The Gear of an Era Is Not Round

A conversation between Dou Wentao and Papi Jiang can be read as a typical dialogue between two generations. On the surface, it is a conversation between a traditional media figure and a representative of the internet age. One comes from television, print media, long-form programmes and a slower public rhythm. The other comes from short video, self-media, platform traffic and personal branding. It is easy to see this kind of exchange as a simple handover between old and new, where the younger generation naturally represents the future, while the older generation is assumed to carry nostalgia and hesitation.

But I do not think the matter is that simple.

Young people are naturally more inclined to believe that they represent the future, because they stand closer to new technologies, new platforms, new languages and new ways of living. This judgement is not entirely wrong. Every generation of young people masters some new tool and adapts more easily to the rhythm of its own time. But being newer does not mean being better. Evolution is not necessarily progress. Something can become faster, more popular and more widely distributed without becoming more advanced, more free, more rational or closer to a complete human life.

There is one misunderstanding that should be avoided. To criticise an era is not to criticise the young people who live in it. Young people are thrown into this environment and have to find their own way to survive inside it. They are not necessarily the source of the problem. Very often, they are the ones who bear its pressure. The real question is not whether one generation is better than another. The real question is where the larger structure of the age is taking human beings.

We often imagine history as a round gear. As long as it turns, we assume it is moving forward. This image is very seductive, because it gives us a sense of stability, continuity and irreversibility. Technology advances, information spreads, lifestyles change, and we easily compress all of this into one sentence: the age is always progressing.

But the real gear of history may not be round. It may be more like a cam.

A cam also rotates, but its movement is not even. It has high points and low points. At one moment, it lifts a system upward; at another, it lets the system fall. It is not motionless, and it is not simply moving backward. It moves through irregular rises and drops. Seen in this way, what we call historical progress may simply be a stage in which the cam happens to be pushing upward. At another stage, the same historical movement may turn into a downward return.

People born in the 1960s may feel this movement especially strongly. Their lives did not unfold inside one continuous age. They moved through several almost different worlds. In childhood, many experienced material scarcity and a highly closed social environment. In youth, they encountered the sudden opening of the 1980s. Later, they went through marketisation, globalisation, the rise of real estate, the internet age, and now the age of platforms, algorithms, widening inequality and a public atmosphere that often feels tighter again.

So their judgement about the present should not be dismissed too quickly as nostalgia. Of course they may miss their youth, but what they miss may not be youth alone. It may also be a real upward movement that once existed in the structure of the time. The 1980s can still stir strong emotions in that generation not merely because they were young then. Youth certainly colours memory, but the special quality of the 1980s did not come only from personal age. It came from the turning of history itself.

When a long-closed society suddenly opens, when knowledge regains dignity, when literature, thought, music, education and personal destiny all seem to rise at once, many positive and upward forces are layered together. That decade was not wealthy, and it was far from perfect. But it did give people the feeling that the world was becoming larger, that the future was unfolding, and that a person might change his or her position through learning, expression and effort. In the language of the cam, that was a moment when the cam of the age happened to press upward. What people felt was not merely a youthful illusion, but the real vibration of a historical structure lifting itself.

This also explains why some people later feel that the age is no longer moving forward, but falling back in certain respects. They have not only grown older. They have also lived through changes in the shape of the age itself. If a person at twenty feels that society is opening, and at sixty feels that society is closing, this is not necessarily because he has become old and conservative. It may be because the age he met in youth was indeed opening, while the age he meets in later life is indeed contracting.

We can look at reality directly. Has the development of real estate really made life more secure for most people? Has the political climate really made public discussion more open? Is the widening gap between rich and poor merely a temporary side effect of social transformation? The technology industry has created enormous wealth, but where has that wealth gone? How much of the so-called progress has any direct relationship with the daily lives of ordinary people, and who has truly benefited from it?

Of course, society has not made no progress at all. Medicine, communication, transport, information tools and artificial intelligence have all advanced in real ways. The problem is that we cannot take partial technological progress and package it as the overall progress of an entire era. A society can advance in tools while declining in spirit. It can advance in efficiency while declining in freedom. It can increase total wealth while reducing fairness. It can offer more entertainment while weakening the inner stability of human beings.

This is why the phrase “young people represent the future” needs to be understood more carefully. Young people do live in the future, but they do not automatically represent progress. The future is later in time. It is not necessarily higher in value. Something that appears later can also be a deeper predicament. Something more popular can also be something that has adapted more successfully to a lower-quality environment.

Likewise, the older generation’s suspicion of the present should not be reduced to nostalgia. Nostalgia exists, and memory does beautify the past. But the existence of nostalgia does not invalidate every judgement about decline. When someone says that an age is getting worse, it is not always because he cannot let go of the past. Sometimes it is because he has seen structural decline: a decline in trust between people, a decline in the quality of public language, a decline in the sense that work is rewarded, a decline in certainty, and a decline in the inner space of life.

The real question is not who is young and who is old. The real question is who sees the structure of the age more accurately.

If we imagine history as a round gear, we will naturally believe that as long as it turns, it moves forward. But if history is more like a cam, then we have to admit that it does not guarantee continuous ascent. It rises and falls. Sometimes it releases human possibility, and sometimes it compresses human space. Sometimes it makes people freer, and sometimes it makes them more anxious. Sometimes it allows ordinary people to share the fruits of progress, and sometimes it merely gives a smaller group stronger powers of control.

This is not pessimism. Pessimism assumes that everything will become worse. That is not what I mean. I only mean that we should not automatically treat “later” as “better”, or “change” as “progress”. Whether an age is progressing depends on whether it gives more people real dignity, freedom, stability, creativity and the possibility of a meaningful life. If these things are shrinking, then no matter how advanced the technology becomes, no matter how lively the platforms appear, and no matter how fashionable the language sounds, it is difficult to insist that society as a whole is truly progressing.

So the judgement of an age should not be explained only by the age of the person making the judgement. When young people feel that the world is moving forward and older people feel that it is falling back, the surface difference may be generational. But underneath it may be the different experience produced by the cam of history occupying different positions. The upward movement we saw when we were young may have been real. The downward movement we feel in later life may also be real.

The gear of an era is not round. It does not automatically move forward simply because it turns. It is more like a cam, lifting some things and pressing others down through an irregular motion. What matters is not whether we stand on the side of the new or the old. What matters is whether we can see clearly what this cam is pushing upward, and what it is pushing down.

There is one more layer that should be made clear. If our generation once stood on the rising side of the historical cam, then we were, at least in part, beneficiaries of that historical dividend. There is nothing to show off about this, because it was not purely the victory of personal ability. It was also an age that happened to lift many people upward. In that sense, when we face the young people of today, we should feel not superiority, but a deep sense of apology. We once enjoyed an age that was opening upward, yet we did not hand the next generation a world that is equally open, stable and worth expecting.

So this essay is not an accusation against young people, nor is it a lecture from the old to the young. It is closer to a sigh from someone who has reached a certain point in life. We have seen the light of an age when the cam pressed upward, and we have also seen how it later pressed many things down. But if the cam can fall, it can also turn upward again. The world has its cycles, and history has its rises and drops. The next better turn will come, and perhaps it will not be very far away. What matters now is that before it comes, we should not mistake decline for progress, and we should not leave the young alone inside a difficult world that we have all helped to create.