I just finished a ten week teaching stint at my old high school in Ojai. It was nice to be back in the nurturing bosom of my old alma mater without the trauma of actually being a teenager in high school. I could see all of the students learning, growing and experiencing the general cringiness of high school in real time.
I’m so glad not to be a teenager now.
While hanging out with the faculty, I participated in some good-natured (old lady) grumbling about “kids these days.”
The general consensus: they’re softer and lazier than we were.
Then, my beloved husband shared this quote from Chuck Klosterman’s book The Nineties and I smacked my forehead:
Older generations despise new generations for multiple reasons, although most are assorted iterations of two: They perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.
To quote the Mandalorian, “This is the way.”
This is the way it has been and should be.
Why should we insist that younger generations go through the tough stuff that we did?
It sucked for us and to make them go through the same thing is just generational hazing.
By contrast, my tough-as-nails immigrant grandmother thought her grandchildren were all weaklings because we didn’t have to toil in the ricefields and starve.
Isn’t that why we do what we do? To make it easier for the next generation? As children, we could have experienced the same kind of hardship as a Chinese villager, but would we have been the better for it?
I’ll pass on the character-building I might have gotten from living through a famine.
Also, Isn’t investing in technology intended for us to do less work?
Sure, you could use a wheelbarrow to shovel dirt OR you could use a bulldozer. You could use a notebook to keep track of things OR you could use Excel. You could memorize a bunch of historical dates OR you could just Google it.
You don’t get points for suffering or doing things the hard way.
This was a helpful reframe for me this week and I offer it up to you before you decide to grumble about the younger generation.
All of their softness, laziness, entitlement?
Kind of our fault. Or at least due to the conditions we made possible.
So, progress.
