Become a member Sign in Get started

1K
YOUTH, NOW

Why Older People

Have Always Trashed
Young People
It’s partly fear, partly self- attery, and partly delusion,
and it’s been happening for thousands of years

Jason Feifer Follow

Sep 6 · 9 min read

1 Smart stories. New ideas. No Illustration:

ads. $5/month. Details
Grace Lee

I
ra S. Wolfe is a business consultant in Pennsylvania. A decade ago, all his
clients were worried about the same thing: millennials. “Millennials at
that point were mostly either teenagers or just getting out of college,” Wolfe
recalls, “and they were this horrible, spoiled, rotten, narcissistic, egotistical,
lazy generation. Every hiring manager and every manager in the universe was
saying, ‘What are we going to do about these young kids?’”

Understanding Youth Wolfe’s job was to answer that question. So he did, in a book he wrote in 2008
(Now) Is
Complicated called Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization. He was 58 years old at the time and
Siobhan O'Connor meant it as a guide to intergenerational workplaces — a how-to for getting
everyone to work in harmony. Chapter nine was dedicated to the workforce’s
Drinking the Kool-
Aid newest members. He titled it “The Dumbest Generation?”
Aaron Gell

It is not an exercise in subtlety. Wolfe begins: “What a di erence a few

The Safe, Boring, and
Extremely Cheap decades can make. A young student was once embarrassed and his parents
Drug That Could Cure
Aging
shamed by poor grades on a report card. A young worker was remorseful if he
Lissa Harris disappointed his boss.” No longer, he wrote. The basic decencies of past
generations were absent in this one. Something fundamental had changed.
“This is a generation who grew up reading blogs instead of books. They read
updates about friends on Facebook instead of reading current events in
newspapers. They know more about World of Warcraft than they do about
World War II.”

Wolfe, of course, wasn’t saying anything terribly original here. He was

parroting what he heard, and what is still said today — that the new
generation is a weak echo of the old one. Here’s TV host Joe Scarborough’s
version, in a 2017 tweet: “Young men in the 1940s liberated Europe from
Nazism and the Paci c from the Japanese Empire. Today, too many stay home
playing video games.” And here’s Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, in a 2017 New
York Times column: “When I saw students doing their campus jobs, they
seemed to have a tough time. Over and over, faculty members and
administrators noted how their students’ limited experience with hard work
made them oddly fuzzy-headed when facing real-world problems rather than
classroom tests.”

This is a refrain as old as time. But these dispeptic fogies who love to sound
alarms about the fatal defects of the youth always seem to forget how the
story turns out: The next generation is ne. Capable. Better, even. Some of its
members will slouch o , sure, but others will step up and carry the world
forward. Look around: Everything we know — everything we have ever relied
upon, or been impressed by, or adored, or treasured, or desired — was created
by a generation who had been dismissed by the one before it. If we worsened
over generations, rather than improved, we’d have nothing. We’d be banging
our heads against the ruins of the pyramids. Instead, we built the modern
world. Our lives today are incontrovertible evidence that Ira Wolfe and Joe
Scarborough and Ben Sasse and the untold billions of grumps that came
before them were wrong. All of them. Every time. Without exception. Period.

So why do they keep saying it? And why can’t we stop the cycle — each
generation being unfairly dismissed, only to grow old and repeat the same
mistake?

Simple: Because we’re afraid.

. . .

To understand why we keep doubting the young generation, we rst need to

appreciate the full scope of the problem. That means we can’t just look at any
individual grump. In the vastness of history, a guy like Joe Scarborough is
meaningless, his biases blended in with every other dumb thing anyone else
has said.

Our earliest texts are littered with youth bashing. From 600 to 300 BC, texts of
the ancient Greeks complain of children becoming tyrants, contradicting their
parents and wol ng down the best treats at the table. The comedies of
Plautus, a Roman playwright who died in 185 BC, often feature a
disappointing son with a taste for prostitutes. “In the plays, ancient versions of
sitcoms, there is a debate about whether fathers should be strict or indulgent
toward the moral failings of their sons,” writes Richard Saller, professor of
history and classics at Stanford University.

By the rst century AD, Seneca the Elder is writing, “Our young men have
growth slothful. Their talents are left idle, and there is not a single honorable
occupation for which they will toil night and day.”

