Or, generations in fiction. Or, speed of cultural change. Or, lack of cultural change. Or, why do my clothes look normal (ish) on a college campus? And how should it affect your stories?

There’s been a weird melding of generations over the past few decades. I haven’t set foot in a college classroom for nearly fifteen years, but I could dress in my everyday clothing and pass for a college student. Until I opened my mouth, anyway, and started shouting down the professors for being collectivist idiots.

Oh, wait, I did that when I was really in college, too.

But that’s beside the point. If I went to a school of Ag, jeans, hiking boots, and a t-shirt would allow me to blend in. If I went to the other side of campus, I could pass for normal in black yoga pants, sneakers, and a t-shirt of a slightly different cut. Again, these are the clothes I wear every day, as a woman in her thirties, and I could pass for a late teens undergrad until they looked at my face or I started talking.

Video games and animated TV shows used to be for kids. Young people would dye their hair or go through an emo phase. Teenage girls wore miniskirts. But they grew out of it, or at least, that was the perception. Over the past twenty years or so, the boundaries have blurred, and I at least find it impossible to tell a person’s age with any kind of accuracy. Clothing, hair, interests, and hobbies used to provide clues, but not as much anymore.

What caused this phenomenon? Fear of aging? Cultural shock after 9/11? The internet? Nostalgia for the 90s? A rise in political activism taking people’s attention in new directions?

Probably a bit of everything, and the proportions change according to the precise bit of the culture that you’re examining.

As far back as the medieval period, fashions and manners changed from one decade to the next. Much slower than our modern concept of fashion, which should change every year, and isn’t, but in a time when the maximum speed of travel was about thirty miles an hour- the speed of a galloping horse- and a garment would easily last for a decade of daily wear, the change from laces to buttons in the 1300s, the increase in ruff sizes in the late 1500 and early 1600s, and the shift from stays to corsets in the early 1800s would’ve been fast fashion indeed, and mostly the province of the wealthy.

We, on the other hand, have the internet. The beginning of a sentence can be heard halfway around the world by the time you’ve said the end of the same sentence. And maybe that’s part of why pop culture seems to have stagnated; we have so much information available to us that people can choose to remain in whatever entertainment decade they like. The TV, theater, fashion magazines, etc., aren’t telling them to move on, so they don’t.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing, and there are indications that change has always been happening under the surface, and is starting to become more obvious again- which also has its ups and downs.

But it does affect how we see different generations and cultural change, and what we put in our own stories.

Written stories are supposed to be more clearly drawn than real life is. Because there’s a limited amount of space on a page, and a limited number of pages readers will tolerate- even if they love the story!- every detail counts and some nuance gets lost.

Make your fictional generations more distinct than real life, or have a good reason why a twelve-year-old is acting and talking like a thirty-year-old.

As for how to do that?- some of it is down to character voice. Children use simpler vocabulary and mouth formations when they speak, and if the story is from a child’s POV, they’ll use the same simpler vocabulary in the narrative; teens aren’t sure of themselves, so they’re slightly belligerent to make up for it- in previous eras, they grew out of it, but lately I’m seeing and hearing an interesting increase in the teenage uncertain/belligerent combination among people in their twenties and thirties. Lots of possible explanations, mostly political and societal.

Ceremonies of various kinds can help draw the boundaries. Weddings are a big one, of course, but there’s also examples like ‘breeching’ a young boy to show that he’s no longer a baby; babies of both sexes wore dresses/skirts in the past, because it was easier to change their diapers, and a boy’s first set of proper trousers was a sign that he was growing up. There are also specifically religious ceremonies like bar/bat mitzvahs or Confirmation to show that the child is becoming a young adult with adult responsibilities.

Appearance and attitude matter. Even body language can help the reader distinguish how old a character is. Have each generation wear different clothes, listen to different music, play different games, talk about different events- or the same events in different ways. It’ll add to your characters; it’ll add to your world-building. Your readers will thank you. With any luck, they’ll express that thanks with money!