Kids These Days: The 5,000-Year-Old Complaint That Never Gets Old

Let's start with the oldest one we have.

Around 2000 BC, a Sumerian clay tablet was inscribed with what appears to be a teacher's lament about his students. The translation varies depending on which scholar you ask, but the gist is consistent: these young people don't listen, they don't apply themselves, they don't show the respect that students used to show. The specific medium — wet clay, a reed stylus — is exotic. The complaint is not.

This is the thing about being a longtime human: you accumulate a lot of data on what people reliably do, and one of the most reliable things people do is look at whoever is currently between the ages of 15 and 30 and conclude that civilization is in serious trouble.

The Greatest Hits

We should do this properly. Here are some of the best documented entries in the historical complaint log:

~2000 BC, Sumeria. The tablet mentioned above. Students are lazy, disrespectful, not like the students of the old days. The old days being, presumably, a time when students were excellent and civilization was secure.

~400 BC, Athens. Socrates, as reported by Plato, on youth: "They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise." This quote gets misattributed constantly online, but the sentiment is real and consistent with how Athenian intellectuals discussed youth. Aristophanes' The Clouds is essentially a 423 BC comedy special about how young people have abandoned traditional values for sophistry and disrespect.

~55 BC, Rome. Cicero, one of the most accomplished writers in Western history, complained about the laziness and moral laxity of Roman youth. This was during the late Republic — a period we now recognize as one of the most politically and intellectually productive in Roman history, producing Caesar, Catullus, Lucretius, and Cicero himself.

1624, England. A pamphlet titled The Anatomie of Abuses (written a few decades earlier, but widely circulated) complained that young English people were obsessed with fashion, entertainment, and idleness, and lacked the moral seriousness of prior generations.

1771, France. A French writer complained that youth "are only interested in amusement" and had no patience for serious study. This was roughly twenty years before those same youth produced the French Revolution.

1843, United States. An editorial in a Massachusetts newspaper worried that young Americans were too soft, too focused on commerce and comfort, and lacked the revolutionary virtue of the Founding generation. The Founding generation had, by this point, been dead long enough to become mythological.

1951, United States. Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency concluded that comic books were corrupting American youth. The specific corruptors change every generation — comic books, rock and roll, video games, social media — but the underlying concern is perfectly preserved across centuries.

2023, everywhere. The specific complaint rotates through smartphones, TikTok, remote work preferences, and a supposed inability to handle adversity. The structure of the complaint is identical to the Sumerian tablet.

Why Your Brain Is Wired to Make This Mistake

Okay, so the data is clear: every generation makes this complaint, it's been wrong every time in the sense that civilization continued, and yet it keeps happening. Why?

This is where the psychology research — yes, the kind done on college students in exchange for class credit — actually earns its keep, because it aligns neatly with what the historical record shows.

The phenomenon has a name: rosy retrospection, or sometimes the Pollyanna principle. Humans systematically remember the past as better than it was. We encode memories with emotional smoothing — the bad stuff fades faster than the good stuff. This means that when you compare your youth (remembered as relatively uncomplicated and virtuous) to the youth of today (observed in real time, with all its mess visible), the comparison is structurally unfair. You're comparing a highlight reel to a live broadcast.

There's also a related effect researchers call generativity concern — as people age, they develop a psychological investment in the next generation succeeding, which paradoxically makes them hypersensitive to signs that it won't. The worry isn't cynicism. It's often genuine anxiety. But genuine anxiety filtered through rosy retrospection produces the same output: these kids aren't like we were.

Except here's the thing. Research by psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, published in Science Advances in 2019, found that the bias is consistent across different ages and different historical periods — and that people who score higher on certain cognitive traits are more likely to exhibit it, not less. Being smart doesn't protect you from this one. If anything, smart people are better at constructing convincing narratives around their biased perception.

What It Actually Costs Us

This would be a harmless quirk of human psychology if it stayed in the realm of family dinner arguments. It doesn't.

When the "kids these days" complaint gets institutionalized — when it shapes hiring practices, educational policy, military recruitment standards, or political platforms — it produces predictable distortions. Resources get misallocated toward fixing problems that don't exist (young people's supposed laziness) while real structural problems (the economic conditions young people are navigating) go unaddressed.

Rome's elder statesmen were convinced for generations that the problem with Roman youth was moral decline — too much Greek influence, too much luxury, insufficient martial virtue. The actual problem was a political economy that was concentrating wealth and foreclosing the social mobility that had made Rome dynamic in the first place. They spent enormous energy on the wrong diagnosis.

The Athenians worried about Socrates corrupting their youth. The youth Socrates was supposedly corrupting included some of the most remarkable minds in Western history.

The 1950s moral panic about comic books and juvenile delinquency consumed congressional bandwidth while the actual challenges facing postwar American youth — racial segregation, limited economic mobility for women, Cold War anxiety — received comparatively little serious policy attention.

The Pattern Is the Point

The historical record isn't saying young people are always fine and elders are always wrong. It's saying something more specific: the generic complaint — the structureless "these kids are soft" assertion — has a perfect track record of being useless as a diagnostic tool. Every generation that has deployed it has been wrong about the mechanism, even when they were occasionally right that something was changing.

Change is always happening. The question is whether you're going to understand what's actually changing or whether you're going to reach for the oldest, most well-worn tool in the human cognitive kit.

That Sumerian teacher pressing his complaints into clay about four thousand years ago wasn't stupid. He was doing what human brains do. His students, presumably, went on to run Sumerian civilization for another few centuries.

The tablet survived. So did the kids.