Many scientists will tell you that “generations” — like Gen X or Y — aren’t real, or don’t exist, or that there is not a spirit of the times, some zeitgeist around which certain events emerge that would not otherwise.

Don’t believe them. Though I am a devotee of science, it all too often falls into the common trap that its many naive systematizers who comprise its ranks do — that is, believing that if something cannot be measured, it cannot exist.

When in reality, we can measure only a small part of anything, so more phenomena exist that permit no measurement than those which a ruler can be held against.

That science is possible at all is a miracle of sorts. But don’t mistake science and math for anything but tools, wielded by fallible humans in a universe that is inscrutable even in principle much less in practice on several different scales and in any epistemological system one wishes to examine or adopt.