Failing, and Why the Empathy Gap May Be the Real Crisis
Bill Friend
February 10, 2026
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Introduction
It is a widely observed phenomenon that people struggle with change. This is not a revelation. Every generation, at some point, looks at the generation behind it and mutters some variation of “What is the world coming to?” Historians have traced this complaint all the way back to ancient Greece, where elders lamented the recklessness and disrespect of the young. The impulse is as old as civilization itself.
But something feels different now. The friction between older and younger generations in the early twenty-first century has taken on a sharper edge—a moralized, accusatory quality that goes beyond the usual generational grumbling. Older people, particularly the cohort loosely grouped as “Baby Boomers,” are not merely being called out of touch. They are being called dangerous. Selfish. Complicit. The word “Boomer” itself has become a slur in some corners of the internet, a shorthand not just for age but for a kind of willful moral failure.
At the same time, many older adults look at the pace of cultural and technological transformation and feel something closer to vertigo than stubbornness. They are not trying to be difficult. They are trying to stay upright in a world that is shifting beneath their feet faster than their minds and bodies can adjust.
This essay is an attempt to bridge that gap—to explain, with both scientific rigor and human compassion, why change becomes harder as we age, why a specific generation of Americans seems especially resistant, and why the way we talk about that resistance has itself become a source of needless division. The goal is not to excuse anyone or to dismiss legitimate grievances on either side. It is to reframe a conflict that is doing real damage to families, workplaces, and the broader civic fabric—and to insist that understanding must flow in both directions if it is to mean anything at all.
Part I: The Biology and Psychology of Resistance
The Concrete Hardens
The most fundamental reason that change becomes harder with age is neurological. When we are young, our brains are highly neuroplastic—a term that describes the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways, absorb new information, and rewire itself in response to novel stimuli. A child’s brain is like wet concrete: impressions form easily, new structures take shape with minimal effort, and the entire architecture remains flexible and adaptable.
As we age, that concrete hardens. The brain becomes remarkably efficient at executing the routines and skills it has already mastered, but it loses some of its capacity to build entirely new pathways. Learning a new system—a smartphone interface, a social media platform, a restructured workplace protocol—requires more metabolic energy and cognitive effort for an older brain than for a younger one. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable, physiological reality. The work of learning is literally harder for them.
This does not mean older people cannot learn. They can, and many do, with impressive results. But the effort required is greater, the fatigue is real, and the frustration of feeling slow in a domain where one was once competent can be profoundly demoralizing.
The Furnished House
There is an analogy that captures this beautifully. Imagine your brain is a house.
When you are young, the house is empty. New furniture—new ideas, new habits, new skills—comes in and you simply place it wherever there is room. There are no conflicts, no rearrangements necessary. Everything finds a spot.
When you are older, the house is fully furnished. You have spent forty or fifty years arranging the layout. Your routines, your beliefs, your expertise, your identity—they all have their place. The house functions. It is comfortable. It is yours.
Now someone arrives with a new piece of furniture and says, “Put this in your living room.” There is no empty spot. To accommodate the new piece, you have to move something else—perhaps something you have cherished for decades. For an older person, accepting change often feels like someone walking into their home and rearranging the furniture without asking permission. It is not that the new piece is bad. It is that the disruption creates a visceral sense of disorder and loss.
The Economics of Expertise
Beyond neurology and comfort, there is a deeper psychological dimension: identity. Older people have often spent decades mastering a specific set of skills or a specific way of navigating the world. That mastery is not incidental. It is central to who they are. It is a source of pride, confidence, and self-worth.
When the world changes—whether through technology, shifting social norms, or restructured workplace expectations—it can feel like a devaluation of that expertise. The knowledge they spent a lifetime accumulating is suddenly less useful, less respected, less relevant. Admitting that the “new way” is better can subconsciously feel like admitting that their past efforts were a waste—that the decades of learning and labor that defined their professional and personal lives have been rendered obsolete overnight.
This is not vanity. It is a rational response to a genuine threat. When your competence has been your currency for decades, being asked to start over as a beginner is not a minor inconvenience. It is an existential challenge.
The Loss of Control
As people age, they often face a cascade of losses: physical strength, friends, career status, independence. In the face of these losses, they tend to hold tightly to the things they can still control—their routines, their environment, their daily rhythms.
