“Kids today…”

“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.”

Ah, yes. The youth of today. Vain, badly mannered, and utterly feckless. Of course, a lot of you will probably recognise this as a quote attributed to…Socrates. Also known as the clever guy in the bed-sheet, who died almost two and half millennia ago. These attitudes are nothing new, but they continue unabated today.


I was part of that peculiar generation which grew up just on the cusp of the digital age: we had VCRs, simple computers with Windows 95 (and endless games of Pinball), and perhaps an old Sega knocking about upstairs with a couple of Sonic cartridges. But technology was still primitive enough that it wasn’t yet an omnipresent feature of everyday life; sure we had some of the stuff I just listed, but I also remember having wooden toys and building forts out in the garden. So trust me when I say: we need to stop eulogising our childhoods at the detriment of today’s youth. 

Of course, this happens everywhere and with all generations. The “Greatest Generation” (for want of a better term) raised baby boomers, who the oldsters saw as entitled and selfish. Now, lo and behold, the boomers have had the millennial generation and call their own offspring entitled and selfish. It’s a dance as old as time, and will certainly continue with us too. Every generation thinks that they were the last ‘good one’, and everything that follows is a deteriorating spiral of moral and ethical decay. Enter, the picture up top.

But, let’s get real: IT’S NOT TRUE. I grow up with kites, and you know what? Kites suck. They’re a pain in the arse to get in the air, and then they do nothing once they’re up there. Now, you ask me to choose between a ratty old kite, or a smartphone? I’m taking the phone every time. Games, apps, and access to the internet (a.k.a. a repository of all the sum of human knowledge and experience)? If I was a kid today I’d say, “thanks, but you can keep the kite”. Because you know what, our childhood wasn’t ideal either. We can romanticise the past as much as we want, but it’s a falsehood to claim that our subjective experiences are objectively better than a present-day alternative.

So, in summary: here’s to modernity, technology, and the destruction of romanticised and antiquated visions of the past!