"It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations"

Calling apathy toward deeper ancestry “strange” exposes how compressed modern memory has become. Three generations usually spans living recollection, ourselves, parents, grandparents. Beyond that, people slide from story into statistics. Mobility, individualism, and the cult of reinvention encourage cutting roots to travel light; capitalism rewards flexibility over continuity. Faith traditions of ancestor veneration fade, and with them, rituals that tether identity to a long arc.

Yet the indifference is puzzling because lineage enlarges the self. Knowing who tilled a particular field, fled a famine, changed a surname, or loved a craft refracts present choices through time, lending humility and gratitude. It can also surface harms, complicity in conquest, enslavement, dispossession, inviting responsibility instead of inherited innocence. Without such memory, history feels like news, not kinship, making justice seem optional and ecological stewardship abstract.

Three generations is a moral horizon too short for the epoch we inhabit. Climate policy, infrastructure, and cultural transmission require at least seven-generation thinking. When our memory shrinks, so does our empathy for descendants we will never meet. The result is a culture excellent at documenting everything and remembering almost nothing: terabytes of photos, few intergenerational stories; DNA reports without dinner-table lore.

A caveat matters: caring about ancestry need not slide into bloodline essentialism. Family is porous, adoption, migration, chosen kinship. The gift is narrative, not purity: a web of tales that explains how we arrived here and whom we owe.

Perhaps the strangeness Coupland points to is a spiritual disorientation: a life lived in perpetual present tense. Repair begins with small acts, recording an elder’s voice, tracing the route a grandparent walked to work, learning the plants your people named. Extending memory backward deepens obligation forward, turning private biography into a longer, more generous story. Such remembering does not chain the future; it equips it with compass points when novelty alone cannot guide us.