Relative timescales in intergenerational conversations
Enjoyed a conversation with guests to the Studio D Annex, on new residents landing in an multigenerational community. Newcomers face the challenge of assimilating into established behaviours and practices of the broader community, balanced with their own norms and expectations for what they want to achieve and when.
- In what contexts can or should a newcomer impose change on an established community?
- What is a suitable time frame for changes to occur?
The challenge of answering these questions are more pronounced when the ages of the different parties are significantly different. A mental model the Studio D team found useful to frame intergenerational conversations for our research projects is to consider ‘time’ from the perspective of people in different life stages, shown in Figure 1. We can recognise that by one—probably important metric—a calendar year represents something different based on how long someone has lived.
FIGURE 1. A calendar year as a fraction of a lifespan.
Imagine a conversation between an 80-old long term resident of a community and a 20-year old newcomer. Based on their life spans, the default expectations for ‘a meaningful time-frame for change’ for a 80-year old is likely to be far longer than for their 20-year old counterpart.
To tease out the different expectations we can crudely reframe Figure 1 to compare a single calendar year relative to different ages, shown in Figure 2, with a 20-year old as the baseline.
FIGURE 2. The relative length of ‘a calendar year’, with a baseline set for a 20-year old
Of course age is only one of many factors that shape our perceptions of time. For example, the older a person is, the more likely their assumptions are affected by their lived experiences. For example:
Compare a 35-year rural farmer with an urban consultant of the same age. The rural farmer is more likely to frame time in terms of (preparation, planting, growing and harvesting) seasons, whereas an urban consultant may frame time in terms of billable hours, the duration of projects worked on and outcomes, and fast paced urban life. In both cases, the cadence of events in their environment shape expectations.
Attitudes to time are core to our belief system—an often unquestioned assumption of ‘how things are’—and it can be deeply jarring to land in a culture that frames time in a different way (A Geography of Time is a good entry point into this cultural-assumptions rabbit hole).
A commonly made distinction is between cultures that run on ‘calendar time’ and those that run on ‘event time’. For example, in a calendar time culture a bus leaves according to its schedule regardless of other contextual factors, whereas in an event time culture the bus leaves when it is full—dependent on the context and events that occur around it.
There’s a lot more to unpack here—perception of time can be shaped by a myriad of things: personality, technology adoption, a ‘comfortable’ cadence of communications, exposure to novelty, investment-in and the consequences of outcomes, prior experience of different forms of change (or momentous change such as the Cultural Revolution in China), or time-anchoring events (the birth of a child, moving home).
For a researcher engaged in a multigenerational conversation, the trick is to ask the right questions to reveal these differences.