Kids These Days Should Have It Too Easy
Or: Why being a grumpy old fart about younger generations is dumb.
We all know the grumpy old man joke. “When I was your age, I walked to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill, both ways!” We would chuckle at our grandfathers or fathers as they told that goofy joke, playing up their suffering for a laugh.
I’m kinda worried that mentality has ruined a lot of discourse in our country. People are griping about everything being too easy. The younger generations are wussies, the older generations say. They’re soft, they have it too easy. They don’t have the same struggles as we had growing up.
I mean, yeah, of course I didn’t have the same struggles my parents did. They didn’t grow up with a box in their pocket that could access all of human knowledge.
Every new generation has it easier than past generations. That’s kind of how progress works. Technology moves forward, and each new generation works to eliminate some problem or another that plagued them in the past.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point where many people — particularly older people but not exclusively — feel like the premise that “kids these days have it too easy” is a dire situation that must be fixed. The problem is, fixing that “problem” means either preventing…
