“Kids these days!”
Every Generation Thinks the Next One Has Gone to the Dogs
Or, how we all eventually turn into the people we swore we'd never become.
If I had a rupee for every time I've heard that phrase, I'd probably have enough to buy a flat in Bengaluru. Okay, maybe a parking space in Bengaluru.
But I digress.
Every generation seems convinced that the one following it is a social experiment gone horribly wrong.
Our parents thought we watched too much television, listened to terrible music and had absolutely no idea how lucky we were. We thought they were hopelessly outdated.
Now we're looking at Gen Z and wondering why they can't make a phone call without having a small existential crisis.
And somewhere, a Gen Z person is looking at us and wondering why we keep calling instead of texting.
Same drama. Different decade.
...uphill
...both ways
...in the rain
...with a tiger chasing them.
We had fewer gadgets, fewer conveniences and even fewer ways to embarrass ourselves permanently on the internet.
We played outside, in the mud, made lifelong friends in person, and survived entire afternoons without knowing what everyone else was doing.
All true. Mostly.
But we also had boring television, terrible public transport, parents who thought asking questions was a sign of disrespect, and an impressive number of things we weren't allowed to discuss at the dinner table.
Every generation remembers the good bits of its childhood with extraordinary clarity and files the inconvenient bits under character building.
We call it resilience when we survive something. We sometimes call it weakness when someone younger asks why they should have to survive the same thing.
The uncomfortable truth? Some of the hardships we endured made us stronger. Others were just hardships.
We don't have to preserve both as cultural heritage.
They apparently can't handle criticism, don't want to work hard, and think a comfortable chair and a decent manager are basic human rights.
The nerve.
But here's another way to look at it.
Maybe some of them have seen what happens when people sacrifice their health for a job, stay in relationships that make them miserable, or spend decades chasing approval from people who will never give it.
Maybe they have decided that certain things aren't worth the price.
Are they always right? Of course not. Nobody gets a complimentary wisdom upgrade with their birth certificate.
Some people use the language of boundaries to avoid every difficult conversation. Some mistake discomfort for harm. And refusing to hear criticism doesn't become emotional intelligence just because you've given it a fashionable name.
But the same goes for older generations. Calling every younger person lazy doesn't make you hardworking. Calling emotional honesty weakness doesn't make you tough. And surviving a bad experience doesn't automatically qualify you to recommend it to everyone else.
Perhaps we could stop treating every difference as evidence of moral decline.
Gen X remembers when making plans meant calling someone at home and hoping their father didn't answer.
Gen Z can organise a holiday, order dinner, pay rent and find out what a stranger had for breakfast without leaving the sofa.
We marvel at the convenience. Then complain that young people are always on their phones.
Fair enough. Sometimes they are.
But let's not pretend the older generation was immune to distraction. We had newspapers at the breakfast table, television dinners, office gossip, and relatives who could spend three hours discussing someone else's marriage without once asking how our own lives were going.
We didn't have smartphones. We had different ways of not paying attention.
The technology is new. The urge to avoid an awkward silence is ancient.
And while we're at it, perhaps we should acknowledge that social media hasn't just made young people more self-conscious. It has given all of us a front-row seat to everyone else's carefully edited life.
The difference is that some of us grew up comparing ourselves with the neighbours. Younger people can compare themselves with the entire planet before breakfast.
That sounds exhausting.
Hypocrisy.
We tell young people to be independent, then get offended when they make decisions we wouldn't have made.
We tell them to find their own path, then worry when it doesn't resemble ours.
We encourage them to speak up, provided they say something we agree with.
And we insist that they respect experience, as though experience and good judgement are the same thing.
They're not.
Experience tells you what happened when you tried something before. Judgement helps you decide whether the circumstances are different this time.
You can be sixty and still be an idiot. You can be twenty-five and have an insight that makes everyone in the room stop talking.
Age deserves respect. It doesn't deserve unquestioning obedience.
And the reverse is true, too. Being young doesn't make every new idea brilliant. Sometimes a new idea is just an old mistake with better branding.
The point isn't to declare one generation superior. It's to stop treating the generation gap like a competition nobody remembers entering.
Perhaps the kids are doing some things right.
Maybe we should listen when younger people question the assumption that work must consume your life.
Maybe they have a point when they challenge outdated ideas about relationships, identity and what a successful life is supposed to look like.
And maybe they could learn something from people who've been around longer: patience, perspective, the ability to disagree without ending a friendship, and the knowledge that not every problem needs to be turned into a public announcement.
There is plenty for both sides to learn.
But learning requires something rather inconvenient.
We have to admit that the other person might know something we don't.
For a generation that has spent years telling the next one how little it knows, that can be a difficult pill to swallow.
So, has the next generation gone to the dogs? Possibly. But if history is anything to go by, so did we.
Our parents worried about us. We worry about our children. They'll worry about theirs. Every generation will invent a new way to be scandalised by the next, and someone will eventually complain that society is going downhill because nobody writes letters anymore.
Meanwhile, the world will keep changing, as it has always done.
Some changes will be wonderful. Some will be terrible. Most will be a messy combination of both.
We don't have to agree with every choice younger people make. They don't have to approve of every tradition we cling to. But we could try being curious before being critical.
Instead of asking, “What's wrong with kids these days?”, perhaps we could ask, “What's different about the world they're growing up in?”
And instead of expecting them to live the way we did, perhaps we could help them avoid repeating the mistakes we made.
That would be a rather useful legacy.
After all, the goal of parenting, mentoring or simply being the older person in the room isn't to produce miniature versions of ourselves.
It's to help the next generation do better.
Even if they do it while wearing strange clothes, listening to music we don't understand, and refusing to answer a perfectly reasonable phone call.
And if the kids really have gone to the dogs, let's at least make sure we're not the ones holding the leash.