Change, by definition, represents a loss of control. It forces people into situations where they are novices again, where they do not know the answers, where they might fail publicly. For someone who has spent a lifetime being competent and capable, the prospect of being a “beginner” is not exciting. It is terrifying. It is a reminder that the ground is shifting and that the tools they once relied on may no longer work.
The Risk Manager’s Filter
There is one more psychological factor worth noting, and it is often overlooked in conversations about generational friction. Older people have a long dataset of lived experience. They have seen trends come and go. They have watched “miracle cures” fail, “revolutionary” technologies flop, and confident predictions collapse.
Where a younger person might view something new as automatically better, an older person often views it as unproven. Their caution is not reflexive stubbornness. It is a form of risk management born from decades of watching the world over-promise and under-deliver. They trust the past because the past is known and tested; the future is a gamble. From their vantage point, sticking with the “old way” is not being difficult. It is being prudent.
Part II: The Boomer Phenomenon
Not Just Old—Historically Specific
Everything described in Part I applies broadly to aging humans across cultures and centuries. But in the United States, the generational friction we are experiencing in the 2020s has a specific character that goes beyond the universal biology of aging. It has to do with a specific cohort: the Baby Boomers.
Baby Boomers—people born roughly between 1946 and 1964, in the massive population surge that followed World War II—are not simply “old people.” They are a very particular generation that came of age during a historically unusual window of American prosperity and optimism. At their peak, they constituted roughly 26 percent of the U.S. population, giving them outsized cultural, economic, and political influence that persisted for decades.
They grew up in a period of rapid economic growth, suburbanization, and an expanding middle class. A booming consumer culture celebrated home ownership, automobiles, and household appliances as patriotic expressions of the American way of life. There was a broad, shared belief that life was getting better and that children would have it better than their parents. Stability, family, national pride, and optimism were the dominant cultural notes. That era became the baseline against which all subsequent changes would be measured.
The Psychological Imprint
Research on Boomer characteristics highlights core values such as optimism, team orientation, personal gratification, youthfulness, and a strong work ethic focused on achievement. These are not trivial descriptors. They shaped a generation that tends to see itself as the protagonist of recent American history—the generation that “changed everything,” from civil rights to the counterculture to the moon landing.
Boomers attach enormous identity and self-worth to their work, their version of success, and the cultural era they helped define. When change threatens these things—new technology, new workplace norms, new social expectations—it does not register as “just another change.” It registers as something closer to: “You are rewriting the world we built.”
The Arc of Disappointment
After that promising start, the Boomer life story took a darker turn. The 1960s and 1970s brought the Vietnam War, political assassinations, Watergate, the oil shocks, stagflation, and profound social upheaval. Later decades brought deindustrialization, rising inequality, financial crises, and deepening culture wars.
Research from the Pew Research Center found that Boomers became comparatively the “gloomiest” adult cohort—more likely than younger or older adults to say it is harder to get ahead than it was a decade ago, and more pessimistic about their children’s future standard of living. Their collective life narrative is, in essence: “We grew up in a time when everything seemed to be getting better, and then it got complicated, scary, and worse in a lot of ways.”
That arc is a perfect psychological setup for nostalgia and resistance. When your formative years were defined by stability and optimism, and your later years by disruption and disappointment, the pull of the past is not weakness. It is a gravitational force.
The Jones Factor
It is worth noting that the cohort we colloquially call “Boomers” in everyday conversation actually spans a broader range than the strict demographic definition. The group most visibly associated with nostalgia and change-resistance in the 2020s includes not only early Boomers (born 1946—1954) but also a cusp generation sometimes called Generation Jones (born roughly mid-1950s to mid-1960s). The name combines “keeping up with the Joneses”—the consumer pressure to conform—with “jonesing,” a slang term for yearning or longing.
Generation Jones grew up absorbing the idealism of the 1960s as children, then entered adulthood in the cynical, economically turbulent 1970s. The result is a psychological signature often summarized as: idealistic hopes plus cynical reality equals a deep yearning for something promised but never fully delivered.
Together, early Boomers and Jonesers—people currently in their early sixties to late seventies—form the core of what we encounter as the “older, nostalgic, change-resistant” group in workplaces, families, and public discourse. Their combined traits amplify the effect: the Boomer says, “I remember when America seemed to work; I’m proud of that era.” The Joneser says, “I remember the optimism, then I watched it get messy; I’m wary now.” Put together, you get a powerful emotional pull toward the past and a deeply cautious stance toward further disruption.
