When I noticed years ago in the course of my readings in philosophy and poetry that even the ancient Greeks and Chinese spent a lot of time griping about how the kids those days were a bunch of retarded delinquents and society had been going steadily downhill ever since some vaguely-defined golden age, a low-watt bulb buzzed and flickered over my head, and I said to myself I said, Self, you know what, I think all the curmudgeonly grumping you hear along these lines may just be some omnipresent thing in basic human psychology with no real correlation to anything objective about the world, and after congratulating myself on that perspicacious insight, I quickly resolved to ignore any such bloviating I might later encounter, seeing as how life is short and death is unanswered, and I have largely stuck to that resolution.
You Know the Good Old Days Weren’t Always Good and Tomorrow Ain’t as Bad as It Seems
Therefore I’m glad that XKCD has gone to the trouble to spell out in more detail what I was content to dismiss with a grunt and an impatient hand-wave.
June 24, 2013 @ 9:17 pm
To be honest, at the ancient age of 50, my curmudgeonliness turns absolutely to the opposite: The kids are allright. It is the Older Boomers to which I turn my scathing eye (I am exactly on the turning point of Boomer versus Generation X, and being immature I identify more with the latter). They (the boomers) are all disgustingly obese, all reactionary pigs or pious Prius drivers commuting 50 miles to their exusrban sprawl estates, and all just so blehh!
LOL!