Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Bollocks. We're shaped by the world we live in, and the world changes. You really think you could hop into a time machine and happily spend a week in the shoes of your great-grandparents? That the relentless toil wouldn't leave you shocked and exhausted.
For more than two hundred years people in the West have been getting progressively more comfortable and secure. Each generation has had it easier than the one before it in real and tangible ways. Why do you think really old people are often thrifty to the point of neurosis? Because many of them remember going to bed hungry when they were children. Or having to share one pair of shoes with a sibling. You don't think that shapes you?
People were tougher in the past because they had to be. They lived in more brutal times. Their wants and insecurities were over basic needs. For most, being lazy meant going hungry. The amount of grinding labour just to prepare food every day, keep dishes and clothes and body clean in a home with no electricity or running water, would break the average person in Canada today.
How long do you think the posters on this board would last in the trenches? Ridden with lice, chasing rats off our food. Hurling ourselves into a storm of steel and flame month after month, year after year, while around us our friends were blown to pieces?
We're soft. The softest people to ever walk the planet. Are millennials softer than boomers? Both generations have been raised in environments of such affluence and comfort that there's not much difference. But millennials are one more generation removed from hunger and genuine toil, so yes, on the whole they're more coddled than their parents.
As for cereal, everyone has time for a bowl of cereal. Whether they care to do other things with that time instead is a different matter. Me, I like sitting at a table with other people for meals. Breakfast in our house is a 30-40 minute affair - cereal, toast, fruit. Pancakes and bacon on weekends. I find it an enjoyable way to ease into the day.
|
Every generation has it easier yes, but that is not a comment as to the nature of people but the environment they find themselves in. These are different things. To say that people are softer now because airplanes fly and computers turn on, while my great ancestor had it harder because they were out walking uphill both ways- that may all be true but doesn't speak to character, work ethic, perseverance, determination, any of these intangible human characteristics.
If we scooped up millenials and put them in a time machine and moved them to 1950, my assertion is that they'd be just like the baby boomer generation is and was- because people are people.
edit- and to add, the assumption based on your analysis would be that the current trajectory of humankind is to eventually become stationary puddles of blob that are immobile and incapable of thinking because they're so lazy. I don't believe this to be the case.