The unnecessary generational war

Older generations seem to really enjoy constantly criticising us. We no longer respect our parents, we are no longer modest, and we are basically just a bunch of keyboard warriors…at least according to the articles our parents’ are posting about us.

Are we really all so inherently awful that everyone else has to go out of their own way to call us out?

We were raised in the age of swift technological progress. We experienced using pay phones and saw our parents clip their swanky pagers onto their belts. But we also witnessed how box-set televisions become high-definition flat screens and bulky CPUs turned into slick looking laptops.

And most importantly, we witnessed the rise of the massive game-changer, that is social media.

The point is, we were raised in an extremely different climate than the generations that came before us.

Somehow, people within these generations do not like how we turned out, and fear that there is something wrong with this generation.

Maybe we are going to run the world down to the ground like they feared. But it’s not like war, famine, poverty, discrimination and environmental degradation wasn’t already happening under the watch of older generations, right? #clapback

I think each generation will always have a weird, pre-programmed superiority complex over every other generation after them. After all, people have been selling the next generation short for thousands of years already.

Considering how classical fourth century BC philosopher, Socrates, complained about the youths of the time, saying: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

Each generation was born and raised in a different social, political, economic and environmental climate. This affects the way we behave, our beliefs, actions and so on. Shifts in character will clearly occur within each generation, however, it is not a bad thing.

People from older generations may think we spend too much time on the internet. But they do not realise how scrolling through Facebook on our smartphones is actually going to land us jobs in the new age. After all, social media is the biggest rising industry.

If all generations remained the same, there would have been no progress. Thankfully, each generation grows up different, and is capable of contributing something new to society if given the chance. We must learn to appreciate these differences, and not simply write off and condescend those younger than us.

Because hot on the heels of us millennials is Generation Z, the digital natives born in a completely different century. And we will need to embrace what they can do for the world, even if we may find them really annoying.