The Supposed 3,000-Year-Old Complaint That Explains How Every Generation Sees Business Failure

A much-quoted complaint, attributed to a Babylonian tablet from around 1000 BC whose original has never been documented, reads: “The youth of today are rotten and wicked, godless and lazy. They will never be as the youth of yore, and they will be unable to preserve our culture.” Three thousand years later, the same line could show up, almost word for word, in any office.

Robert Greene includes it in The Laws of Human Nature (2018) as if it were an authentic inscription. It isn’t, or at least nobody has located the original. But the phenomenon it illustrates is real, and psychology has measured it. Greene uses it as evidence of a pattern he calls the law of generational myopia: every generation believes it’s judging the next one objectively, without noticing it’s repeating a reaction thousands of years old.

A complaint that repeats in every era

Greene is explicit:

Similar complaints can be found in every culture and period.

It isn’t peculiar to any one generation to feel misunderstood by the one before it, nor is it peculiar for the established generation to see the arriving one as immature, unprepared or overly sensitive.

His explanation isn’t that one side is right, but that both suffer from what he calls an “illusion of perspective”: every generation, on reaching positions of power, judges the next one from a set of values it internalized without realizing it during its own youth, and takes for granted as simply “how things are.”

What actually shapes a generation

According to Greene, the decisive period for forming this outlook falls between the ages of ten and eighteen, when a person first becomes aware of the world and adopts their core values, almost always without being able to analyze that process while it’s happening.

Research places that window somewhat later. The “impressionable years” hypothesis, tested by Jon Krosnick and Duane Alwin (1989) with surveys that followed the same people over the years, holds that attitudes are most malleable in youth and early adulthood and stabilize afterward. Greene’s underlying idea holds up; the exact age range, less so.

What determines a generation’s character isn’t the calendar, but the major events that coincide with that age window:

• Those who came of age in the 1930s lived through the Great Depression and the start of World War II.
• Baby boomers grew up with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.
• Generation X were children during the sexual revolution and teenagers when it became normal for both parents to work outside the home.
• Millennials faced 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis.

A period marked by a major crisis, Greene notes, tends to produce generations that value safety, the group and caution. A period of stability tends to produce generations more inclined toward experimentation, risk and even recklessness.

Why we misjudge the next generation

When a generation reaches its twenties and thirties, it starts clashing with the one already in power. It’s usually seen as “immature, unsophisticated, weak, undisciplined, spoiled, uneducated.”

Decades later, that same generation, now settled in power, tends to describe the next one in exactly those same terms.

Greene distinguishes three types of response to the spirit of an era: those who visibly lead it and openly break with the past, a much larger group that simply follows the trend without resisting, and the rebels, who define themselves by going against the current, though, in his analysis, they remain just as marked by their generation as anyone, only in reverse.

What psychology measures: the “kids these days” effect

John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, studied this complaint in five preregistered experiments with 3,458 American adults, published in Science Advances in 2019. Participants believed that today’s young people were in decline on three traits: respect for elders, intelligence and enjoyment of reading.

The revealing part is who believed it most strongly. The most authoritarian people saw the young as especially disrespectful; the most intelligent, as especially unintelligent; the most avid readers, as especially uninterested in reading. Each person saw the decline precisely where they themselves excelled.

The authors identified two mechanisms. First, we tend to notice other people’s shortcomings in whatever we’re best at. Second, a memory bias: we project our current qualities onto the young people of our own day, and when we compare that flattering memory with young people today, a decline appears that doesn’t exist. In their view, this would explain why the complaint has been repeated for millennia.

It’s the data-backed version of Greene’s “illusion of perspective.”

There’s an added component in that harsh judgment of the younger generation, Greene notes: alongside the genuine feeling that the world is getting worse, there’s usually also an unacknowledged envy of other people’s youth and a silent grief for one’s own, two emotions rarely named out loud when someone complains about “how young people are these days.”

A fifteen-year-old watches a king being made

Greene illustrates this generational clash with a very specific episode: the coronation of Louis XVI in Reims, in June 1775.

