this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
for those that do not get the reference, this is a quote that is generally attributed to Socrates or the like. I seem to recall once seeing some discussion to the effect that it isnt actually a quote of his, and is actually from some guy in the beginning of the 1900s paraphrasing some ancient greek writers, though I dont know for sure, but either way, its a pretty old quote and as such is used to demonstrate that the sentiment that "the children of today are worse than they used to be" has been around for longer than modern technology, and may be as old as civilization itself if not older.
Respect is earned. And a lot of these adults have given zero reason for them to be respected. Children are not servants, that's a wrong and stupid way to look at it.
Kids doing weird stuff that doesn't totally conform to the culture is not a respect thing. Its just the evolution of culture. For example when I was a kid, painting your fingernails was almost unheard of. Basically only the hard-core emos or a rock singer or something would do it.
These days you see young kids painting their fingernails and it's not a big deal to anyone. I'm the Socrates here because I think it's weird but I try to stay open minded that things are different now and will continue to change into ways that will seem stranger and stranger to me
For the uninitiated this is a qoute from Socrates.
I'm not pro child and I'm not a child myself, at least by age, but you make it sound like children should just fall in line and be mindless servants. Half the stuff you listed I think are improvements to my upbringing.
Respecting elders is bullshit after a point. Respect everyone, but elders don't deserve some specialty treatment. I have never stood when someone enters a room except for a bride at a wedding or to greet that person. There are very few people that deserve people to stand on arrival, and for everyone of them, it depends on the setting. Nobody always gets a standing arrival. Contradiction is healthy within reason. Asking question and countering statements isn't bad when it's honest.
All that said, there are definitely traits that I think are bad with today's youths, but they aren't worse than previous generations, just worse in different things. For example, I bet less kids today smoke cigarettes compared to 10 years ago.
Edit: I guess that's a "woosh" on me. I thought that it read a bit on the nose, but I wasn't familiar with the OG material. That's on me, but I agree with the intended sentiment.
It’s a quote that gets attributed to Socrates showing that the issue of one generation complaining about the following generation is a tradition as old as time itself
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt
The user you replied to is repeating a fairly well known and old quote, not directly arguing that children behave as servants. It's a quote that gets used a lot in discussions about "kids these days", the point of sharing it is usually to demonstrate that adults have always said this about children, and thus also to imply that the kids really haven't gotten significantly worse in the present generation, people just think they have because they remember themselves or previous generations as kids through the lens of nostalgia or such.
I think it's more that most of us don't remember ourselves as kids.
I remember myself as a kid, I was an asshole. My friends were assholes. We were only slightly restrained by the fact that we had no internet so our assholery was contained withing the limited physical space we could access.