Why we'll never be good enough for the previous generations.

Whenever anyone makes any claim to the tune of “kids these days”, I am reminded of the comic in the header.

A very popular person once said,

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

And he wasn’t talking about the millennials or the Gen Z. His next lines were:

“Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

These were, allegedly, the lines of Socrates from more than two and a half millennia ago.

Then we have Sallust, from the last century before the birth of Christ.

“The men of to?day, on the contrary, basest of creatures, with supreme wickedness are robbing our allies of all that those heroes in the hour of victory had left them; they act as though the one and only way to rule were to wrong.”

In the 17th century, Robert Russel had to say,

“… I find by sad Experience how the Towns and Streets are filled with lewd wicked Children, and many Children as they have played about the Streets have been heard to curse and swear and call one another Nick-names, and it would grieve ones Heart to hear what bawdy and filthy Communications proceeds from the Mouths of such…”

The generational gap is getting wider. The rate at which everything changes around us today adds to this. A few centuries ago, there might not have been a lot of difference between the lifestyles, career choices, hobbies, and general ideologies of two consecutive generations. Things moved at a slow pace.

But not anymore.

When I was born, almost 3 decades back, there was no concept of a television in my village. When one of the families got one, it became a celebration. People would flock to their house for the weekly Mahabharat extravaganza. Letters were still the predominant form of long-distance communication. I remember my mother saving the ones from my dad very well into my teen years (dad was posted in a far away city, but we moved in, and stayed, with him when I was 5). I remember my first phone call sometime in the early 2000s. I got my first computer in 2006. The first smartphone I saw was in 2007, a sleek Nokia N series.

Everything around us in a state of great flux - 3D movies, Augmented Reality headsets, unprecedented connectivity, access to anything anywhere anytime. Its becoming hard for even me to keep up with the rate of change.

Older generations see this and feel slighted. “How can this latest crop of humans have it so easy?” “We had to wait months to get our Television. We had to walk for miles to reach school. Everything had to be done by ourselves - no machines, no home pick-up and delivery.”

And in all of this, they forget that the current generation has its own set of challenges.

• Yes, education is easily accessible now. But even a Masters degree no longer suffices to guarantee one a good job.
• Yes, most young, educated people no longer have physically demanding jobs. But we work far, longer hours.
• Yes, some of us are earning more in a day than you did in a year. But we still can’t afford a place of our own.
• Yes, we did not see a great war or recession. Ours is the generation of scattered conflicts through the globe, chemical and biological warfare, and cyber-crime.
• Yes, we are no longer dying of tuberculosis, cancer, or cholera. But suicide rates and depression is far more prevalent today than ever.

Every generation is critical of the one that follows because they fail to see the chasm that separates them. And as humans, we have a tendency to congregate - by nation, by religion, by gender, by generation. And believe that ours is the finest. We see things from our perspective and fail to realize that others have a different vantage point. We attribute our success to our efforts, but that of others’ to luck and perchance. We view the past with rose-tinted glasses, and the future with shades of skepticism.

This hasn’t changed much over the course of human civilization, and is not likely to, any time soon.