I want to talk about family relationships: a subject most of us have little opportunity to experience deeply or understand when we are young, except in particularly dysfunctional families.
In older family relationships, authority, emotion and ways of living rested on a stable social structure. Our parents’ experience seemed sufficient to explain the world. Part of that stability came from family structures and attachments to land inherited from agrarian society. But China and East Asia have long undergone industrialization and urbanization to varying degrees; contemporary society cannot simply be defined as agrarian. People once depended on the land: “While your parents are alive, do not travel far.”
But the pace of society changed, and that explanatory system fell apart.
Over recent decades, industrialization, urbanization and digital platforms have transformed life at different speeds in different places. Some people’s information habits and expectations of family have not kept up. This is a mismatch in social experience, not evidence of a neurological defect in the older generation.
Our parents may still believe that “what television, newspapers and the news say must be true.” They rely on authoritative broadcasts, neighborhood reputations and the certainty of print. We have been swept into an algorithm-driven flood of information, encountering a thousand competing versions of the truth. Growing up in a complex information environment may make us more familiar with platform and advertising tactics, but it does not make us immune to bias or misinformation.
As the world fragments and accelerates, we may become better at identifying interests and biases. Yet this very ability can leave us at a loss within our families. We encounter another logic: our parents’ attachment to the information placed before them provides emotional security; our suspicion of conflicting information and our efforts to choose between accounts are instincts of cognitive survival. When the two collide, conversation easily becomes exhausting.
Short-video algorithms deepen the divide. They excel at producing resonance, without necessarily caring whether they convey truth. Parents open WeChat or Douyin and encounter not the world’s diversity but a curated compilation of fears: retirement scams, moral decline, unfilial children and social breakdown. Why have children? What holds a family together? They may not see the business models behind this information or understand that platforms are delivering emotion rather than understanding. Some consequently encounter increasingly repetitive, narrow material. Young people can fall into similar recommendation loops: age cannot substitute for examining actual usage habits.
These messages reinforce anxiety day after day. Some become combative, rigid and quick to anger. They overlook their good fortune in having lived through an exceptionally prosperous and peaceful period, yet seem more dissatisfied than any generation with society and their children. A daily scroll through short videos and a chat with the neighbors leave them thinking they have finally “seen through society.”
Having missed opportunities during their own prime, they suddenly feel compelled, in a less-than-successful second half of life, to instruct the next generation.
Meanwhile, young people have left familiar homes for cities where their abilities are assigned a market price. They find themselves hoping for an opportunity to be “exploited” by capital. They understand more viscerally than their parents that staying alive, having somewhere to live and earning money matter above almost everything else.
They carry rent, commuting, career anxiety and loneliness on their own. Ritualized “filial duty” and the Spring Festival Gala’s refrain to “come home often” have long since exhausted them. They have lost the patience to approach pointless family conflicts with endless warmth.
In many family conversations, children’s explanations therefore sound like excuses, while parents’ positions sound like verdicts. Each side thinks the other has been brainwashed. This is not simply a moral problem; their information worlds have fallen out of sync.
The root of the mismatch is not whether love remains. It is that both sides are struggling, exhausted, to survive in their own worlds.
After a long struggle, we may finally have to acknowledge that some relationships cannot be repaired.
Not because someone necessarily did something wrong, but because the times have made it impossible to inhabit the same language. Attempts at repair often begin with “understand me.” Yet understanding requires a shared reality, and that shared reality may no longer exist.
The way forward is neither to change them nor to surrender yourself, but to learn to live with not being understood.
In some families, parents understand involvement as care while children experience it as control. Boundaries need to be specific: which decisions are yours to make, which forms of help you will accept, and which conversations need to pause. This difference cannot be generalized to an entire generation.
You cannot make them update their operating system, but you can stop yourself from being dragged back to an earlier version. Accepting their limitations without giving up your own clarity is a form of reconciliation available in adulthood.
It is reconciliation with yourself: acknowledging that you have grown up, that they may not understand immediately, and that some differences may endure. Whether and how to continue communicating can depend on mutual willingness and the harm actually involved.
You do not have to keep waiting for the moment they understand, or feel ashamed of their inability to keep pace. Your task is to live quietly and firmly by your own reasoning, even in a world they cannot make sense of.
Hold steady.