One of humanity’s great traditions is for older people to complain about the work ethic of younger people. We have seen this pattern repeat with every generation in modern history, and we would probably see something similar if we could go back to a time before modern history. It seems likely that if you talked to a 45-year-old in the year 1200 BC they would tell you that kids those days were a bunch of lazy, ungrateful whippersnappers. In fact, we don’t have to speculate about this, we know that Aristotle, some 300 years before Christ, complained that young people of the day were “high minded” and had not yet been “humbled by life.” Meanwhile, the Roman poet Horace in the first century BC chastised young people as “beardless” and accused them of squandering their money. Which tells us that the epidemic of beardless men goes all the way back to Ancient Rome. A shocking discovery.
The point is that there is nothing new under the sun, and complaints by old fogies, like myself, directed at the youth are certainly no exception to that rule. However, just because a complaint is common, that doesn’t make it necessarily invalid. In fact, if anything, it would seem to suggest the opposite. And these days, when it comes to concerns over a lack of work ethic among the current crop of young adults, all signs indicate that the concerns are well founded. I don’t know if they were true in Rome or Greece two thousand years ago, but I know that here, in the year 2023, we have a serious problem.
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