Also known as: Shifting Baseline Syndrome
The effect of each generation perceiving the way the world is when they grew up as normal.
Over longer periods of time, this can lead to extreme changes that aren’t perceived at all by the current generation.
A few examples:
Cars in populated areas
- When cars were first introduced to cities, people fought against them. You could walk anywhere and cities were much calmer, quieter and connected environments.
- People were pushed onto smaller and smaller parts of the public space, laws like jaywalking were invented to clear the street of people. People fought against it the whole time.
- Now people accept the vast majority of city space being dedicated to cars as normal.
- This is only the case because they didn’t experience the change, the before state.
Environmental Changes
- Snowier winters or having your car covered in bugs after a road trip
- Light pollution breaking connection with the night sky
The consequences of not keeping this front of mind are extreme.
Effort needs to be put in not only to preserve historical evidence of change, but to question everything you think of as normal.
Look into the historical roots and you may find that may be the victim of a great injustice, or the perpetrator of a terrible crime.
Cultural Extinction
- Entire cultures can be wiped out and simply forgotten within a few generations
Language
- Languages like those of the british isles or of the native americans can change and be forgotten
Land Ownership
- A place like Northern Ireland, which was the result of colonization and fought against by the Irish who live there.
- The descendent of colonizers will grow up in a place they had no choice in and will call home.
Loss of Rights
- Certain rights that would have been inalienable to previous generations can be taken away in this manner.
- A right to privacy comes to mind
- You can’t take a right away nearly as easy as never allowing it in the first place. Generational amnesia enables this trick to take place, and for entire generations to grow up with less rights (or more!) than their parents.
Taking for Granted
- Forgetting how hard life was in the past, leading to over consumption, living beyond ones means
The list goes on and on
A solution here is once again extreme empathy.
But we can never fully escape this effect. Only be as aware as possible.
If the sky turned green tomorrow, you certainly wouldn’t forget that it was always blue before.
But those born the day after would never know a blue sky.
Learn from history, and choose the things you believe in, not what you see as normal.