Scholars of European, African, Chinese, and Japanese history all tell me their
texts contain some versions of youth hating. Pick a time, pick a place, and
you’ll nd it. Renaissance writers complained of rowdy youth who’d sing
bawdy songs in inappropriate social settings. In precolonial Africa, a youth
wasn’t considered a full- edged person until they’d gone through an initiation
— and even then, they were not fully respected until they became a parent.
One of the reasons Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, says Mark
Elliott, professor of Chinese and Inner Asian history at Harvard University,
“was that he feared the younger generation, lacking the experience of the
older generation of revolutionaries, would be too ‘soft.’”

Older generations blame this softness — or today, millennials’ entitlement — as

a tangible loss. Something was good, but it will crumble in the next
generation’s hands. Today, it’s work: These coddled kids won’t grind at the
o ce the way their forbearers did. For the 14th-century Japanese monk
Yoshida Kenkō, it was language: “The ordinary spoken language has also
steadily coarsened,” he writes. “People used to say ‘raise the carriage shafts’ or
‘trim the lamp wick,’ but people today say ‘raise it’ or ‘trim it.’” For writer Anna
A. Rogers, writing in the Atlantic in 1907, it was the institution of marriage:
“The rock upon which most of the ower-bedecked marriage barges go to
pieces is the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of
the Self.”

Youth bashing isn’t the exclusive province of older people. Young people get
into it too, especially those inclined to sentimentality. Consider the journalist
Gregg Easterbrook. In 1980, Easterbrook, then in his mid-twenties, noticed
something troubling. The young generation seemed detached from the world,
putting up a wall of indi erence between them and anything meaningful. So
he took to the pages of the Washington Monthly, condemning the collective
youth in a piece titled “Fear of Success.” He accused the era’s
twentysomethings of longing for boring and unchallenging jobs, self-
sabotaging their romantic relationships, and even refusing to vote for fear of
believing in change. This damaged generation, he wrote, “believe[s] it foolish
to gamble for accomplishments when accomplishments will cause more to be
expected of [them].”

Where did his youthful negativity come from? He has at least one culprit: The
generation before him. “My generation heard all the rhetoric: ‘the greatest
generation wins World War II, overcomes the Depression,’” says Easterbrook
today, 38 years after writing his essay. “You think, ‘These are great
achievements. What have people of my age ever done that compares to that?’ I
think you could nd that cyclically in history. The young worried that they’re
not as good as the old.”

Talk to any millennial or Gen Zer now and you’ll see the front end of this
cycle. “Right now, in this day and age, people are constantly trying to
schedule the next thing, check on this, on that,” Jace Norman, 18, recently
told me. “It’s so much noise and not much substance.” Norman is the star of a
Nickelodeon show called Henry Danger, and his (less famous) peers have told
me the same sorts of things — that they’ve become too distracted by their
screens or have become slaves to frivolity. It’s a strange way for young people
to talk: They’re not speaking about their own experience, but rather, they’re
speaking in contrast to someone else’s. “In this day and age,” Norman tells me.
As compared to what? A time no teenager saw themselves. An invented past.

What monsters we become. We bring a new generation into this world, only to
convince them of their shortcomings so they can wield the same charges
against their peers. We send children o into the future, telling them the
greatest moments have already passed.

And why do we do it?

Again, because we’re afraid.

. . .

Let’s talk about land for a second.

To the Anglo-Saxons of the Middle Ages, land was everything. “The basis of all
legal relationships in the Middle Ages was land,” says Andrew Rabin, an
English professor at the University of Louisville with a specialty in early
medieval law and literature. Owning land meant having status in the
community and providing stability for a family. Life and liberty took place
upon one’s land. “From a legal perspective, the primary purpose of the family
unit was to ensure the proper descent of land,” Rabin says. And the descent
was predictable for a patriarchal society: A son reaches a certain age and the
land becomes his.

But that’s not always what happened. Instead, many sons ended up like
Edwin, son of Enniaun, who lived sometime between the years 916 and 935.
His father died, and his mother wouldn’t hand over some estates that Edwin
believed were his. So, like many sons of the time, Edwin sued his mother in
court. That kicked o a chain of Game of Thrones–grade one-upmanship,
replete with a host of quality medieval names: The judge, Thurkil the White,
sent a delegation to take the mother’s testimony. The mother (whose name
wasn’t included in the records) then summoned Leo aed, Thurkil’s wife. In
the presence of the court delegation, the mother swore the land rightly
belonged to her and then dispossessed her son of the land. Instead, she said,
Leo aed and Thurkil could have it after she was gone. With this, Thurkil
ruled in the mother’s favor. She’d keep her land for the rest of her life, and
Edwin would never grow up to get it.

