The Repeat — Summary

At every gathering of my peers someone says our generation is the first to really understand. The blank after the word changes. Mental health. Power. Climate. Identity. The structure does not. I have said versions of it myself, and will say it again before I finish writing about why I should not.

I love my generation. This is not a takedown.

The vocabulary is precise. We can name forms of harm that had no name a generation ago, and the naming is a real achievement: it changes what can be done because it changes what can be said.

We are also certain. The certainty is the part that gives us away.

Every generation in the record arrived with new language for old problems and mistook it for a new understanding of the problem. The sixties had it, with a confidence that now reads as beautiful and a little embarrassing, which is how ours will read to whoever comes next.

Not a flaw. It is how a generation works. You cannot inherit the world without believing you understand it better than the people handing it over. The certainty is the fuel. It burns off around the time the next generation arrives certain you got it wrong.

AI is folded into our version now. We are the first to grow up with this, we say, the first who will get the relationship right. Some of it is true. It is the same sentence with a new noun.

I wonder whether the people in the room will recognize this when they are older, or whether recognition is reserved for the ones who study the pattern.

Someone is talking right now about how we are the first to really see. I am nodding. I mean it. I also hear the century behind the sentence.