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

Around 1000 BC, someone carved this complaint into a Babylonian tablet: “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 cites this inscription in The Laws of Human Nature (2018) 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 every era

Greene is explicit: “Similar complaints can be found in every culture and period.” It isn’t unique to any one generation to feel misunderstood by the one before it, nor is it unique for the established generation to see the arriving one as immature, unprepared, or overly sensitive.

His explanation isn’t that one side is right. It’s that both suffer 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 happens 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.

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, 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 into 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 it, and rebels, who define themselves by going against the current, though, according to his analysis, they remain just as marked by their generation as anyone, only in reverse.

There’s an added component to this harsh judgment of the younger generation, Greene notes: alongside the genuine feeling that the world is deteriorating, there’s usually also an unacknowledged envy of others’ youth and a silent grief over one’s own, two emotions rarely named out loud when someone complains about “how kids are these days.”

A fifteen-year-old watches how a king is 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 snuck out of his boarding school to witness the ritual, drawn by adventure more than politics. Danton belonged to the generation that would, years later, lead the French Revolution.

Louis XVI himself, barely older than Danton, represented exactly the opposite: a timid young man seeking safety 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 almost at the same time, but in practice 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 how each group interprets professional or business failure.

Greene poses direct questions to identify this pattern within one’s own generation: is failure in a business or career experienced as a shame to hide, or accepted as a natural, even valuable, part of the entrepreneurial process itself? Did entering the workforce feel like pressure to generate income immediately, or like a legitimate moment to explore and take risks before settling down later?

The answers, he argues, aren’t universal or derived from individual character. They’re shaped by the major economic events that marked each generation’s formative years, the same way the Great Depression molded a relationship with money very different from the one produced, decades later, by a period of tech-driven boom.

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 remain useful from 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 never knew it had encountered. 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 philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ideas about equal rights took entire generations to become influential.

The distance between those two examples and the Babylonian tablet spans several thousand years. The underlying structure, according to Greene, is the same at both ends: every generation believes it’s the endpoint of history, when it’s really just one more link in a much longer chain.

Sources

• Greene, R. (2018). The Laws of Human Nature. Viking.