“Back in my day, we respected our elders” he said
“No you didn’t, you feared them because they could hit you” she said.
“Is there a difference?” he asked,
“No, if you’re confessing to respecting the hooded youths you avoided the other day”
Back in my day, we wore jeans so wide you could rent them out as studio flats for the Conservatives to house unprocessed emigrants. Now the kids shuffle about in trousers so abbreviated they’re basically conceptual art – like they’ve been issued a statutory two inches of fabric by some government committee for Trousorial Streamlining, resulting in the waistband now hovering somewhere around the mid-shin.
And these kids – these luminous, S-shaped silhouettes hunched over phones like little glowworms, – they’re not doing any harm, of course they’re not, but somehow, just by existing, they manage to embody the general, low-frequency sense that everything, absolutely everything, has gone terribly wrong somewhere.
I blame AI. Remember? Remember life before the internet, when we climbed trees and played conkers? We did nothing else, there was no crime, no disease, no geopolitical tension, just us, trees, conkers. But then Game Boys arrived, and overnight civilisation collapsed, didn’t it? Because the children, with their buttons, and their thumbs, and their “fun,” possessed by a joystick-fuelled idleness, had abandoned the sacred tradition of climbing trees. And conkers.
Then the radio died, killed by the “television,” which, as we all know, renders the brain into a kind of warm, compliant paste spread over a Sony Walkman. Suddenly, jazz and juvenile delinquents everywhere.
Remember when we climbed trees and played conkers?
The Victorians do, frowning into gaslamps, muttering that children are now all softness and sentiment, drowning in trash literature and workshy dreams. Carlyle wringing his hands because the youth couldn’t heft a decent metaphorical anvil anymore. Remember during the enlightenment period, when we climbed trees and played conkers? Samuel Johnson has been busy warning us, several times, that young people now lack industry and moral seriousness.
Remember the Renaissance, when we climbed trees and played conkers? Erasmus does, sighing into his inkwell, the young now are just pleasure-seekers – untamed, disrespectful, unlearned. Martin Luther has also noticed that the youth are now wild, unbridled, and disobedient.
Remember the good old Medieval times, when nobody died of anything and we all climbed trees and played conkers? But now these younger monks have their disrespect, laziness, and lack of obedience. Even Alcuin of York has noticed that the young scholars these days prefer vain and foolish trifles over study and discipline. 4th century St. Augustine has even commented that now young men are obsessed with games, drinking, sex, and applause, instead of learning the many joys of learning.
Remember in 1st century Rome when we climbed trees and played conkers? But now, according to Cicero, the young Romans are now neglecting traditional virtue and preferring pleasure and entertainment. Horace is now rolling his eyes at their luxury habits. Juvenal noted that the young are decadent, vain, fashion-mad. Expensive sandals, loose morals, no conkers.
Remember when we climbed trees and played conkers?
Not anymore, and as you can see, it’s not just me that’s noticed, Khety 1200 BCE Ancient Egypt complains that young scribes are lazy and undisciplined compared to elders. A 2000 BCE Sumer school tablet shows teachers complaining that pupils don’t listen, talk back, and slack off.
You’d think, by now, we’d notice the pattern. That maybe the problem is not the youth, nor the trousers, nor the technology, nor the conkers. But noticing would require admitting the uncomfortable truth that the decline we’re diagnosing is merely the slow erosion of our own relevance.
Memory, after all, is a lovely little liar. It edits out the misery, the boredom, the smells, and leaves us with a polished highlight reel of ourselves – younger, slimmer, cleverer, climbing trees, besting conkers, never once losing our keys.
And the moment comes – quietly – when what once made us modern becomes the exact thing that makes us old. The world shifts an inch to the left and suddenly we’re stood on the wrong floorboard.
Still, there is comfort – a delicious psychological biscuit dunked in the lukewarm tea of superiority – in believing that “they” are the problem. That their slang, or shoes, or music, are a sign of The End. Because it is far easier to believe the world has declined than to suspect we’ve simply moved to the background of it.
On and on, the cycle persists. Each wave of youth is mocked by the last, before inevitably joining the chorus of condemnation once their Spotify starts including more podcasts than pop songs.
But the world never ends. Not really. Not with Snapchat filters or vaping or whatever strange trend currently holds dominion over adolescent expression. The kids will grow up, adapt, become annoyed by the next batch of upstarts. And us? We’ll mutter through dentures and weary sighs, “Remember when we climbed trees and played conkers?”
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