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Comment by secondaryacct | Hacker News Reader

Im at an age when people talk of my age group like that, and my age group talk of young adults like that. I started working at 14 carrying furnitures on the weekend and im a pampered millenial :D

In fact, I read a little essay wrote during the 18th century by a grumpy old guy that, if modernized a little bit, could pass for your little essay.

I think your reaction is an effect of aging more than an objective view of the world. It's probably very similar to what a pre WWII adult would say of the pampered boomers born around the 40s: children are treasured by their parents, fathers want their child to surpass them and parents are disappointed by the new path their offsprings carved, on average.

Basically, your comment is as useless to trigger change in the youth as it is interesting to study aging. Instead of wondering how to whip the youth into aging faster, I d ask you: how to comfort the elders into aging slower ?

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We can go back much further in time and find the same lamentations:

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

Well look what happened to Athens.

My comments here (or anywhere) don't aim at utility, let alone triggering change. What kind of fool thinks he can change nature by an internet comment? No, friend. This is a simple howl. But I do think we who grew up with rotary phones and building the infrastructure of the shit that's called the internet now should get a little extra weight when we criticize the social media generation than, for instance, old time cowboys should get for criticizing hippies. Their criticism was about style. Mine is about substance. Yes, it's normal to see youth as callow and fickle the older you get, nothing in the whole of human history has prepared us for the utterly vapid emptiness and mindlessness of the current generation.

But I am your future generation, probably: I m 33, so a millenial. I'm starting to feel the same way about my own future generation.

I think it evolves with age and you exaggerate the old time. How many people finish high school in your country, how significantly has this changed ?

In mine,France, it's a bit better, but most people still stop abstract study around 14 and start practical and will never produce a refined thought or have a noble hobby in their life and that's fine. That's always been so and there has always been noble grumpies to somberly bemoan the vapid frivolities of the next generation - but they compare perhaps their fancy upbringing to a base mass that never changed in the first place.

Look take an exemple: I'm the first of all my ancestors to speak and write English, that's a generational progress in a huge sample of my age group they would never judge us on positively.

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