The Millennial Bug

We're taught in life that the thing that sets humanity apart from animals, amongst many others, is that our evolution is sequential and cumulative.  That each generation that comes after the one before it, stands on the foundations that it built for them and is therefore able to climb higher as we develop as a species.

I and my generation no longer believe this to be true.  We don't even know if the generations that came before us really believed this or if they just never questioned it.  Whichever is the case is inconsequential now.  The truth is self evident, that our generation and the ones that are already coming after ours are being forced to build a new world from the ground up - whilst the generations that came before us continually try to tear that asunder, not content with the mess and misery that have already created, they are determined to screw up any chance at a legacy.

To be a millennial is a statement the definition of which has been debated far and wide, but the definition I accept is any person who turned 18 on or after the turn of the Millennium.  For sake of clarity that's anyone born between 1982 and 2000.  Why do I cut it off at 2000?  Well because society has already decided to define another generation - one which they can't seem to agree a name for, but the one I see most often is "Generation Z" which includes everyone born after the year 2000.  I like to think of the "Z" as foreshadowing, that perhaps Z being the last letter might be an indication that they are the finality of segregation and that they will be the last to be grouped into a "generation" and that a new world will emerge, a post-generational world.  Others are a lot more cataclysmic when it comes to the symbolism of that moniker however.

18 years ago at the turn of the Millennium there was a phenomenon called the Millennium Bug that was a quirk in the way computers and their software had been programmed.  In a nutshell it was to do with the way they handled dates, that they had been coded to interpret dates as 2 digits as nobody had the foresight to contemplate the need for something larger.  The bug of course was averted in the end after billions of dollars and millions of man hours were devoted to upgrading computer systems.  I like to think of this as a metaphor for society in its current state.  There is something wrong with the world, and we need to fix it.  The only way we can do that is to acknowledge that this is not the way things are meant to be, and that we must change if we are to survive as a society.  I call this the Millennial Bug not because of who or what created it, but simply because it is the Millennial generation and the generations that come after us that are going to have to fix it.  You can't solve a problem using the same thinking that created it, we must evolve.  We must look to the future not the past, we must embrace the new not the old.  We must embrace the ideas of those who will inherit this world from us, they are the ones who will have to live in it when we are gone.