A Palimpsest Generation

By Brigadier General (Ret.) Paul B. “Trey” Chauncey III

On a Generation That Carries What Came Before

I have a habit of paying attention to words, especially older ones that seem to carry more meaning than we give them credit for. From time to time, I look up a “word of the day” simply out of curiosity. This morning, that word was palimpsest. I had encountered it before but never used it, and certainly never lingered on its metaphorical weight. As I read through its definition and then its broader application, I realized I had found the language for something I have been circling for years. It offered a way to describe a generational experience that aligns closely with the themes I have explored in recent essays: continuity, stewardship, discernment, and the limits of reinvention.

We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. Institutions are told to disrupt themselves, individuals are urged to shed old identities, and each technological leap is framed as a clean break from everything that came before. The past, we are told, is baggage. Progress requires erasure.

That story has never quite fit my generation.

Those of us born in the mid-1960s, and those close enough to share the same formative experience, did not encounter change as a sequence of orderly transitions. We experienced it as accumulation. We were formed in one world and matured in another, not by choice but by timing. What we became did not replace what we were. It was written over it.

The word palimpsest captures that reality better than any generational label I have encountered. A palimpsest is a manuscript written over an earlier text, where the original has been scraped away but never fully erased. Traces remain. The older writing still shapes what can be read, what can be written, and how meaning is interpreted.

That is how many of us live.

We were raised in an analog world. Authority was physical. Knowledge was scarce and slow. Memory mattered because retrieval was costly. Judgment was shaped by friction. If you wanted an answer, you asked someone older or you waited. If you wanted to be heard, you earned standing. Hierarchy was visible, sometimes stifling, often stabilizing.

Then, midway through our working lives, the ground shifted.

The internet flattened information. Mobile devices collapsed distance. Social media dissolved gatekeeping. Now artificial intelligence threatens to compress cognition itself. This was not a gradual evolution. It was a rupture that occurred within a single professional lifetime. The distance between our formative years and the present moment is not measured only in years but in entire operating systems of life.

What makes this generational experience distinctive is not that we witnessed change. Every generation does. It is that we embody the contrast. We carry the habits of an analog past inside a digital present. The older layer still shows through.

That layering produces something our culture often misreads.

We are sometimes described as cautious, skeptical, or resistant to novelty. In truth, what looks like resistance is often memory. We remember when systems failed quietly instead of publicly. We remember when mistakes did not scale instantly. We remember institutions before they were optimized for speed rather than judgment. We remember consequences that unfolded slowly and could not be edited away.

That memory does not make us anti-technology. Many of us became fluent in it out of necessity and later out of mastery. It makes us alert to tradeoffs that younger cohorts, native to the digital environment, have never had to confront. When you have lived on both sides of a transformation, you notice what is lost as well as what is gained.

The palimpsest metaphor matters because it pushes back against binary thinking. It rejects the false choice between tradition and innovation. It resists the idea that wisdom requires nostalgia or that progress requires amnesia. It argues for integration rather than replacement.

In leadership, that matters.

Organizations today suffer less from a lack of intelligence than from a lack of memory. Decision cycles accelerate, but accountability thins. Novelty is rewarded, but continuity is treated as inertia. Institutional knowledge is dismissed as legacy thinking, even as the same mistakes repeat under new branding.

A palimpsest mindset values continuity without idolizing the past. It understands that not everything old is wise, but not everything new is better. It recognizes that culture, like character, is cumulative. You cannot erase your way to maturity.

There is also a moral dimension to this.

A society that treats reinvention as a virtue unto itself eventually loses the ability to steward what it inherits. Rights detached from responsibilities become entitlements. Freedom detached from discipline becomes fragility. When nothing is allowed to endure, nothing is trusted to last.

Those raised before the digital age learned limits early, sometimes harshly. You could not curate your identity in real time. Reputation accumulated slowly and stuck stubbornly. Mistakes were instructive because they were not instantly obscured. That experience leaves an imprint. It fosters a seriousness about consequences that cannot be simulated.

This is not a claim to superiority. It is an argument for perspective.

Every generation brings something necessary. The danger comes when one generation believes it can overwrite all others cleanly. History does not work that way. Culture does not work that way. Human beings do not work that way.

The palimpsest reminds us that progress is layered. What we inherit constrains what we can build, and what we choose to preserve shapes what we become. The faint marks of earlier texts are not defects. They are guides.

In an age that prizes speed over depth and novelty over wisdom, that may be the quiet contribution of this generation. Not as a bridge to be crossed and discarded, but as a living record of continuity. Proof that complexity can be carried, not solved away.

In an age obsessed with reinvention, a palimpsest is a reminder that nothing meaningful is ever written on a blank page.