Less shared experiences, weaker bonds

The bonds of friendship between Malaysians who grew up in yesteryears are said to be stronger than today’s generation, and the claim is repeated by those who endured the Emergency, all the way to my generation of the 80s.

Jun 17, 2023



The bonds of friendship between Malaysians who grew up in yesteryears are said to be stronger than today’s generation, and the claim is repeated by those who endured the Emergency, all the way to my generation of the 80s. Reminiscing about the past always seems to be an idyllic, romantic idea.

If you trace back the common factor in these (often seemingly exaggerated) recollections, you often find a theme of hardship. My generation grew up with stories of how lucky we were to have three square meals, when all our parents had to eat was either tapioca or congee once a day. If the stories were to be put together, one would imagine the whole of Malaya to be a giant tapioca plantation where our grandparents huddled together, hiding from Japanese air raids in the morning and harvesting tapioca to share in the evenings, and running spider-fight rackets with banana leaf paper money in between.

On the topic of currency, the value of money is another favourite topic. Again, if the stories are collated, one would be inclined to believe that a single roti canai in the 60s could feed a family of four, but we digress.

My generation, too, growing up in the 90s, had many shared experiences, though perhaps less adversity than the one before. Almost everyone watched the same television programmes — Airwolf, Knight Rider, Mr Bean. Some transcended cultural barriers — Baashha would play on repeat every Deepavali and God of Gamblers every Chinese New Year.

Kids would by and large attend national schools — with pleasant memories of trucks dispensing ice-cold Milo, less pleasant memories of lining up for BCG immunisations, strange ones of lining up by drains learning how to brush our teeth.

Saturday mornings were spent indulging in cartoons. Serial programmes meant coming back at regular intervals and tolerating long ads, especially during prime time.

Even in church, before the emphasis on teaching the meaning of Mass to children (or the existence of overhead projectors with translations of prayers), we would be left to fill these gaps ourselves, and that was part of the joy of learning about our faith, apart from sharing a hurried snack or drink before or after catechism.
Fast forward 20 years, and we are two generations away from millennials. Like tropical storms, we are reverting to Greek in naming future ones this way, and Beta is approaching us fast, as those who grew up in the 80s and 90s shift squarely into the middle of our seven living generations.*

What shared memories will our kids have?
Just as we found it difficult to relate to sharing a television between neighbours, our children will find the idea of waiting for a 56k dialup modem unrelatable, even unbelievable.

Meanwhile, the current generation have developed an appetite for both quantity and quality of choice, with a demand for immediacy — they want it all, and they want it now.

Driven to power these, our own choices have diminished somewhat. The value of our money has diminished, forcing us to expend more time in keeping up with developments the present has to offer, and anticipating the future.

Saturday morning cartoons we enjoyed at home, often together, as our parents gave up their large screens for us, are now replaced with multiple small screens over a table, usually outside home, as we satiate our coffee cravings to start the weekend.

Part of progress, perhaps, as we live our lives trying to tick our weekly boxes and rush through our now longer bucket lists. Holidays are cut short to accommodate more cities and documenting them becomes more important than experiencing them, adapting to today.

In adapting, we sometimes circumnavigate and tiptoe around problems.

National schools’ quality not what it used to be? Send our kids to Chinese or Tamil or private schools.

Higher crime? Gated and guarded communities. Not enough places in local universities? Go private. Government hospitals getting packed, get insurance for everyone.

A large part of the blame can be assigned to successive governments, but perhaps also us, the people, who accept things the way they are, and work around it.

This, sadly, just adds to the divide between our haves and have-nots, and with it the common bonds that bind us together as a Malaysian community. Together with these; values, identities, and relatability. As these now-bubbled communities drift apart, exacerbated by less need to be guarded or sensitive to each other’s feelings, being stuck in new echo chambers by people who think, speak and feel like us, reinforcing our beliefs, even if they may not be right.

It isn’t like we don’t have enough problems to tackle together, but the danger lies in the increasing propensity of seeing these problems from the lenses of only those who are ‘like’ us — replacing the quintessential Ali, Muthu and Ah Chong with more of the same race, or to including those with different pronouns or gender inclusion, or taking account of his/her education — depending now on which segmented bubble we belong to.

The results of these starting steps would reverberate in our children’s adulthood- finding it harder to bond and relate to one another owing to having less in common.

Perhaps going back to basics once in a while would help remind us that we risk too much by simply rushing our families across the finish line, and it is worth spending some idle time with each other, by trucks dispensing ice-cold Milo.

* The Seven Living Generation are:
Greatest Generation – born 1901-1924
Silent Generation – born 1925-1945
Baby Boomer Generation – born 1946-1964
Generation X – born 1965-1979
Millennials or Gen Y – born 1980-1994
Generation Z – born 1995-2012
Generartion Alpha – born 2013 – 2025.

(Emmanuel Joseph oversees IT as his 9-5 job and from 5-9, he serves a few NGOs, think tanks and volunteer groups. He serves as an advisor for Projek Dialog and is a Fellow with the Institute of Research and Development of Policy.)

Total Comments:0

Name
Email
Comments