About seventy thousand years ago, on the vast grasslands of Africa, a small band of Homo sapiens wandered in search of food. Human life then was brutally hard. There were no schools, no libraries, no internet as we know them today. The only repository of knowledge was the minds of the group's elders. Which fruit was safe to eat in which season, which forest hid dangerous predators, how to keep a fire burning — this life-or-death knowledge lived nowhere but in the memory of the old. In that ancient world, obeying every word of an elder, to the letter, was the only way for the young to survive. A young man who trusted his own cleverness over the wisdom of his elders and ate some unfamiliar fruit was almost certainly signing his own death warrant. And so, through the long grind of evolution, the human brain came to be wired in a particular way: elders would always perceive the novelty or rebellion of the young as a threat. Change meant danger. Tradition meant safety.
Since then, thousands of years have passed. We have left the forests behind and built great cities; we have set foot on the surface of the moon; we have invented artificial intelligence. And yet the hardware of the brain inside our skulls is still, in essence, the hardware of the Stone Age. That ancient dread still lives within us. Which is why, even now, people mutter that today's children have no respect for their elders, that they won't put in an honest day's work — we were never like this in our time. Anyone who has sat in their own living room, at a tea stall, or at some family gathering has surely heard an elder say this at least once. Every generation seems to believe the one coming up behind it is somehow inferior — weaker in character, in values, in diligence. It is one of humanity's oldest habits. But the question worth asking is this: is each new generation really getting worse than the last, or is this simply an illusion of the human mind?
In 2019, the journal Science Advances published a landmark paper. Psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California ran an extensive study and gave this mental illusion a name: the "kids these days" effect. To understand this strange facet of human nature, they surveyed thousands of adults and found that people consistently held negative opinions about three particular traits in young people — respect for authority, intelligence or love of learning, and their capacity for hard work. When asked directly, adults said, without hesitation, that today's youth simply aren't hardworking, have no taste for reading, and show no respect to their elders. The finding calls to mind that same primal human clinging to tradition for the sake of the tribe's survival, and that same suspicion of anything new.
The workings of the human mind are intricate, and it often deceives itself in order to protect its own ego. According to Protzko and Schooler, two psychological mechanisms drive this effect. The first is the idealization of the past — what might be called a memory illusion. When adults look back on their own childhood, they conveniently forget their own mistakes, their disorderly conduct, their laziness. The wisdom, discipline, and maturity they have gained by growing older gets retroactively projected onto their childhood selves, as though it had always been there. As a result, they end up comparing their own mature, present-day selves against the immaturity of today's children — an unfair contest from the start. Memory is not a video recording that preserves the unvarnished truth. It is a story the brain writes, one in which we are always cast as the hero. When a sixty-year-old recalls being twenty, he forgets the immature decisions of that age and remembers only his achievements and his discipline. This, in fact, is one of evolution's small mercies — if we were forced to carry the full weight of every past mistake, we would break down mentally. But this same tendency to gild our own past makes us needlessly harsh toward the young of today.
The second reason is what might be called specialty bias. As human society moved through the agricultural revolution and grew into vast empires, it split into different vocations — some became farmers, some warriors, some scholars. And whoever excelled in a particular field began to judge the entire world by that one yardstick. The research found that an adult who is skilled in some particular quality tends to notice, more sharply than anyone else, the absence of that very quality in others. A person who loves reading concludes that "children these days don't read at all." A highly disciplined person concludes that "today's youth have no manners." This bias reveals something important: we are incapable of judging others objectively; we view society always through the lens of our own particular competence. A literary person may believe that the younger generation's command of language is deteriorating, entirely unaware that this same generation might be making revolutionary strides in computer programming — a domain entirely invisible to that literary person's frame of reference.