The Velocity Problem
It is also critical to acknowledge the sheer speed of change these cohorts have experienced. A person born in 1800 lived in a world that looked remarkably similar at the beginning and end of their life. A person born in 1950 has witnessed the rise of the space age, the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, social media, and artificial intelligence—each one a tectonic cultural shift arriving faster than the last.
The world after roughly 2000 changed radically in ways that younger, digitally native generations absorbed from childhood. New norms around gender, sexuality, race, and identity proliferated. Constant media bombardment and political polarization became the background noise of daily life. For Boomers and Jonesers, who built their mental models in a fundamentally different world, this velocity is not invigorating. It is overwhelming.
When the goalposts move every five years, eventually you stop running and decide to stand where you are. This is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to cognitive overload.
Part III: The Case Against Patience
Before asking younger generations to extend empathy, it is essential to sit with their experience first. Because they have a case, and it is not a small one.
The Inheritance
Millennials and Gen Z did not arrive in this economy by accident. They inherited it. And the ledger is sobering. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of a four-year college degree has increased by more than 1,200 percent since the 1960s. Median home prices in many American cities now exceed ten times the median household income—a ratio that would have been unthinkable in the suburban paradise of the 1950s. Real wages for young workers have been largely stagnant for decades, even as productivity has soared. The social contract that once promised a middle-class life in exchange for hard work and a college degree has been quietly shredded.
These are not abstract grievances. They are lived realities. A twenty-eight-year-old in 2026 carrying six figures of student debt, renting an apartment she will never be able to buy, watching her retirement horizon recede with each passing year—she is not being “dramatic.” She is doing the math. And when she hears an older relative say, “Well, I worked my way through college,” the gap between that experience and hers is not a misunderstanding. It is a chasm.
The policies that produced this chasm were not enacted by mysterious forces. They were voted on, supported, and defended by real people—and the Boomer generation, by virtue of its size and political engagement, was disproportionately influential in shaping the policy landscape that younger Americans now navigate. Tax structures that favored asset holders over wage earners. Zoning laws that restricted housing supply. Deregulation of financial markets that led to catastrophic crashes. The systematic defunding of public higher education. These were choices, made by majorities, over decades. The younger generation’s anger at those choices is not scapegoating. It is accounting.
The Climate Ledger
And then there is the planet. The scientific consensus on climate change has been clear for over thirty years. The window for relatively painless mitigation has narrowed with each decade of political inaction. Younger people will bear the overwhelming majority of the consequences—rising seas, intensifying weather events, disrupted food systems, climate-driven migration—for decisions made during a period when the Boomer generation held the levers of political and economic power.
It is difficult to overstate how this shapes the younger generation’s emotional posture toward the older one. When you believe, with some justification, that the people asking for your patience are the same people whose collective inaction may have compromised your future, patience does not come naturally. It feels like being asked to be polite to the person who set your house on fire.
This is not an argument that every individual Boomer is personally responsible for climate change or the housing crisis. That would be absurd. But it is an argument that younger people’s frustration is not irrational, and any honest attempt to bridge the generational divide must begin by acknowledging that the grievances on this side of the gap are real, material, and consequential—not merely a matter of hurt feelings or youthful impatience.
The Exhaustion of Explaining
There is also an emotional cost to being the generation that is perpetually asked to “educate” the one before it. Many younger people—particularly those from marginalized communities—have spent years patiently explaining why certain language is harmful, why certain assumptions are outdated, why certain jokes land differently than they used to. They have done this at family dinners, in workplaces, on social media, in classrooms.
At some point, patience runs out—not because the younger person lacks compassion, but because the emotional labor of perpetual translation is genuinely exhausting. When someone asks “Why can’t you just explain it nicely?” they are often unaware that the person they are asking has already explained it nicely dozens of times, to dozens of people, and has watched the explanation be dismissed, ignored, or weaponized in response.
This does not excuse cruelty. But it does contextualize the sharpness that older people sometimes encounter. The tone is often the scar tissue of a hundred previous conversations that went nowhere.
Part IV: The Empathy Gap
Fear Misread as Malice
With the legitimate grievances of younger generations fully acknowledged, it becomes possible—and necessary—to examine the other side of the collision with equal honesty.
What we are witnessing in the generational friction of the 2020s is not, at its core, a simple moral conflict with clear heroes and villains. It is a collision between two fundamentally different ways of processing reality, each with its own blind spots.
