The lazy, entitled millennials trope just doesn’t hold up. Whoopi in hot water again...

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 541 points –
The lazy, entitled millennials trope just doesn’t hold up
msnbc.com

Whoopi Goldberg argued on “The View” that millennials feel that raising a family and buying a house are out of reach because they simply aren’t working hard enough.

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The older generations have always seen the younger generations as lazy

“They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”

“Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners and despise authority. They show disrespect for their elders and love to chatter instead of exercise. Young people are now tyrants, not the servants of their household. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food and terrorize their teachers.”
Rhetoric, Aristotle, 4th Century BC

People have always whinged about young adults. Here's proof

Why old people will always complain about young people

The big takeaway from this is that change doesn't happen until the old guard dies.

We can't reason with them. All we can do is wait for them to die of natural causes.

Thank god death is built-in to the universe, or else we'd never solve these problems.

The big takeaway from this is that change doesn’t happen until the old guard dies.

Not quite.

The takeaway is that every year the old guard that died is replaced by a new group that ages into being grumpy old fucks.

I'm old GenX and have watched many people who used to be radicals when they were young turn into reactionary old fucks when they hit their 40s and 50s.

And people in your cohort will do the same as they age.

That hasn’t been happening. Millennials are moving further left with age. My take is that the previous trend of moving right as you age relied upon your life getting more comfortable as you age. You buy a house, you have two cars, you get to start going on vacations, you have assets you need to secure. That isn’t happening for Millennials. We’re not getting anymore comfortable as we age. We have nothing to conserve.

That said, I see so little radicalism in millennials compared to Gen Z. My generation is a bunch of liberals still trapped in corporate fairy tales about peaceful protesting and voting harder. Gen Z reminds me more of the generation of the turn of the 20th century. They’re not tolerating this shit.

Is that Aristotle or Socrates? I’m seeing both being attributed to the quote.

Edit: Also Plato… found this not sure if reputable but appears to be a quote from 1907 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/?amp=1

Probably invented, but it's worth pointing out that Socrates did not write. Most of his stuff came from Plato or others.

The Ancient Greeks also had a fundamentally different idea of what it meant to be a historian. It wasn't a fact and evidence-driven field, as it is thought of today. Herodotus, for example, regularly wrote stuff in the framing of "I wasn't there and it was many scores of years ago, but if I HAD been there this is what I would've seen happen", so to speak. Assuming he was a real person and not an invented personality.

I remember finding the source. It was a doctoral thesis on education in the ancient Greece, and that passage was like a summary of the sentiment in source texts, written by the author of the thesis.

edit; found the source text.

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