None of this is new. Anyone who assumes that adults only began complaining like this after the arrival of the internet, or only in the modern era, is quite mistaken. As far back as the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote something to the effect that the youth of his day filled him with despair — that they were disrespectful, irresponsible, uncivil. In the fourth century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle likewise criticized young people as hot-tempered, driven by emotion, and lacking self-restraint. In other words, in every era, the adults of that time have believed their successors were ruining everything. Neither Hesiod nor Aristotle had smartphones or video games to blame, and yet their complaints echo, almost word for word, the complaints of any grandfather today. This makes it abundantly clear that the trouble was never really about technology — it is the same primeval software running in the human brain, replaying itself in every generation. Homo sapiens has built its social fabric in such a way that as we age, our desire to preserve the status quo intensifies, and the restlessness of the new generation becomes something to fear.
Looking through history, one finds many amusing and fascinating examples of this fear — what is now called "juvenoia." The great Greek philosopher Socrates feared that the invention of writing would ruin young people's memory and leave them ignorant; to him, the written word was nothing more than a dead memory. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, there was widespread panic about novels and books. When reading storybooks and novels became popular, the adults of the time worried that young men and women would lose themselves in fantasy worlds and that their mental balance would be destroyed. People believed reading was a kind of addiction that would corrode the values of society. It might seem strange to us today that anyone could have panicked over reading books, but for the social fabric of that era, this new medium was a genuine source of dread.
In the twentieth century, this same juvenoia took on new forms. There was an enormous uproar in America over comic books. In the 1950s, comic books provoked such fear across America and Europe that many sociologists claimed reading comics was turning children into criminals. A U.S. Senate committee even deliberated on the matter and imposed restrictions on the comic book industry. Then came the age of television and video games, and the same anxieties resurfaced — that these media would render children's minds passive and inert.
Each time a new medium of information or entertainment appeared, the older generation believed that this time, the youth really were headed for ruin. The intense anxiety adults feel today about smartphones and social media is simply the contemporary expression of juvenoia. Those who criticize social media today forget that their own parents criticized them in exactly the same way over television, and that their grandparents' generation voiced identical fears about listening to the radio or reading novels.
All of this makes clear that the "kids these days" effect and juvenoia walk hand in hand. Together, these two concepts capture both the individual and the collective dimensions of the human mind. Causally, the "kids these days" effect gives rise, at the level of individual psychology, to the illusion that "children have become unworthy." When this illusion merges with a changing technology or shifting culture across society, it swells into the broad social fear known as juvenoia. Homo sapiens has always loved to hear stories and to believe in them. When many individuals combine their private illusions into one grand social narrative, an entire generation gets branded as delinquent or worthless. It is one of the strange paradoxes of human society that the very species that rules this planet through its intelligence and adaptability is also the species most terrified of change.
In all of this, adults make one very significant error: they consistently underestimate the power of adaptation. The researcher Finkelhor has shown that adults tend to undervalue the adaptability of the younger generation. Young people are remarkably capable of adjusting to new environments and new technologies, of learning new skills — an ability that the older generation often struggles to fully grasp. The greatest strength of Homo sapiens has always been its extraordinary capacity to adapt quickly. From the use of fire, to agriculture, to the wheel, to the steam engine, and now to artificial intelligence — every single time a new technology has arrived, the younger generation has absorbed it with remarkable ease and rewired its own mind accordingly. Older generations, judging the young by the standards of their own past, conclude that the world is declining. In reality, the young are simply using that same ancient gift for adaptation to prepare themselves for a new world.
These two ideas together teach us that the generation gap is nothing abnormal. It is a continuous cycle running through human civilization. Evolution does not only shape the body — it shapes the mind as well. Our brains are, in a sense, programmed to keep turning along this same circular path. Every young person will one day grow old, and every revolutionary idea will one day harden into conservative tradition. The very young people being criticized today as unworthy or immature will, decades from now, having become adults themselves, look at the generation that follows them and repeat the very same line: "How disciplined we were in our day — the children of today learn nothing at all." This is the eternal law of human civilization. And for as long as Homo sapiens walks this earth, its memory illusions and its fear of the new will keep this endlessly entertaining generational drama alive.
Comments
Post a Comment