“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” Socrates (469 -399 BC)
What is usually called the older generation, always says a variant of the above quote about every younger generation. For the baby boomer generation, we had Christopher Lasch’s punditry. It seems today, we are actually a little bit more enlightened by science about the plight of youth; given the advances in brain science. Physiologically , the most sophisticated part of the human brain, the frontal lobe, where judgment is processed, does not fully develop until age 26, so that is why youth behaves irresponsibly, without reflection and sometimes highly immorally.
And in my experience, it is always the people who were the most irresponsible and most self-destructive in their youth, who are in turn the most judgmental of the growing pains of the under 30’s. The play Really, Really, by Paul Down Coliazzo, produced by Touch Productions, currently running at West of Lenin, was a treatise about the biggest defect of being young, their selfishness.
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