“Kids these days don’t respect their elders,” “Things were better back in the old days,” “The new generation doesn’t have any values and is destroying society.”
You must have heard someone say this before. It might have been your parents, an uncle, a grandparent, or another older person you know. This has been said about Gen Z for a couple of decades now. “Gen Z doesn’t want to work anymore!” they said. “It’s the weakest generation yet!” Now, this is also being said about Gen Alpha. Interestingly enough, the very generation who once faced these accusations is now starting to do the exact same thing to the newest generation.
For example, older generations sometimes criticized Gen Z trends such as the Renegade dance on TikTok, the Floss popularized by Fortnite, and the dab as ridiculous or pointless, or as evidence that young people were becoming increasingly obsessed with social media.
Now, some members of Generation Z are directing similar judgments at Generation Alpha. This time, the targets are things like Skibidi Toilet, the viral “6-7” gesture, Italian Brainrot memes and the seemingly nonsensical slang children use online. What was once dismissed as Gen Z’s brainless internet obsession is now being used by its members to describe Gen Alpha’s culture. The references have changed, but the reaction is remarkably familiar.
But why do we, as a society, seem to keep judging the next generation? Here are a few reasons why:
Selective memory makes the past seem better
In the 2019 study “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking“, published in the scientific journal Science Advances, researchers found that our memories distort comparisons with the past. People tend to project their current characteristics onto their memories of their own youth and their perceptions of how young people behaved back then.
For example, someone who has always liked to read can assume that, when they were a teenager, almost all their classmates also liked to read. Memories of youth end up being built partly from our own experiences as teenagers, rather than from the experiences of an entire generation.
When people compare this idealized memory of the past with young people they observe today, the current generation seems inferior. This is important to note because people may be sincere when they say that young people have changed for the worse while still making an unreliable comparison. They may not realize they are treating a selective memory as if it were an objective historical record.
And our memories of youth tend to become more positive over time. This is known as the “rosy retrospection” phenomenon. When an older person says that children were happier when they were young because they played in the street, neighbors knew each other, and no one sat alone staring at a screen, the claim may be true, but it may also reflect selective memory.
Things like family conflicts, insecurities, restrictions, and other problems may not be remembered with the same intensity. Rosy retrospection makes us idealize the past, overlooking how difficult things could be sometimes.
We Mistake Our Values for Universal Truths
We’re not born knowing what a good life means, what it means to have a respectable family, to be a good worker, or a well-educated young person. We learn these definitions throughout life, within a specific society. When we grow up, many of these references become so natural to us that we stop perceiving them as social constructions and start treating them as universal truths.
According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we carry dispositions that are acquired throughout life through family, education, social class and the experiences we have. This is our habitus. It influences our way of thinking, feeling, acting, evaluating people, and perceiving the world. It’s something we internalize without even intending to or realizing it, a kind of practical sense that makes us feel that certain ways of living are natural or more appropriate than others.
Imagine growing up in a family where questioning your parents was considered disrespectful, getting married and starting a family were fundamental goals, and enduring difficult situations was seen as a sign of perseverance. When this person meets a generation that questions parental authority, changes jobs in search of better conditions, postpones marriage, and sets limits on family relationships, they can interpret these differences as a lack of discipline, commitment or respect. This is because they evaluate the behaviors of the new generation based on what they learned to consider correct.
This doesn’t mean that habitus completely determines our opinions or that people of the same generation think the same way. Rather, our evaluations are influenced by dispositions we don’t consciously choose.
Each Generation Faces Changes the Previous One Struggles to Understand
The world changes faster than people can adapt to it. According to American sociologist William F. Ogburn, different parts of a society don’t necessarily change at the same pace. Technology and material conditions can change rapidly, while standards, institutions, and values take longer to adapt.
This idea is especially useful for understanding conflicts between generations. An older generation, for example, may have learned to build friendships mainly through face-to-face meetings, phone calls and activities carried out in physical spaces. The younger generation also builds relationships in these environments, but can maintain friendships, form communities and participate in debates through digital means.
Technology has expanded the possibilities of interaction. However, the criteria used to evaluate what constitutes a true friendship may remain linked to past experiences. Thus, someone may conclude that young people are more isolated because they spend a lot of time connected, even if some of these connections represent meaningful social relationships.
The same reasoning can be applied to changes in family, education, and work. Women have earned rights and expanded their participation in the labor market, but traditional expectations about who should take care of their children and perform household chores may persist. Similarly, younger generations can question the expectation to follow a linear professional trajectory, while companies and families continue to use models of success built in previous periods.
In these cases, the conflict is not only between young and old people, but also between social practices that have changed and expectations that have not yet completely changed.
Each generation inherits a different world
Generations don’t form in isolation. They grow under different historical conditions, including wars, economic crises, technological transformations, changes in the labor market, and political disputes.
A person who entered the labor market during a period of economic expansion may have built their life under very different conditions from those of someone who started working during an economic downturn. However, people often explain their own success by their individual qualities and the failures of others by their personal defects.
But we need to investigate something before making this judgement: under what conditions did older people build their lives, and under what conditions are young people trying to build theirs?
For sociologist Karl Mannheim, generational experience also depends on the historical context in which people grow up. A person who reaches adulthood during an economic expansion may develop different expectations from those of someone who starts working during a crisis. Similarly, growing up during a dictatorship, a transition to democracy, or a technological transformation can influence the way someone understands authority, freedom, and political participation.
Also, Marxist theory helps us ask what social conditions make certain trajectories possible, instead of explaining all success or failure in terms of individual virtues and flaws. Material conditions also change the meaning of choices. Leaving your parents’ house, getting married, buying a property, or having children doesn’t require the same resources in every period.
But are young people really different or are they just judged unfairly?
Both things can be true.
Each generation develops its own characteristics. Technology can change attention and communication, economic conditions can change professional expectations, and new cultural norms can modify affective relationships. It is legitimate to study these differences and point out real problems. What isn’t legitimate is turning differences into an automatic moral hierarchy.
For example, saying that young people spend more time on social networks is a statement that can be investigated. To say that this makes them morally inferior is a different kind of judgement. One that requires much more than simply verifying a habit.
In addition, there is a tendency to treat younger generations as if they were a homogeneous group. Individuals of the same age may have radically different experiences depending on social class, country, family, education, and available opportunities.
What we should ask, therefore, isn’t whether the newest generation is getting worse. We need to think about which behaviors have actually changed from one generation to the next and what conditions have driven these changes. Which parts of our criticism are based on concrete evidence, and which are rooted in nostalgia or discomfort? Are we judging people by their choices or by the circumstances they have to live in?
In the end, we don’t need to rank generations against one another. We should recognize their achievements and setbacks without treating our own youth as a universal measure of human value.
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The article above was edited by Julia Ide.
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