Older generations are experiencing cognitive overload and what can only be described as grief—grief over a lost world, a lost sense of competence, and a lost feeling of being at home in the culture around them. Younger generations, looking at the outward symptoms of that grief—the defensiveness, the retreat to familiar language, the resistance to new norms—are often interpreting it as malice.
When someone is overwhelmed, they freeze. They get defensive. They retreat to what feels safe. From the outside, especially to someone who has never experienced that particular form of disorientation, the retreat looks like hostility. It looks like a refusal to care. But more often than not, it is fear and exhaustion wearing the mask of stubbornness.
Naming the Exception
A word of necessary honesty here, because this argument only works if it does not flinch from the uncomfortable parts.
Some resistance to change is malice. Some nostalgia is for the oppression, not just the stability. There are people in every generation who use “tradition” as a shield for prejudice, who weaponize their discomfort to deny others their dignity, and who have had every opportunity to learn but have chosen, deliberately and repeatedly, not to. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and it would undermine the very bridge this essay is trying to build.
The argument here is not that bad faith does not exist. It is that bad faith is not the default setting of an entire generation. The person who refuses to use a colleague’s correct pronouns after being asked directly and repeatedly is making a choice, and that choice deserves to be called what it is. But the person who stumbles over new terminology at Thanksgiving dinner because their brain is still running software from 1987 is not making the same choice. Treating both people identically—with the same contempt, the same moral condemnation—is not justice. It is laziness. And it drives the second person directly into the arms of the first.
The distinction between “struggling to adapt” and “refusing to adapt” matters enormously. Collapsing that distinction is one of the central ways we have made this conflict worse than it needs to be.
The Legacy Software Problem
Consider an analogy from the technology world. Imagine trying to run a modern, hyper-optimized 2025 application on a computer built in 1975. The computer is not “evil” or “bigoted” because it cannot run the software. It simply was not built for that code.
Boomers and Jonesers were “programmed” with a set of social norms, language conventions, and cultural rules that were considered standard and decent for roughly half a century. In the span of just fifteen years, the rules of language, gender, race, and social etiquette have been substantially rewritten. When an older person stumbles over new terminology, it is often not because they dislike the person in front of them. It is because their brain is frantically trying to access a file that does not exist in their mental cabinet. They are overwhelmed, not hateful.
The Boomer and Jones experience of this shift can be summarized in a single anxious sentence: “I am trying my best, but I am terrified of saying the wrong thing and being attacked. The goalposts keep moving.”
The younger interpretation is equally honest, and equally incomplete: “They refuse to learn the new rules. They are stuck in the past.”
Both are partially right. Neither is the whole truth. And the space between them is where most of the damage is being done.
The Magical Past and Its Shadow
A recurring flashpoint in generational conflict is the older cohort’s nostalgia for what they remember as “better times.” For many white, middle-class Boomers and Jonesers, the mid-twentieth century was, in a very tangible, personal sense, magical. You could work a summer job and pay for college tuition. A single income could buy a house. Neighbors knew each other. Kids played outside until the streetlights came on. You had a job for life. When they say “I want to go back to that,” they are expressing a longing for security, community, and predictability.
However, younger people hear something very different. They hear: “I want to go back to a time of segregation, female subjugation, and homophobia.”
Here is the uncomfortable truth that both sides need to reckon with: both are right, and the fact that both are right is precisely what makes this so hard.
The past was structurally oppressive—younger people are correct about that. The economic security and community cohesion that Boomers remember were built, in significant part, on a foundation of exclusion. The GI Bill that funded suburban homeownership was administered in ways that systematically excluded Black veterans. The single-income household that seemed so effortless depended on women’s unpaid domestic labor and limited professional options. The “safe” neighborhoods were safe partly because they were segregated. The stability was real, but it was not equally distributed, and it was not free of cost—the cost was simply borne by people who were largely invisible to the white middle-class families enjoying the benefits.
And yet: for the individual family living in the suburbs of 1958, it also felt safe, abundant, and full of possibility. That feeling was not an illusion, even if its foundations were unjust. Human memory does not store structural analysis. It stores the warmth of the kitchen, the sound of the kids playing outside, the security of knowing Dad’s job would be there tomorrow. Nostalgia for those sensations is not, in most cases, a conscious endorsement of the systems that made them possible.
Because these two realities—the structural injustice and the personal warmth—were so deeply intertwined, it is easy for critics to conflate nostalgia for the stability with an endorsement of the oppression. That conflation is understandable. But it is also, in most cases, inaccurate. And when it is deployed as an accusation rather than explored as a complexity, it does not enlighten anyone. It entrenches them.
