It started around Christmas. The end of a decade. The beginning of a new one. While at a personal level there was much to be grateful for, the bigger picture was not so rosy. Problems abound across every sphere with climate change threatening our very existence (see Australia) – although the climate may have to compete with the collapse of the world economy, animal to human diseases and war in the Middle East (1).

Meanwhile, that word ‘Boomer’ (those born between 1946-64) was echoing in my head. No longer is it a word with warm feelings attached. Now it’s a word used to reference the generation that never had it so good while they laid the stage for the mess the world is in. I am a boomer.

A new generation of political leaders was emerging that got younger by the day. First it was early 40s (Trudeau, Macron), then late 30s (Ardern), then early 30s (Marin) and in my electorate of Palmerston North, the National Party have chosen someone who will be 18 at the time of the election as their candidate – he says he wants to be the Prime Minister.

The way things are going he is a shoe-in.

Given the magnitude of the problems, given the assumed culpability of the boomers and given the sense that it was time to make way for younger generations ready and willing to ‘change the world’, perhaps it was time to move to the margins of political debate and cheer on those whose time has come.

Food for thought.

But then I began to think about Boomers, Generation Y, Millennials, Generation X, Generation Z and whatever comes next.

The way these age cohorts are often talked about it would be easy to conclude that they have little in common. Each
exists in its own demarcated bubble. Each getting less relevant as they grow distant from the current world. How, the question is posed, can a boomer have anything relevant to say about the contemporary world that, by dint of their
age, they can know little about? Their world is history.

Convenient as this parcelling up of each generation might seem (it certainly works for advertisers), it pays to remember one salient fact. Research shows that the generations have more in common than they do differences. It is easy to see
why. People born at a particular time are going to share similar experiences.

For example, Generation X grew up with social media in full swing. As a result, they are more likely to be digital natives than previous generations. But that does not mean people born earlier have not experienced social media – they just
interacted with it in different ways.

More generally, despite being born at different times, people who are alive at the same time have many of the same experiences – albeit in different circumstances. This means, to take another example, when we ask what people want from work it turns out they want pretty much the same as each other with a few twists here and there that relate to their age group.

What can be taken from this is that age does make a difference to the way we experience the world but not to the extent that only those closest by age to what is happening today are relevant. We all have a stake in getting things right. We inhabit the same world. The problems will have an impact on us all. The solutions will assist us all.

Which raises the question – so who has the answers? As someone who experienced the 60s and early 70s, I can attest that those who were the equivalent of GenZ at the time thought they had all the answers and considered the previous generation to have done a pretty poor job of just about everything.

It turned out we were only partially right. We did answer some questions, but we got a lot wrong as well.

Along the way we gathered some useful lessons (or ‘learnings’ as is now often said). One such lesson was the importance of combining two things when confronting the need to change society for the better. First, what is the compelling big
picture of the future? Second, what are the detailed workable policies that will make the big picture real?

Right now, these two things are urgently required, and we all have a responsibility to say something about them. I am going to be a bit harsh here. I don’t hear much being said about either of these questions that is convincing.

I do hear the kind of ridiculous bullshit that comes out of the mouths of people like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson as they reduce the complexity of the world we face to nostalgic slogans (Make America Great Again) and the need to avoid being a ‘gloomster’. I do hear a lot of well-placed criticisms about how the world is headed in the wrong direction.

But I do not hear an achievable picture of the future nor the policy detail to get there.

This is an important lacunae in the current frantic debate taking place around the world. It warns us we will not make progress if all we do is wish the problems away or hammer on our social media accounts fronting people up for their big
and small mistakes. As President Obama recently advised, real change is what is needed, not more self-satisfying activism via Twitter.  

Real change can only come when people are able to shift from what they do now to something else. For that to happen people must know what it is they are shifting to. Painting nightmare scenarios will not work. Endlessly rehearsing the problem will not work. Only practical ways to live a different life will take us forward.

All of this means that as the new year starts, I have decided to try and stay relevant.

This is my world too and there is a lot going on that needs fixing. If I am going to make even a tiny contribution, I need to accept the problems are real (something Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison should do) and, while no-one seems to
have a mortgage on the answers, (no mystery here, the problems we face are unique) contribute to the debate.

The worst thing boomers or any generation that finds itself aging can do is to see themselves as irrelevant. That might lead to complacency or defensiveness – ‘OK, I have had my shot, it is up to you now’. It may even lead to a willingness to block change that might cause discomfort. People about to retire are apt to become protective of policies that offer them security at a time when they will be exiting the workforce.

That cannot be allowed to happen. Only an effort to participate in finding solutions to the issues that confront us all will do.

This is what I have been seeking to do in the blogs I have been writing on Pundit about the Third Way during 2019. To be clear, the Third Way is not being offered as the answer (although it does have something to offer). Rather, I have been using it as something to engage with while trying to find an answer. The reason this is useful is that the Third Way grew out of an effort to understand what is driving the New Times we live in. A world of diversity, fragmentation and
differentiation. A world of modernity characterised by globalisation, instantaneous communication, mass transport, the decline of traditional ways of thinking and organising and choice as it relates to consumption and identity.

The Third Way platform (I am referring to Anthony Giddens, not the politicians who adopted a Third Way approach) was a comprehensive and radical effort to address this emerging world that today would also include the rise of China, the reduced position of the United States and climate change. The answers need to be comprehensive and radical because that is all that will work. We need to find a different way to live because this one might/will kill us.

As the politicians who saw possibilities in the Third Way have departed the political scene (Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in particular) it quickly became fashionable among politicians of the centre-left to declare that they had moved on from
what they saw as a failed experiment. The problem is that what they moved on to was not all that clear. Nowhere in the world has a centre-left party been able to articulate clearly what the way ahead might look like and how to get there.

This unfortunate situation does not mean good things have not been done by the centre-left, but it would be fair to say that the world is not being swept along by an optimistic progressive tide. At the moment, it is the opposite as the recent result in Britain illustrates.

But that opposite tide offers clarity by looking backwards when we desperately need to look forward.

This year (an election year in New Zealand and the United States) that is what I hope to continue to do – look forward. To avoid any sense of the Pollyanna, I will be remembering the words of Gramsci – ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.

It is essential to acknowledge just how tough this all is, but there is no excuse for losing hope. Hope is, after-all, what politics should be all about. Hope that something better is actually possible

All the best for 2020.

1.  I wrote this while listening to reports of President Trump ordering the killing of the Iranian military leader General Suleimani. The General was clearly a bad man, so it is hard to lament his passing. It is also the case that the Iranian Regime has a bad track record on all kinds of issues and has been provoking the United States for some time by
causing trouble throughout the Middle East. But it is also true that the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 on false pretences thereby kicking off regional conflicts that continue today. The arrival of Trump has served to make a bad situation worse. He tore up the nuclear deal negotiated by the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, China and Iran. He introduced ‘maximum sanctions’ aimed at forcing Iran to bow to American wishes. He has run an erratic Middle
Eastern and Iran policy that has made it impossible to understand the end-game. He has denied wanting regime change in Iran while at the same time demanding changes that amount to regime change. Now, in the midst of his impeachment and at the beginning of an election year, Trump orders the assassination of a man destined to be the next leader of Iran without any stated plan to handle the inevitable reaction.  Sounds more like old times than new times.