I recently stumbled upon a great illustration of today’s generation gap. We all know that the generation gap is real and that it is big, but this example caught me off guard.

I was editing something at the computer along with our youngest staff member, who is 23 years old and a computer whiz compared to me. I asked her to fix the formatting of something. Normally a very quick responder, she hesitated a moment, as if not sure how to do it. I said, “Just hit a carriage return.” She looked at me like I was from another planet. Then she asked, “What’s a carriage return?”

I was totally aghast! How could she, college-educated computer genius that she is, not have a clue that a “carriage return” is the “enter” button on the keyboard? I later asked a 28-year old member of our team what a carriage return was, and she did not know either.

This was a huge reality check for me. Frankly, it still boggles my mind. Yet it taught me a very important lesson: we may not have anywhere near the amount of “shared understanding” with others that we think we do.

According to Dictionary.com, “common sense” means “sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence.” It defines “common” as, among other things, “belonging equally to, or shared alike by, two or more or all in question,” or “pertaining or belonging equally to an entire community, nation, or culture.”

Who knew that understanding of the phrase “carriage return” was so far removed from our present day culture as to be virtually never even heard of by the under 30 crowd?! Wow!

I guess I should not be shocked. I grew up in a world where there seemed to be shared understanding about a whole lot of things that are missing today—things like good and evil, right and wrong. Not that it was so clear exactly what was good or evil, or right or wrong, or precisely where their boundaries fell in a given circumstance. But there was a common belief that there was good and evil, right and wrong—a shared understanding that each of those things existed.

Nowadays it seems to me that the biggest gap in our culture is not the generation gap, the Republican verses Democrat gap, or even the liberal verses conservative gap—though each of those gaps are colossal and critically important. Even greater and more fundamental is the gap between those in our culture who believe that good and evil and right and wrong exist, and those who believe they do not.

Could that be the real reason why it feels like each half of our population is looking at the other half and thinking “what planet are you from?”