Among the crowd gathered in front of the cathedral was Georges-Jacques Danton, a fifteen-year-old student who had slipped out of his boarding school to witness the ritual, drawn by adventure more than politics. Danton belonged to the generation that, years later, would lead the French Revolution.

Louis XVI himself, only a little older than Danton, represented exactly the opposite: a timid young man seeking security by reproducing to the letter a centuries-old monarchical ritual, while a new generation, at the cathedral doors, was starting to see that same ritual as a meaningless relic.

Both had been born at almost the same time, but in practice they belonged to two different generations.

What this means for business failure

One of the most concrete effects the book attributes to this generational conditioning is the way each group interprets professional or business failure.

Greene poses direct questions for spotting this pattern in your own generation: is failure in a business or a career experienced as a shame to be hidden, or accepted as a natural, even valuable, part of the process of starting something?

Did entering the workforce feel like pressure to earn money right away, or like a legitimate moment to explore and take risks before settling down later?

The answers, he argues, aren’t universal, nor do they come only from individual character: they’re shaped by the major economic events that marked each generation’s formative years.

What the data confirm and what they don’t

For financial risk, there’s solid evidence. Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel (2011) analyzed the US Survey of Consumer Finances from 1960 to 2007. People who had experienced low stock market returns over their lifetimes reported less willingness to take financial risks, invested less in stocks and were more pessimistic about the future, even after accounting for age and family situation. Recent experiences weighed more, especially among the young. In a nod to the Great Depression, they called them “depression babies.”

For workplace attitudes, the evidence is more modest. The meta-analysis by David Costanza and his team (2012) pooled 20 studies with nearly 20,000 people from four generations and compared job satisfaction, organizational commitment and intention to leave. Differences between generations were generally small, and part of them could be due to age or tenure rather than generation.

Our reading: what a generation lived through in its youth can leave a mark on how it relates to risk and failure, but generational labels explain far less than the headlines suggest. There are more differences within each generation than between generations.

It doesn’t matter which era shaped you: our entrepreneurial style quiz measures how you relate to risk and failure today, regardless of the generation you belong to. If you recognize yourself at the end that sees uncertainty as an opportunity, the bold profile digs deeper into that pattern.

Parenting style is also inherited by generation

The book adds another layer to this analysis: the dominant parenting style of an era (permissive, controlling, neglectful or empathetic) also leaves a generational mark.

As an example, Greene mentions the famously permissive style of those who had children in the 1890s, which helped shape the reckless, carefree attitude later associated with the interwar “Lost Generation.”

Seeing beyond your own era

Greene’s final point isn’t to resign yourself to being determined by the historical moment you were born into, but to recognize the mechanism clearly enough to stop operating only from within it.

Understanding that your own generation inherited specific values, shaped by specific events, lets you tell which of those ideas are still useful and which were simply taken for granted without examination.

Greene closes this reflection by widening the timeframe in both directions. Looking back, he notes that any generation inherits all the accumulated changes in human thought up to that point, including those of generations it no longer remembers having known.

Looking forward, he mentions figures like Leonardo da Vinci, who devoted much of his thinking to imagining advances and values that didn’t yet exist in his time, or the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ideas about equal rights took entire generations to become influential.

Several thousand years separate those examples from the supposed Babylonian tablet. The underlying structure, according to Greene, is the same: every generation believes it’s the endpoint of history, when it’s really just one more link in a much longer chain.

Sources

• Costanza, D. P., Badger, J. M., Fraser, R. L., Severt, J. B. and Gade, P. A. (2012). Generational differences in work-related attitudes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Business and Psychology, 27(4), 375-394. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-012-9259-4
• Greene, R. (2018). The Laws of Human Nature. Viking.
• Krosnick, J. A. and Alwin, D. F. (1989). Aging and susceptibility to attitude change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(3), 416-425. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.3.416
• Malmendier, U. and Nagel, S. (2011). Depression babies: Do macroeconomic experiences affect risk taking? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(1), 373-416. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjq004
• Protzko, J. and Schooler, J. W. (2019). Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking. Science Advances, 5(10), eaav5916. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916