What, exactly, makes you a grownup? And how has that changed over the years?

Because it definitely has changed. At least since World War II and probably even before that, it has seemed to successive generations that the generations before them were more competent, organized, tough, and strong than them.

Partly, this is an illusion created by the power gap between parents and their kids, and kids’ need to feel that their parents are powerful and in control of things and that adults, in general, know what they are doing.

That is the only way a kid can feel safe enough to be able to relax and be a kid. Part of the job of a parent is to help maintain this belief, even if privately you feel like you have no idea what you are doing and any minute now it will all fall apart.

But there is real truth to this idea as well. With every generation, we specialize more and end up knowing less. The human animal, despite shaking our spears at the sky and declaring our individuality, actually becomes more interdependent with each successive generation. The role of the adult as an individual lessens, and the adult as a society emerges.

The parents of the Greatest Generation were tough. They ran farms, built their own homes, raised animals, bought and traded goods, pumped cisterns, and in general worked a hell of a lot harder than their kids ever would. Even city dwellers faced far more hardship, death, and horror than we can possibly imagine in our safe and golden age.

Their children survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, and built the very foundations of modern society. They made it through childhoods plagued by diseases like polio and the Spanish Flu, wars that destroyed entire nations, and poverty so severe that people ate their shoes. They might not have been quite the rugged loners of their parents generation, but they were tough, resourceful, and survived lives that seem like living hell to us now.

Then came their children, the Baby Boomers. Much has been made of their self-indulgent ways, but they still managed to have families, careers, and homes. Sure, they might not have been (or had to be) as tough and competent as their parents, but they at least had their lives together.

And then we come to my generation, Generation X. Very few of the people my age that I know have anything like the sort of lives their parents had at their age. They sometimes have some of the aspects of it, like a family, or a career, but very few of them have the whole basket of competencies that our parents had.

And what did we do? We overprotected our kids and created a generation even less capable than ourselves.

So that is what has been happening to us as individuals over successive generations. And yet, somehow, society continues. In fact, it has never been better.

It seems like as individuals lose competencies, society as a whole gains them. While generation after generation becomes less capable, society becomes more just, sane, safe, secure, and healthy. Just what the heck is going on? Where is all the competency coming from?

The only possible answer is that as we develop our modern societies, said societies become more complex and interconnected. The competencies that once had to reside within individuals now resides in systems. The further we modernize, the more power, authority, and competence flows away from traditional power structures and more into the spaces in between the power blocs.

In short, the competency becomes less of a hierarchical strength and more of an emergent phenomenon.

Way back in our hunter-gatherer days, there was no specialization apart from gender differences. All men were hunters. All women were gatherers. All hunters had the same set of skills. Ditto gatherers. A hunter could survive on his own for weeks because of all the jungle lore he had acquired over the years.

But as populations grew, specialization was required. First, the chieftain, who organized and led the hunters. Then the shaman, someone who neither hunted nor gathered but whom they supported because he was their intermediary with the unknown.

Then as populations grew still further, you have the blacksmith, the seamstress, and countless other specialized jobs emerging. And always it was the same tradeoff : in return for the kind of quality and quantity a society gets by having people who do nothing but their trade, society has to support the specialists.

Thus, it could easily seem like generation after generation, people became less competent. If a hunter has a son who’s a blacksmith, he could very well say that his son would be helpless on his own, and he’d be right.

What he is missing, though, is that while his son is less capable of surviving on his own, the society in which the son operates is greatly enriched by having someone who knows all that there is to know about working metal and making durable metal goods. The son’s competencies might be more specialized, but they still require a great deal of knowledge, both applied and theoretical, and his hunter father would be just as helpless in the son’s world as vice versa.

So perhaps it is mere narcissistic neurosis to compare ourselves to our parents and bewail our lack of their apparent competence. We are merely products of the process of specialization that is the very foundation of civilization and that has been going on since the time of the caveman.

We don’t know everything our parents did. But they did not know a lot of it before they had us either. And they would be lost in the modern world we understand, just as one day we all will be lost in the world our children create.

We don’t lose competency. We simply build it into the world we create.

And that conclude another meandering diatribe. I will talk to all you nice people out there again tomorrow!