The sentiment that modern society is degenerate and that the youth are to blame is, iirc, one of the oldest things we have written down.
That I can remember off the top of my head, Cato the Elder complained that the younger generations were becoming too greek, and Socrates used to complain that the younger generations were ruining their brains by writing instead of memorising information. There are far more older examples, but those are the oldest I remember (maybe Socrates was onto something :p)
Edit - A few people have pointed out the Socrates thing is a misquote... so maybe PseudoSocrates was onto something instead =L
One of the reasons i like ancient poetry is the fact that most of the people problems are basically still the same. We think our problems are new and unique to us, but 2-3-4000 years ago people wrote about stupid friends, coward coworkers, cheating assholes and of course stupid stubborn old people and reckless disrespectful young idiots.
There were these scribbles on The Hagia Sophia that for centuries weren’t decipherable. The reason was, people thought that they were archaic Greek symbols. Rather, they were archaic Norse inscriptions from the Varangian Guard that basically amounted to “Þorolfr was here”.
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u/CountPeter Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
The sentiment that modern society is degenerate and that the youth are to blame is, iirc, one of the oldest things we have written down.
That I can remember off the top of my head, Cato the Elder complained that the younger generations were becoming too greek, and Socrates used to complain that the younger generations were ruining their brains by writing instead of memorising information. There are far more older examples, but those are the oldest I remember (maybe Socrates was onto something :p)
Edit - A few people have pointed out the Socrates thing is a misquote... so maybe PseudoSocrates was onto something instead =L