When speaking of generation in a social and human sense, it may be referring to two different types of elements. In the first place, generation is that capacity that the human being has to elaborate products, phenomena or events of various kinds. However, the most common and widespread meaning for this term in the social sphere is that which has to do with age groups developed in succession and which have specific customary, ethical and cultural characteristics.
The concept of generation used in the sense of social age groups is undoubtedly one of the most interesting for Humanity. This concept tells us about indefinite sets of individuals who are born in a similar period of years (approximately between ten and thirty years of time are enough to mark a generation) and who share cultural, moral or belief elements that have marked their lives.
It is through this sense that the term generation combines social and cultural elements with biological and physical elements, since the latter also vary (although minimally) over time, adapting to the peculiarities of each era. For example, in some Third World countries, there is talk of undernourished generations and with negative future expectations due to the lack of development of all the biological and physical capacities of an average human being.
The interesting thing about the succession of generations is that many times it happens that within the same family group numerous realities and ways of seeing the world can coexist since children coexist with parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Normally, a family with three generations is the most common case of generational coexistence, although many times the cultural or social differences between pairs of generations are not clearly delimited.
Currently, from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, Western societies have presented such significant cultural changes that every ten years a new generation occurs with interests, perspectives, attitudes and values completely opposite to the previous one and the one that will continue in the line historical.