Cultural Lag Is Not Bigotry
Sociologists use a term called cultural lag to describe the time it takes for values, habits, and social norms to catch up with technological or structural change. Material culture—the tools and technologies we use—can change almost overnight. Non-material culture—our speech, our values, our sense of what is normal—takes much longer to adjust.
Because the internet has compressed and accelerated social change to an unprecedented degree, the lag is more visible than ever. Older people are living in that lag. They exist in a liminal space where the new rules have arrived but their internal software has not finished updating. Being “in lag” is uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes embarrassing. But it is not the same as being a bigot. Confusing the two shuts down the very dialogue that might help close the gap.
Part V: The Moralization of a Personality Trait
Openness as Virtue, Caution as Sin
Beneath the generational labels and the cultural analysis, there is a deeper structural problem in how modern society processes disagreement about the pace of change. We have, perhaps without realizing it, transformed a psychological personality trait into a moral imperative.
In personality psychology, one of the “Big Five” traits is Openness to Experience. People who score high in this trait naturally enjoy novelty, ambiguity, and new ideas. They get a kind of neurological reward from change. People who score low in openness naturally prefer familiarity, tradition, and established patterns. They find comfort and security in stability.
For most of human history, this was simply a personality difference—one of many ways that human beings varied. The adventurous person became the explorer or the entrepreneur. The cautious person became the village elder, the keeper of traditions, the institutional memory. Both roles were necessary. Both were valued.
Today, however, high openness has been culturally reframed as virtue, and low openness has been reframed as sin. If you adapt quickly to new social norms, you are “enlightened,” “tolerant,” and “kind.” If you struggle to adapt or express a preference for the old ways, you are “bigoted,” “hateful,” and “phobic.” This is a psychological bait-and-switch. We are attacking people for their neurology, not their morals.
The Speed-of-Processing Gap
Because the pace of change is so rapid, society has adopted a survivalist mentality toward cultural adaptation. There is an implicit demand: keep up or be left behind—not just practically, but morally. This creates what might be called a speed-of-processing gap.
The quick adaptor hears a new social rule, integrates it, and repeats it. They are seen as “good.” The slow processor hears the same rule, is confused, needs time to think, asks “why?” or makes a mistake. They are seen as “bad.” The division arises because the quick adaptors often lack the patience for the slow processors. They mistake slowness for resistance, and resistance for malice. The learning curve—that essential, humane recognition that people absorb change at different speeds—has been abolished.
In the past, if someone did not know something, we assumed they simply had not learned it yet. We taught them. Now, if someone does not know the current terminology or the correct social cue, it is treated as a character flaw. “I don’t understand why this is offensive” is met not with explanation but with contempt: “You shouldn’t have to ask. If you have to ask, you’re already part of the problem.”
This shuts down dialogue. When you shut down dialogue, you create division. The person who was confused—but potentially willing to learn—is pushed into a defensive corner. Once defensive, they stop listening. Once they stop listening, they harden. And once hardened, they become the very caricature their critics feared from the beginning. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy driven by impatience.
The Weaponization of the Gap
This personality-level difference is not merely a source of interpersonal friction. It is actively weaponized by political operatives, media algorithms, and social influencers who profit from division.
The playbook is straightforward. On the progressive side, the message is: “Look at those people stuck in the past. They are clinging to offensive, outdated norms. They are the enemy of progress.” This rallies the base by conferring a sense of moral superiority and generates outrage-driven engagement—clicks, views, donations. On the conservative side, the message is: “They are calling you bigots just for living the way you always have. They hate you and your history. They want to erase you.” This rallies the other base by stoking a sense of victimhood and persecution, generating fear-driven engagement.
Both messages contain a grain of truth, which is what makes them so effective and so destructive. The result is that two groups of people who largely share the same fundamental goal—a decent, functioning society—are pitted against each other not because of genuine moral disagreement, but because of different processing speeds, amplified and inflated by people who profit from the friction. The media screams “Culture War!” The reality is closer to a neurological and personality clash, exploited for profit and political power.
The Cruelty of Future Bias
There is a subtle cruelty embedded in judging people by how quickly they adapt to the future. It assumes that the current moment is the pinnacle of moral understanding and that anyone who has not caught up to it is defective.
But this assumption has a built-in trap. Twenty years from now, the social norms will shift again—perhaps in ways we cannot currently imagine. The “quick adaptors” of today will become the “slow processors” of tomorrow. The people currently shouting “tolerance” may find themselves bewildered by a change in the 2040s that makes their own deeply held beliefs seem quaint or regressive.