There are a lot of morals to that tale, of course, about power, and wealth, and
gender. But Rabin says that, as he read historical tales of land disputes, he saw
a recurring theme: Parents did not want to pass down their land, because it
meant also passing down their power. If the children own land, the parents do
not. If the children prove themselves to be good landowners, then then
parents aren’t needed.

“A child is a reminder of mortality, right? Once you have a child, you can get
displaced,” Rabin says. “And so when you dismiss children — when you say
that they are not living up to the standards of the older generation — part of
what you’re saying is, ‘This child cannot replace me. This child isn’t good
enough to replace me. I am, in some sense, irreplaceable.’”

We talk of children in terms of continuation. They carry on our traditions.

They take our names. We delight in how they look like us, act like us, think
like us. We want our kids to adopt our politics, our causes, our sense of
meaning. In our children, we seek immortality.

But then they grow up, and we discover they’re not us. They are their own
people. They’ll nd their own politics, their own causes, their own sense of
meaning. They’re more interested in the future than the past. They’ll know
their parents’ names, of course, and probably their grandparents’ names, but
perhaps not their great-grandparents’ names, and certainly not their great-
great-grandparents’ names. Which means one day they’ll have children, and
those children will have children, and our names will begin to be forgotten
too. We will slip into nothingness, remembered by nobody, having left no
recognizable impact.

That’s why we say these kids are no good. We can’t accept that life goes on
without us. And instead of accepting it, we lay the blame for the whole state of
a airs at the feet of the next generation.

. . .

And yet, every once in a while, the cycle is momentarily broken: The old
grump, the one bitterly protecting his own mortality, will stop and look
around with clear eyes.

Easterbrook did. Today, at age 65, the once-self-hating baby boomer thinks
his peers turned out “relatively accomplished,” leaving the world at least a
little fairer than how they found it.

But Wolfe really did. The author of Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization stopped to
meet the millennials he’d mocked. And it changed him.

The process was slow. Even as he told his clients that millennials were a
problem to be managed, he was going out to dinner with friends, or sitting at
a bar, and listening to the young people around him. These supposedly lazy,
entitled kids were talking about the companies they were starting, or the
three jobs they were working, or the education they were getting — and all
this despite having graduated college during a deep recession. It made him
remember that his baby boomer generation, too, was once doubted. “Oh,
yeah, it was the same thing,” Wolfe says now. “We were lazy, narcissistic,
egotistical, idealistic, promiscuous.”

Slowly, Wolfe began to shift his message. He started calling himself a

“recovering millennial basher” and told his clients to hire these amazing
young workers. If they hired lazy ones, they just weren’t doing a good job of
recruiting. “Every generation,” he explains, “has good and bad people.”

Find the good ones, he’d say. There are so many of them.

. . .

Additional research by Elisabeth Brier.

WRITTEN BY

Jason Feifer
Editor in chief, Entrepreneur mag. Host of the podcast Pessimists
Archive, about why people resist innovation. Listen at
apple.co/2Cdfm0G More: jasonfeifer.com

Follow

ABOUT THIS MAGAZINE

Youth, Now
Radical tech and extreme anti-aging. Breathtaking challenges. And bold visions for the future.
The September issue of Medium’s monthly magazine — Youth, Now — explores the world
being inherited, informed, and altered by the next generations. All month long, we will be
publishing stories that illuminate our obsession with youth now and in the past — telling the
stories of kids who may not be all right, but remain the best hope we have. Cover art by Ben
Voldman, Blake Suarez & So a Hydman.

Understanding Youth (Now) Is

Complicated
This month on Medium: the kids are not all right

Siobhan O'Connor · Sep 4 · 2 min read

Drinking the Kool-Aid The Safe, Boring, and Extremely Cheap Can a Thirst-Trap Sel e Lead to
Seventeen DJs, 250 attractive young professionals, Drug That Could Cure Aging True Love?
and 72 hours in the wilds of New England. How I Forget Silicon Valley biotech wonderdrugs. Leading As a young woman, I had polished myself into an
learned to stop worrying and join a… gerontologists are making a historic bet on object, a thing t for consumption. Then that
metformin. object caught a stranger’s eye.
Aaron Gell · Sep 5 · 31 min read
Lissa Harris · Sep 5 · 11 min read Bindu Bansinath · Sep 5 · 8 min read

Discover Medium Make Medium yours Become a member

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll Get unlimited access to the best stories on
Medium, smart voices and original ideas take deliver the best stories for you to your Medium — and support writers while you’re at
center stage — with no ads in sight. Watch homepage and inbox. Explore it. Just $5/month. Upgrade

About Help Legal