No generation is new.

Michele Lem Yakouba
Apr 24
4 min read

Updated: Jul 26

Do we, today more than ever, in this era of change, need new rebels?

by Michele Lem Yakouba

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends,

fleeting fashions, and popular opinion.

Jack Kerouac

I am a child of my generation, of those born without art in the gray 1980s, in that provincial twilight that smelled of cheap cigarette smoke and faded promises. Mine is a generation that knew neither wars, nor barricades, nor the clamor of revolutions that shook the pages of history books. A generation born poorly, in quiet but already resigned, under the weight of an inheritance we didn’t choose, frightened by a political class teetering on the brink, by those who lived through years of lead, bombs in piazzas, massacres, with our parents’ tense faces speaking in hushed tones, as if the past could still explode within the walls of our homes. Too tied to that looming past, heavy as a boulder, which obscured a future we couldn’t glimpse, we grew up in towns with narrow streets, amid the peeling walls of elementary schools and televisions broadcasting the collapse of a distant world, a future opening elsewhere. But for us, the future didn’t arrive. It was an idea stifled by teachers still using the chipped chalk of the 1960s, by fathers who dreamed of a steady job as the only redemption, by mothers who sewed their own fears onto us. Don’t take risks, the world out there is dangerous, they said, and we, too small, too provincial, let ourselves be convinced that rebellion was a luxury for others.

The world was changing, yes, we knew it would change, but our story remained still,

trapped in a script written by those who came before us.

Our education clung to what had already been, too small to escape the archaic patterns rooted in our lineage. Elsewhere, history was being made, but ours wasn’t changing.

Creativity, that fire that sparked cultural revolutions elsewhere, here was a lantern extinguished by banal rules, by laws written by those who wanted to steer our lives. Every grand dream was bent, filed down, until it fit the mold of a life that wasn’t ours. We were destined to take their jobs, to continue their obsolete lives. Every rebellious spirit was tamed with the certainties of life: a steady job, a family, a certain death.

“There was a time when we were young and restless, children of an

era that promised much and left us little. We grew up amid the rubble

of shattered dreams and the digital illusions of a modernity that

updated too quickly to be grasped.”

Yet, beneath the ashes of that resignation, something burned. We felt it in the afternoons spent staring at the sky beyond the rooftops, in the songs screamed at the top of our lungs in broken car radios, in the books we read in secret, stolen from dusty libraries. We knew the world was bigger than those streets, but we didn’t know how to reach it. We were children of a suspended country, one of political scandals and closing factories, a country that handed us a future already worn out, like a second-hand suit.

Today, looking back, we wonder if we could have done more. If we could have broken that yoke of stale certainties and run toward the unknown. We were the ones who shouted into the void, who tried to name the crisis before it became the norm. We were the generation that refused to grow up as we were told, yet we ended up feeling out of time, unfit for any era. Perhaps this is our destiny: to be the bridge between a past that crushed us and a future that didn’t wait for us. We didn’t make history. But in that silence, in that stasis, we learned to bear the weight of who we were. And perhaps, deep down, that too is a way of existing.

“We learned to move through instability, to be disillusioned without

losing the desire to believe. We were the generation of crisis, of

uncertainty, of existential precarity. But what do we leave to those who

come after us?”

Now the baton passes, without heroes, without grand narratives, but with the awareness that every generation has its turn in the eternal return of restlessness. We fade like an echo, leaving to the new fools the task of rewriting history, of being the voice out of the chorus in a world desperately trying to standardize every difference—marginal and prophetic figures, capable of seeing it with different eyes, of exposing its contradictions.

This baton that passes from hand to hand, an inheritance of questions, of unrest, of unfinished battles. The new generation grows in an even more accelerated world, where identity dissolves in the perpetual flow of information, where rebellion itself is absorbed and sold as a fleeting trend. In an era where every gesture is tracked, every thought anticipated by an algorithm, every emotion translated into a reaction, it is precisely in this drift, in the heart of the noise, that new forms of silence will emerge, new rebels who don’t shout but remain silent; who don’t seek the stage but linger at the margins, observing everything with clear eyes. Solitary, visionary figures, capable of disobeying by instinct, fervor, and grace. Tomorrow’s outsiders won’t be icons, but shadows; not influencers, but interferences. Today, more than ever, in this era of change, we need new rebels.