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You are right, it's always been the same
But now the media has a BS of bashing young people every chance they get
That's why they always stereotype young people as Gen X, Gen Y, milenials and then constantly portray them as idiots that know nothing about the World.
On the other side, show old people as very smart and knowledgeable.
Don't believe me,
It's not a coincidence that the youngest news anchor you see is possibly in their 40s
As a comedian said ' a little nieve..Don't change think?'
Ignorance is not age discriminate. That is the crux of this topic.
I DO have a bond with particular generations..My seniors or those who surpassed ignorance and gained a sensibility. God bless em for quietly letting my zany ideas to faulter...It gave them a smile and I sure learned a lesson !
I think a certain amount of inter-generational conflict within a family is normal: kids want to find their own way, parents want to hold on and protect them from making mistakes.
Other than that, I don't think there is anything normal about "bashing" another generation. Individuals, sure, if their behavior warrants it, but to condemn an entire group of people is just silly. To be fair, I see a lot of it, coming from both the young and the old. It's quite depressing. All generations have something of worth to bring to the table.
Why lump people together by age? Because it's simple, duh. Our simple lizard brains are always seeking simple answers to problems that can affect our lives. So (with no higher thought involved) that primitive brain says: "Old people do this, black people do that, women are _____ (fill in the blank), teenagers are _____ (fill in the blank).
It takes some higher thought to arrive at the idea that "all old people are not alike", "all women are not alike" etc.
At age 11 I started to see that adults were not the paragons we were taught they were and started to rebel (in a very limited, Catholic girl way). I began wondering "why" people who were older than I was were given this distinction without doing anything to deserve it. Why does being older confer status? I have always believed that intelligence was a better criteria for my admiration.
In earlier times people were revered for attaining old age because it was rare. They had knowledge (before reading and writing and books passing knowledge) and that was valuable. The gods had spared them whereas others in their generation had died.
Now there are many older people, it's not that rare and there are more and more people living to 100.
What is your opinion of someone who makes it to 100? Mine is "good genes" not necessarily admiration or reverence.
I don't bash older people, I am one now. Do I think younger people owe me respect because of age? No.
Some younger people are smarter than I am in technological ways, and that is valuable knowledge.
Some older people are not very intelligent or open-minded and I do not accord them respect just because they've lived 10 years longer than me.
I believe in the future children will be respected as much for their future abilities as older people are now for their past deeds. What is more valuable for our genus, the future or the past? Young humans deserve as much respect as old humans.
Let's stop making "age" a reason for respect. Show me and tell me who you are that is worthy of respect.
Not sure how this topic is debatable, but old people bash young people, young people bash old people. In other words, we bash anyone who's different from us.
If we don't bash our age difference, we'll bash our different languages, skin color, culture, where we live, if our house is bigger or smaller than theirs, parenting styles, blah blah blah.
Does anyone remember the 1960's and "don't trust anyone over 30"? My father of blessed memory (died in 1973 when I was 15) said "that's great until the person saying it is over 30.
I suspect it is endemic. I personally was never that way. I always had and treasured good relationships with my parents, my parents' friends and my in-laws (all four of them).
Is it natural for older generations to bash younger generations?
I would say the answer to your question is YES! Why? Maybe it is due to experience being the best teacher, when you see the younger generation making the same mistakes as the previous generation, one has to ask the question "What have you learned from our mistakes?" and then asking "What are you going to do to not make those mistakes?" When we see the same mistakes being made over and over again, then Yes, questioning the motives is warranted. This has been going on for generation after generation, if we try something different and it doesn't work, then why continue, if it works then great, pass it on, but to try and recreate the wheel every generation is an exercise in futility.
As an 80s kid I liked and respected my parents (50s) generation. I preferred that to the previous 60s-70s hippie culture. I did some rebellious stuff but it wasn't anything like some of the things the hippies did to their parents.
Researching ancient cultures and looking at preserved bodies you see 2500 year old corpses of young women in their 20's with tattoos on their arms, stories of ancients rebelling from their elders, and the like.
You see millennials bashing boomers, boomers bashing millennials, but in the end it seems to me the more things change, the more things stay the same.
The younger people are always more progressive and want change to the status quo, and those people eventually become the status quo, bashing the very young people that now want change. It's likely related to hormones and psychology. Testosterone makes us adventurous, and when that goes away, the familiar makes us comfortable and we become more resistant to wanting or needing change.
Seems to me not much has really changed from a human behavior standpoint, though certainly we've made some great cultural advancements. You look at the rise of rock and roll, and that music was considered appalling to many of the silent generation, while the boomers were considered the progressives campaigning for change and social freedoms, now the millennials look back at boomers with a negative light.
Truth be told, life is more a continuous, analog event, and we wouldn't be where we are today without our past generations. It's also important to remember hindsight is always 20/20 and it's easy to look back at something and say "it should have been done this way" .. it's much harder in the moment to actually make those decisions. Here's to continued progress and change at a reasonable pace and more of the same arguments from the young and old about why each other's generation is wrong.
There's been a big U-turn in the human race. Once upon a time, the few people smart and strong enough to make it to grandparent age were repositories of all kinds of knowledge for later generations to draw on. Just a couple of generations back, teenagers -- called "children" in those days -- spent all the time they could with adults they looked up to, learning how to be like them so they could make it as adults, too. Now they're seen as fuddy-duddies or worse, burdens who don't even know (gasp) how to use a cellphone.
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