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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

It seems every generation discovers the same new problems of every generation before it. And as each earlier generation matures, it describes the new generation disparagingly.

This article described the movie The Graduate, which everyone felt described a generation coming of age in the 60s. Pick other movies and books for other times.

Take it far enough back and you have this quote

"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

which sounds contemporary but dates back centuries (often attributed to Socrates, but not likely that old). It sounds contemporary in every time.

I conclude things aren't suddenly getting worse -- http://joshuaspodek.com/arent-suddenly-worse -- which makes my life better.

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Hey Josh,

I actually agree with your quote - but a surprising number of your posts / comments / submissions are or have links / references to your site.

That's not inherently bad (I'm not against self promotion at all), but it sort of comes across like your contribution to the site is one big promotion for your site rather than focused on the contribution to the community.

Hopefully this isn't too out of line - but I thought I'd mention it as I've seen a few of your posts in the past couple of days referencing that site multiple times & realized they were all yours.

I go back and forth because I usually prefer to post on topics I like to write about, which means I've often written about them elsewhere. I try to write posts that get votes, implying the community values them, so I try to make posts that stand on their own without clicking the links but get more depth with clicking. If the material is relevant I could still leave it out, copy it, or link to it. I'll use your feedback as a data point suggesting reducing the links. I'm a fan of constructive criticism, though it feels funny doing it publicly like this.

I'll discuss the first point in the article:

He mentions that the current generation thinks it's moving faster. And he cites some inventions (the train, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone).

Well, didn't all of these "inventions" happen in THE SAME generation?

We're not talking about 5 generations between the inventions, many of them happened within years of each other. This certainly allow me to believe that technology changes people.

Look at the dinner table. Who even eats together at the dinner table? It's not a "normal" thing to do in many "modern" cultures. Even when they do, many don't even speak anymore, but instead they are on their smartphones / tablets.

I happened to know very the members of my family from the previous generation. And, to tell you the truth, things have changed A LOT within the last 100 years. Work is different, life is different, even relationships are different.

The "new problems" you refer to may be what is inherent for humans. To show disrespect, to contradict parents, etc. are all things that every young generation has to deal with. Parents are not new and neither are children.

What's different may be how the generations deal with these inherent traits. What people considered to work in the 1900's probably won't work nowadays.

> Well, didn't all of these "inventions" happen in THE SAME generation?

Your definition of generation is 3-5 times longer than the usual definitions.

Addressing approximate timeframe of commercialization:

> the train

1812. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamanca_(locomotive)

> the telegraph

1837, +25 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooke_and_Wheatstone_telegraph

> the telephone

Bell/Gray was 1876, commercialization by 1878. +40 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_telephone

> the radio

Mid-to-late 1890s. 1895-1877=18 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio

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