The previous generation will always lament that the next generation is nowhere as brilliant as theirs: the previous generation is hard-working and has better self-control, is willing to spend large amounts of time slaving away, and has a better sense of honor and morals. But the next generation is also lamenting that the previous generation is not as intelligent and informative as they are: the next generation has an expanded common sense and set of skills that is uniquely adapted to the new environment, and is proved to be always smarter on average than the previous generation.

I remember comparing myself continuously to my parents on this regard in my adolescence or college age. On one hand, they will make a lot of mistakes on analytical tasks and are extremely slow at learning. They would be embarrassingly bad at thinking about things that they have not done before. What would be incredibly infuriating is that sometimes they are slow to see their own hypocrisy. On the other, they have the incredible endurance and an unimaginably large repository of near-psychic wisdom and knowledge that somehow always manages to get things done. Maybe they have long-lost knowledge on how to operate older “technological artifacts,” or have brute swaths of data in their head and deep expertise of multiple things that we are just beginning to learn about in school, or have interesting skills (such as driving a car without a GPS, being able to tell who was going to mug you while not being bogged down by political over-correctness, and the ability to strike a deal with others or you as their children and making you think that it was your decision all along).

Whether being the younger or older generation, we have to be humble to recognize that despite how disappointing the other generation might be, they are not necessarily all worse or all better, or that some of the things that they are might not necessarily be worse or better. We must trust our kids to be uniquely equipped for the next era, the next two decades that they will inhabit, just as we were uniquely equipped for the previous era that we inhabited, and our parents were uniquely equipped for the era that they inhabited. The age of AI, of renewed global tensions, of societies and pundits that pride themselves on being post-Christian, of an over-correcting back-swing from atheism and post-modernism to religious mysticism, is dawning upon us. Fact-checking is getting harder and harder. New jargon and slang are being formed that creates psychological landscapes with their barriers and inroads to the gospel that we can no longer map out. We are afraid that the next generation might not know as well as we do what the correct belief and way to navigate these issues are, but we must trust that the next generation will also have the powerful work of the Holy Spirit in them to hold on to the truth of the Bible in an updated environment. The future years are years we cannot see, nor are they years that we are intimately familiar with and are able to anticipate. So we need to trust that God will be with them even then, and present the faith in a genuine and non-controlling way. Likewise, as the next generation, we should read up and seek to understand the previous generation’s past environment, which will help us understand why they say the things they do now. We cannot just say, in our hearts, that they are short-sighted and not updated and hypocritical—for we have the benefit of accumulated hindsight without ever putting in as much effort in discovery as they do—but we have to work with our environment so that we have something to give to the next generation, to be careful that we ourselves are not hypocritical nor cynical such that we are unable to give to the next as much as the previous have given us now.

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