Our youth now loves luxury.
They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.

This isn’t some elder complaining about today’s youth. This was said by the famous philosopher Socrates, more than 2,500 years ago.

Not much has changed since this was written, but it is an overstatement.

Socrates reminds me of the old man down the street yelling at the kids to “get off of his damn lawn,” but he was the grouchy old man that had some truth in his words.

“History repeats itself” would be the easy way to summarize this.

Each generation is raised with different assumptions and norms. I always assumed that the past was better, based off what my grandparents have told me.

You know the usual, “Back in my day…” or “Well, when I was your age…” spiel you get from elders. Well, it was a different time, a different situation when they were my age.

I’m aware there wasn’t always the technology that we have now, and fun was defined in different ways then.

But that is not the way it is anymore. I thank and appreciate the older generation, for living then and helping create my generation and for going through those experiences.

But this generation lives now and creates the future.

They like saying something was better when they were young so they can remember how much they enjoyed those things— despite the negatives that might have tagged along with it.

Nostalgia can be fun, but misleading. Sometimes that is the only reason why the elder bother to even pick up with the activity again. To get the same emotion they once had years ago.

The undeniable challenge that remains between generations is what creates progress.

Because of what has occurred in past years or mistakes that have taken place, we, the young, now have higher expectations set on our shoulders.

But we are not given the benefit of the doubt.

Competition has risen for this generation. Over 40,000 people applied to a UC and about 20,000 were accepted in 1989— that’s half of the applicants.

In 2013, approximately 99,000 people applied and 33,000 were accepted— thats less than half. Only one-third of the applicants are accepted, according to ucop.edu. It’s harder to get into a UC now than it was 25 years ago.

Though our generation may sometimes be deaf to the words of our elders right now, when we get older we will be preaching the same thing.