Dinsdale… I would imagine that perceiving hardhsip is a function of what you encounter as normal. If I live on ants and sleep in mud every day, it won’t seem particularly hard to me: its all I know. Especially as a teen: very cocksure already, yet not experienced enough to have a perspective like we might.
If anything, large public schools and television have lent a perspective to kids earlier to see that they have it harder/easier compared to others. So maybe they’ll even feel it is easier than it used to be. I don’t know. Factually, I think life is about as hard as anyone can stand. just because the ancient greeks might think we’re living in a magical paradise doesn’t mean I feel that way; ie- I still philosophize, and life sucks, and so on.
Well, it is always the case that we tend to look to our own culture with some rosy spectacles. Kids had to do work, but for all that (barring the stint of serious child labor) I would imagine that kids were kids, they played kick the can or threw rocks at bottles or went swimming and generally just absorbed themselves in experience like kids do. It is ony when we present them with a difference that they can grasp a notion of hardship that they might be undergoing, I think.
Adults look to the happiness of youth and think they’ve got it so easy, why, when I was a kid…etc… uphill both ways. I mean, like kids never had fun before now? I think we tend to mix up the notion that we have it hard now as adults compared to kids, rather than to actually recall whether we felt it was hard or not.
I mean, when you are sick it is seemingly impossible to remember what it was like to feel not-sick. You just know it sucks. I think we tend to forget that though we can judge our own perceptions as mapping to certain ideas, that it is really very hard to imagine feelings that we have had. I cannot feel what it is like to be sick when I am well, tired when I am awake, or happy when I’m sad. Likewise, though I remember facts about when I was a child, how I felt about existence then often eludes me. Thankfully I kept a poetry journal full of teen angst and comments on love and sex and so on to remind me, though even still it slips away. I cannot recall what it was like to have sex for the first time, I only remember that it was an incredible feeling like, I don’t think, anything I’ve had since.
And a factual account of difficutly doesn’t interest me, how one perceives their state does. I would say today’s kids have it easier if they are happier in some way. And I don’t think that can really be said. I think that, barring things like abuse and hunger, kids are pretty much kids.
If it is a question of physical hardship then the answer is sort of obvious: easier today in the general case. If it is a case of mental hardship (what we expect them to know and understand) then I am not sure, though today is probably harder. If it is a case of feelings: the same in the general case, I think.
