From the Stone Soup Blog
An Essay on Outrage
Have you ever heard your parents say, “Back in my day, life was so much more difficult. Kids these days are so spoiled”? You would be surprised to know that they were the spoiled hipsters of yesteryear.
As long as there have been Homo sapiens, there has been a generation gap and elders frowning upon it. One can almost imagine a geriatric Neanderthal rolling his eyes as his prodigy used the wheel or even before that, a Homo erectus grandfather looking suspiciously at his children living the easy life by using a fire to cook, leaving the good old days of raw meat dinners.
From the complaints of Socrates turning young men against the establishment to the small but vocal groups of Boomers on social media, there have been many examples of elderly backlash to changing times. One of the first documented episodes of such outrage goes back to Ancient Greece, from the fifth century BCE onwards. During this time, a population boom and plentiful sustenance inspired philosophers and thinkers to question the world around them. In fact there is a saying, “All that I know is that I know nothing.” The young Athenians were educated to question everything, and this stung the established order. The noblemen condemned this wave of change and even succeeded in poisoning the leader of a major group, whom we know as Socrates, in 399 BCE. But the die was cast, and his doctrine spread under the likes of Aristotle and Alexander the Great. Despite the cry of the previous generations, change was inevitable.
You can read the rest of Schamil’s piece at https://stonesoup.com/post/an-essay-on-outrage-by-schamil-saeed-11/
About the Stone Soup Blog
We publish original work—writing, art, book reviews, multimedia projects, and more—by young people on the Stone Soup Blog. You can read more posts by young bloggers, and find out more about submitting a blog post, here: https://stonesoup.com/stone-soup-blog/.
