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Category: Miscellaneous

Are we the last generation? No, we’re just the latest buzzword.

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Article written with the use of Artificial Intelligence

How often do we hear phrases like:

We are the last generation that can save the planet.

We are the last generation to know life without the internet.

Effective expressions, often used in political, environmental, motivational, or nostalgic speeches. But there’s a serious problem behind these formulas: the incorrect use of the term “generation.”

In everyday language, the idea has spread that “generation” simply means “us today,” as if the entire living population belonged to the same temporal, historical, and cultural category. This is conceptually incorrect.

In reality, generations follow one another in time, overlap, and coexist. A child born today does not belong to the same generation as someone in their 50s or 70s. Therefore, saying that “we are the last generation that…” presupposes a uniformity that doesn’t exist.

Generations are distinguished (and renewed)

In demography, a generation is defined as the average interval between the birth of parents and the birth of their children, usually around 25-30 years. But in sociocultural parlance, generations are identified in even shorter cycles—often every 7-15 years—to reflect changes in values, historical references, access to technology, and educational models.

Here’s an example of how they are commonly divided:

  • Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964)
  • Generation X (1965–1980)
  • Millennials (1981–1996)
  • Generation Z (1997–2012)
  • Generation Alpha (2013 onwards)

All these generations coexist in the world today, each with different experiences, roles, and responsibilities in society.

A Rhetorical (and Ideological) Problem

The expression “we are the last generation that…” is also a rhetorical shortcut. It serves to:

  • create alarm or moral urgency
  • evoke a sense of collective responsibility
  • or, conversely, a form of nostalgia/self-celebration (“we know what real life was like”).

But it is not neutral: it is a way of simplifying reality and speaking on behalf of everyone, without distinguishing who is speaking or who is being addressed.

In some cases, it can even contribute to generating artificial tensions, as in discussions of “generational conflict” (young vs. old), shifting attention from the true structural causes of problems to imaginary faults.

Words are not secondary details: they structure thought, guide the way we interpret reality and talk about responsibilities, rights, and possibilities. Misusing the term “generation” simplifies a complex reality, preventing a clear analysis of problems (environmental, social, political) that instead require depth and precision.

Scicli in video

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A couple videos of my birthplace city

http://vimeo.com/108656950

New Year’s Day in spring

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Here are some photos I took this afternoon in Donnalucata, after 5 days off I took for Epiphany, taking advantage of the holiday being on thursday Jan 7 and adding two days on Jan 5 and 8:

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The last three days we’ve had full sun and a temperature around 20C° during the morning… while in other places around Italy it was snowing and people were fighting with ice! It’s not anything new anyway, generally weather in this corner of Sicily is almost always mild, and we are used to consider temperature around 8-10C° as “cold“, since during most part of winter it keeps around 12-15C°, especially on the coast.

Previous Christmas’ weekend has not been very cold too. I take the chance to say something about local Christmas’ tradition:

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In Ragusa’s province the Christmas’ Eve dinner mainly consists of scacce. But in Scicli and Donnalucata’s area at Christmas those scacce take a different name and become pastizzi. Pastizzi are a sort of quiches, and they are baked in round baking pans, without the typical focaccia shape. They have no relationship with maltese pastizzi, of which I have recently discovered. There are many kinds of pastizzi with different stuffing, and again the tradition says to bake them all, so that each guest can taste many slices of the various kinds. The most popular ones are those with broccoli, with ricotta spinach and raisins, with meat and topinambur, with dogfish and spaghetti, with eggplant onions and tomato, and so on.

The existence of many variants of pastizzi and the habit to bake them all every time has given origin to many ironic family jokes on leftovers in the past, since they lasted for weeks and weeks and became a sort of family food torture between relatives. Nowadays generally families bake only few kinds of them, only those that are likely to be eaten in a short time without compromising appetite for following days’ meals. Furtherly, in the past they were the only holiday food on eves, while now many other typical dishes have entered sicilian holiday habits, dishes from other regions of Italy that are commonly considered holiday food, like cotechino with lentils, panettone and pandoro, chocolate turron (here the traditional turron is made of almonds or sesame, and it’s called cubaita or giuggiulena).

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .