[Blank] is Worse Today! An Old Idea.

As Millennials reach middle age, we should be warry of becoming nostalgic for the past. There seems to be a very universal and timeless belief that society hit its peak when you were young and everything has gone downhill since then. Here are some sentiments to be suspicious of.

"Nobody wants to work anymore."

Ah this gem. Use of it shot up in the pandemic, with businesses claiming that people were choosing to sit at home on the dole rather than do an honest day's work (which was false). The claim isn't new though. Here is some history of it being said:

When this statement is made, journalists often repeat it completely uncritically. Because the claim is usually being made by someone trying to fill a crappy job for as little pay as possible. Perhaps most frustrating is how many working class people buy into it. I want to scream when I hear an overworked waiter blame their woes on a fictional person who doesn't want to be their coworker rather than their employer who isn't offering a decent wage.

"Movies aren't as good as they used to be."

I have to admit, I kind of believe this one a bit myself. The "Marvelization of Cinema" has meant that studios don't want film makers with a distinct vision, they want someone who will produce their intellectual property. However, the complaint that movies have lost their way or that they've been ruined by profit seeking isn't a new one.

2014: The Reason Why Hollywood Makes So Many Boring Superhero Movies

2004: ...movie-making may be the only business that generates more revenue by dumping shoddy widgets overseas than by selling first-rate ones at home. Today's bad movies are made to be dumped.

1990: These are two examples of Hollywood's new commercialism at its most grotesque, and there are many others...

1978: Who killed Hollywood?

1974: Everyone feels that movies aren’t very funny anymore, and they seem to get worse even as we expect less.

1964: What I think are processes of structural disintegration are at work in all types of movies, and though it's obvious that many of the old forms were dead and had to be broken through, it's rather scary to see what's happening...

1953: Thus on a straight competitive basis it is no wonder that a thoughtful segment of the entertainment world is very pessimistic about the future of the motion picture theater.

1932: But the accession of sound set the whole industry back upon the wrong road — the road of imitation. Drama never got anywhere along that road, and neither — as an art — will the movie.

1931: The trouble with the Hollywood output is precisely the trouble with any other art that is allowed to fall into the complete control of profit seekers whose one objective is the mass mind.

1915: The theatre is now entirely conducted in America under a system of competitive capitalism...

The last one is pretty funny because the author is bemoaning the fact that the proletariat is going to see cheap movies rather than live performances of Shakespeare. However the best has to be the guy in 1932 complaining about how movies today are being ruined by presence of... sound.

"Real men are in decline."

Look, I'm not even going to try to define what a "real man" is because the whole concept is dumb and the panic is old.

1956: In the early of the days business was the province of the self-made man, and that traditionally rugged, untutored individual sought little help from college boys in running his affairs.

1911: The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living.

1879: Certainly in the old day, when war was the frequent occupation of all able-bodied men, when the fight was personal, and the weaker vanquished were always destroyed, war did act to annihilate the weak and preserve the strong. But in modern warfare the system does not work to preserve the strong at the expense of the weak; the victors of battles do not in the least tend to survive or to propagate to better advantage than the vanquished. On the contrary, the selection for the battle-field tends to favor the breeding of the weak, the cowardly, the superannuated, or the immature by the more or less permanent separation of the strongest men from society.

Oh 1879 writer, you have no idea what modern warfare is. In case you are wondering, yes that guy is very racist. Some pretty low opinions about the Irish.

I was planning an entry about people complaining through out time about how feminism is bad. It seemed less fun though when the first article I found was basically "I'm a feminist, but the right to abortion has gone too far." Well congratulations writer from 1990, you got your way.

"Kids are so badly behaved these days!"

“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.”

This statement is a few minor edits from being earnestly declared today by a conservative opinion columnist pretending to be a reasonable centrist. Want to take a guess when it was actually said?

That statement was said over 2,000 years ago by Socrates. The belief by every generation that youth today are worse is so well established that there are actually scientific papers studying the "Kids these days" effect.

A lot of it is believing that traits you have as an adult, such as respecting authority, being intelligent and well read, were traits you had as a child. And then people get annoyed that youth don't act like adults.

So try to keep in mind that whatever generation you are a part of is probably not the best or the worst. Plenty of people might think that, but you don't have to be one of them.