Kids These Days

There are a few phrases that transcend culture and time, one of them being complaining about “kids these days”. Sure, there are variations of it, but in one way or another, it’s older generations complaining about younger generations not valuing (hard) work or some other change.

This year I read “Letters from a Stoic” by Lucius Annaeus Seneca the younger (commonly referred to as simply Seneca). I made it a point to read only one letter per day in order to think and reflect on what was written instead of rushing through the whole thing. And in particular, I stumbled upon a passage that sounded familiar:

“There can be no doubt that before this earth was worn out it produced a better type of offspring. But though they all possessed a character more robust than that of today, and one with a greater aptitude for hard work, it is equally true that their personalities fell short of genuine perfection. For nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.”

Would you look at that. People have been complaining about “kids these days” for thousands of years and yet here we are. I personally have always enjoyed hanging out with interesting people, no matter their age and there are two things I would like to point out in regards.

1) Learning in progress

If you are complaining about kids or young adults (up to around 25 years of age, when the frontal lobe of our brains becomes fully developed), do try to keep in mind that you yourself were once young and dumb. There are plenty of situations where I did absolutely listen to people older than me; (most) teachers would be a good example of that. But conversely, there were adults in my life whose advice I choose to flat out ignore or sometimes even ridicule.

The results were a mixed bag of successes and failures, but that’s what learning and growing up is all about. We need to let younger generations fail on their own (I did a blog post on overcoming failure). I think that we often become the victims of “curse of knowledge” cognitive bias (thinking error) – once we learn something, we just assume everyone else has learned it too. Even within the same age group that is not true, much less if you’re talking to someone in their teenage years.

Conversely, no matter how old we are, there are things that kids and young adults can teach us as well. We get set in our ways as we mature, but if there’s a good idea or suggestion, why not take it? Just because someone is deemed as “inexperienced”, doesn’t mean that they have nothing to add to the conversation. Just because we might be embarrassed that a 10 year old has thought of something that we didn’t – or couldn’t – we shouldn’t reject that out of a sense of misplaced anger.

And ultimately, when it comes to “kids these days”, who do you think taught them? We aren’t magically summoned on this earth by a ritual from outer space, appearing as adults. We’re born as babies and raised by people around us. The same generations who complain about the younger kids are the ones who taught them. And even if you object saying that you don’t have any kids of your own, that doesn’t matter. You might have nephews, nieces, neighbor’s kids. And even if you have no desire to deal with any, at the very least you interact with other people and influence them – and in turn, they raise their kids accordingly.

Take a deep hard look at yourself first before you talk shit about any offspring (yours or somebody else’s).

2) Societal Change

Change is scary. Full stop. There is no denying that. When we people don’t understand something, we have often times turned to superstition and mythology, before slowly and gradually constructing theories to make sense of the world around us. And I don’t think we, as a species, will ever have a complete understanding of everything in existence. We might get a pretty good idea, but we will always be like the ancient Greek philosopher Plato suggested, figures in a cave observing merely the shadows of the world outside.

I truly believe that people who complain about “kids these days” are just afraid of said change. They’re afraid that their work won’t be valued anymore, or perhaps that what they were trying to achieve would not be useful anymore. I could be absolutely off on this one assumption, since I don’t like to generalize and complain about younger people – just as I don’t generalize and complain about any other generation (though I have my own biases of course). I try to make it a case by case basis for me.

But here’s the thing. Hating younger generations is what makes people hold the belief “fuck you I got mine”. Even as a teenager in my own country, we knew that by the time we grow old we likely won’t be able to retire. How sad is that? Knowing as a kid that we’ll likely be forced to work until death (this also goes a little bit into the empathy that I wrote about last month).

Conversely, once the kids grow up and are expected to take care of the elderly, they will be sick and tired of being berated and talked down, so they too will not have any interest in properly helping old people and very likely develop hateful thoughts towards the new new young generations.

Some people will just naturally accept the change and go with the flow, while others will feel like aliens in a world they don’t recognize. Perhaps the best example I’ve heard about this was one of my professors in college telling us about a physicist (forgot the name) who dedicated his entire life trying to study the movement of the moon. After the invention of the computer, the same calculations were done within a few days – and, there were errors discovered in his calculus.

Was his life then useless?

Of course not! Every future generation builds on what the people before them have constructed. There is no such thing as a single individual accomplishing something extraordinary alone – it is always with the help of others. Sir Isaac Newton has famously said that he stood on the shoulders of giants – acknowledging the hundreds of years of natural philosophy, mathematics and then physics that enabled him to develop his theories on gravity. Anybody who denies the merits of people that came before us is either a narcissist or in complete denial of reality. 

Kids of future past

I was actually surprised to find out that the complaints about “kids these days” went back thousands of years. I genuinely thought that the changes in technology from generation to generation were not big enough in ancient times for people to berate their kids as being lazy. Personally, I thought that this all would’ve started happening only with the Industrial Revolution, when the technology truly took off exponentially and allowed us to do what thousands of generations before us couldn’t even dream off.

Overall, I think we need to help each other and work together. No generation should feel superior to other as we are all in this together (yes, I went there with the overused COVID-19 slogan). The arranging of people in boxes of boomers, millenials, Gen Z and all the other bullshit is only helping make this divide worse.

Just like Seneca pointed out, “For nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.”

Can we stop with the blame game?