Arguably all started in the mid-to-late 70s when leadership in the US essentially threw in the towel on trying to improve the nation and started dismantling the country for profit. Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization does a very good job of illustrating this overall trend as it was reflected in the zeitgeist.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room."
-Socrates
Things change and different generations behave differently. Nevertheless, the parent complains about leadership behavior, not about children behavior.
I do, however, agree with the spirit of quote; it's just that it started to become really applicable a few generations ago (or, depending on how you think of it, such a mentality was always a major current of colonized America, but it really gained cultural ascendency in the 70s as we ran out of easy ways to extract wealth while plausibly "improving" things).
FWIW, that quote isn't from Socrates https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
This must be it.
Back in the 70s, Carter at least seemed to care about the American family’s wallet.
Now, America votes for a clown ex-president like Trump, thinking he’ll actually do something for them. Instead, he just surrounds himself with a bunch of other crooks.
And I highly doubt that Biden will do anything different to send America on a different trajectory.
Or maybe being cynical and disaffected is just a part of being young? Seems pretty common!
It's not just the young that are cynical anymore, though.
Listen to 80’s music for a bit if you think the current decade has a lock on existential dread.
Or just the theme song of “Good Times”, a sitcom from the 70’s.
Gen-Xers have also had a notoriously awful employment economy.
Re:The Battle of GameStop
by mywittyname on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @09:36AM
(#25916170)
My mom was an Xer and lamented that she was part of the first generation to be worse off than their parents. Our saving grace was the fact that welfare programs had not yet been completely gutted and that the 90s ushered in an era of prosperity that lasted long enough to get us kids through school (just in time for the GFC, yay!).
Re:The Battle of GameStop
by akhilcacharya on Tuesday January 26, 2021 @03:48AM
(#25913757)
It’s because generational theory is bogus of course!
Where have I heard this before?
” As adolescents and young adults in the 1980s and 1990s, Xers were dubbed the "MTV Generation" (a reference to the music video channel), sometimes being characterized as slackers, cynical, and disaffected.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X