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.

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.