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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

"Even Sumerians complained about the young" sounds like an urban legend but it is not, there's a historical record of a scribe from Ur complaining about his ungrateful son, loitering about public squares rather than dutifully training to become a scribe:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001112875700300...

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This is why I’m really insistent on pushing back on “kids these days…” complaints. Every single generation has had grumpy people who whine about how the young’uns are unruly, lazy, have it easy, etc. I’m starting to people in my age group (mid 30s) saying it, which is a little bit sad since it was not long ago that we were on the receiving end of a lot of “psssh, typical millennials…” nonsense :-/

This is an interesting topic though, because this generation is the first generation of kids who grew up with social media, so it's not unfathomable that "kids these days" are different, for better or worse. Kids these days might be normal, but with them being the first generation to truly grow up in the internet and social media era, there is a legitimate argument that they are not.

You're not wrong that there will be some kind of difference in how they grow up, but I think each generation has grown up exposed to new technologies from birth that the previous one wasn't. My thought is that it would be really unusual if, after decades and decades of "kids these days..." that this is the time it is finally right that the current generation are in some way worse or more badly behaved or whatever negative connotation people may be using at any given point.

There's a lot of "I think..." in this so obviously this is totally based on speculation and from what I've seen in my encounters with Gen Z, where they generally seem pretty good and certainly no worse behaved than my fellow millenials :)

I’m much more upset at the cruelty and hypocrisy kids display (and of course by extension the adults that grow no wiser) in that when I was on the Internet as a kid you were a loser and loner. And now if you’re _not_ on the Internet enough you’re a loser and loner.

Have to admit that the movie Black Phone was much better than I thought because the children were portrayed very realistically in their dynamics and yet still we were reminded of their vulnerability in society as those without many rights or privileges that adults have. Furthermore, the child abuse… I don’t even flinch at some of the most brutal violence in media anymore because it seems so comical typically but I felt sick during that part.

Horror to me is reality oftentimes I guess and much of why I watch horror is to desensitize myself a bit about the horrors of our world.

Everything old is new again … https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/juvenoia

I agree in spirit, although I’d put it as „every generation needs to go its youth period, when it tends to behave excessively irresponsible and selfish, before they can mature and more or less join the adult society”. I’m 41 :)

> Every single generation has had grumpy people who whine about how the young’uns are unruly, lazy, have it easy, etc.

That's because at least the "have it easy" part is factually true on a large scale. At least until now, it was a constant given that over generations, technical progress would make life easier for society as a whole. An example is the distribution of jobs by sector - in Germany, the generation of my father (born in the 70s) grew up with 50% of jobs being in agriculture and heavy industry, today 75% of jobs are classified as "service jobs" [1].

Add on top of that something that is incredibly common across migrant communities... they know they got treated badly and had to jump through tons of ridiculous hoops to immigrate to Germany, and so they strictly oppose relaxations of these rules because their trauma hasn't been recognized at all, much less made whole. And that mindset is similar in education - we still suffer through "frontal education", pointless selection after the 4th grade and other education crap because boomers think it would devalue their own sufferings.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/275637/umfrag...

Hm so perhaps that phrase is actually a separate issue, but it is still interesting because it still involves treating the younger generation differently. Because in the context I was talking about this "they have it so easy" complaint is usually presented as a bad thing that the younger generation has it "easy". It suggests that despite each preceding generation having progressively "easier" lives, it is wrong that this current generation should also enjoy an easier life than the last.

> Because in the context I was talking about this "they have it so easy" complaint is usually presented as a bad thing that the younger generation has it "easy".

For the older generations, they do see it as a bad thing that society didn't make them whole on past transgressions. Taking the concept of "generational trauma" seriously is only a thing of the last 20-30 years.

In the stone age my friends often complained about their kids spending time painting their hands on cave walls rather than learning how to properly knap a flint knife.

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