If we establish the rule that struggling to adapt equals hatred, we are setting a trap that every generation will eventually fall into. We are building a moral framework with no statute of limitations and no grace period—one that will eventually devour its own architects.
Part VI: Scapegoats, Villains, and Accountability
There is a political and media dynamic at play that deserves its own attention. It is deeply satisfying, psychologically, to have a villain. Younger generations face very real, very serious problems: a housing crisis, climate change, student debt, wage stagnation, the erosion of institutional trust. These problems are complex, systemic, and resistant to simple solutions.
It is far easier—and far more emotionally satisfying—to blame “the Boomers” for these problems than to grapple with the Byzantine systems that actually produced them. And because Boomers did, in fact, vote for many of the policies that contributed to these outcomes, the accusation has real weight. It should not be dismissed. The generation that benefited most from public investment in education, infrastructure, and housing subsequently supported the dismantling of many of those same investments. That pattern is documented, and it has consequences that younger Americans live with every day.
But there is a difference between accountability and caricature. Accountability says: “These were the policy choices, these were the consequences, and we need to change course.” Caricature says: “An entire generation is morally bankrupt.” The first is useful. The second is satisfying but useless. It turns tens of millions of individuals—with wildly varying beliefs, circumstances, and levels of complicity—into a monolithic villain. The Boomer who marched for civil rights and the Boomer who opposed it become the same character in the story. The one who voted for climate legislation and the one who denied the science are collapsed into a single archetype.
The media and online discourse amplify the worst examples of Boomer behavior—the angry rant, the racist remark, the tone-deaf Facebook post—and use them to represent the whole generation. This creates a caricature that serves the same function on the progressive side that the “lazy Millennial” trope serves on the conservative side: it provides a convenient target that absorbs anger without requiring anyone to engage with the actual complexity of the problem.
Scapegoating an entire generation may provide a temporary sense of clarity and purpose, but it does nothing to repair the systems that are actually broken. And it inflicts real emotional damage on millions of people—many of whom share the younger generation’s values and voted accordingly—whose primary offense is being old in a world that moves fast.
Conclusion: Aptitude Is Not Attitude
Here, then, is the core argument of this essay, distilled to its simplest form: We have confused aptitude—the natural ability to handle change—with attitude—the willingness to be a decent person.
The person who adapts easily to new norms is not necessarily a saint. They may simply have a brain that likes novelty. The person who struggles is not necessarily a sinner. They may simply have a brain that craves stability. By conflating the two, we have created a kind of moral class system in which the flexible are the aristocrats and the cautious are the peasants. History teaches us that any society built on that kind of division is destined for conflict.
Most of the time, the resistance we see from older generations is not hate. It is disorientation. It is a generation of people watching the world they spent a lifetime mastering dissolve into something they do not recognize, while simultaneously being told that the world they remember was “evil.” They are grieving the loss of their relevance, the loss of their competence, and the loss of the stability that once made their lives feel meaningful and safe.
But understanding must be reciprocal to be meaningful. If this essay asks younger people to extend patience and to distinguish between struggle and malice, it must also ask something of the older generation. It must ask them to stop dismissing the economic and environmental realities that younger people face as “entitlement” or “complaining.” It must ask them to recognize that the world they remember as golden was experienced very differently by people who did not look like them. It must ask them to accept that the discomfort of learning new norms is a small price compared to what marginalized people endured under the old ones. And it must ask them to stop treating every request for change as a personal attack—to cultivate the humility to say “I don’t understand this yet, but I’m willing to try.”
Empathy without accountability is sentimentality. Accountability without empathy is cruelty. What we need is both, directed in both directions, at the same time.
None of this requires lowering standards. People who cause harm should be held responsible, regardless of their age or their generation. But accountability and compassion are not mutually exclusive. We can hold people to higher expectations while still granting them the grace of a learning curve. We can insist on progress while still honoring the disorientation that progress inevitably creates. We can refuse to accept bigotry while still distinguishing it from bewilderment.
The concrete hardens for all of us. The house fills up. The world accelerates. The question is not whether we will someday be the ones struggling to keep up—we will—but whether, when that day comes, we will want to be met with contempt or with understanding.
The answer to that question should guide how we treat the people struggling today. And it should humble us into recognizing that the same grace we hope for is the grace we owe.