Whenever I grumble about the way things are, how people behave and what they do, or where society is going, I am accused of being a chronic malcontent who is pathologically pessimistic.  More specifically, since I am very much a member of the older generation, I am characterized as one of those bitter old men who habitually declares that the younger generation is going to hell.

Naturally, the people I hang out with the most are of my generation or the one that immediately followed it (the 50+ crowd), even though I do have frequent direct and indirect contact with a large number of younger people.  Among the older crowd, there's a deep feeling that society is, in many respects, headed in the wrong direction.  It's a theme that appears in many of our conversations – and I don't think this is because we are just a bunch of crotchety old poops indulging in nostalgia for the "good old days" or because I am naturally drawn to people who think as I do.  Nor do I think it is because we derive perverse pleasure from being crotchety old poops.

We are, in fact, genuinely alarmed and depressed by what we are observing.  Sometimes, to escape the depression, we entertain the idea that our age has distorted our perceptions (as younger people often say it has), that we are, after all, just old codgers whose capacity for accepting any kind of change has decreased.  Sometimes, we rationalize by asking ourselves, "Even if it is true that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, why should we care?  We won't be around when it happens."  Then we get even more out of joint when we observe that those who will be around don't seem to care where society is headed.  They're too self-centered for that.

In a recent conversation, a friend who is in his mid to late fifties wondered aloud whether his dis-ease with people's attitudes and behavior was a sign that things were changing for the worse or that he was just getting old and critical.  "I see the way things are going," he said, "and I don't want to go there."  I said that I wasn't the best person to judge because I feel the same way, but I allowed that it was probably a little of both – we do see everything differently as we get older, but there is also good reason to disapprove of many current trends.  I commented that it's necessary for any kind of serenity to "go with the flow," but we have the right to choose another course when people are throwing too much garbage in the river (I  used a word other than garbage, but that was my drift).  Then, as might be expected, we began a long litany of specific details and trends with which we had become unhappy.

My friend focused on the decline in political leadership because politics is a subject he has followed closely all of his adult life.  I tended to focus on the deterioration of education because I've been involved in that area.  We both noted a precipitous decline in common sense and common courtesy, feeling that neither was "common" at all, and that there has been an accompanying decline in values.  While we believe in the rights of the individual, we sense that far too many people have become so self-centered that they have forgotten about the social good – an attitude of entitlement without responsibility.  We both love technology, but we're painfully aware of the downside and intensely critical of the ways people abuse it; once more it's often because something that could be a social boon is perverted toward wholly self-centered uses, by everyone from profiteers to con artists to the man or woman on the street.

Perhaps there is a streak of old codger bitterness in our viewpoint.  Maybe we are saying to the younger generations, "You have it all.  Why aren't you using it?  You have the tools to be the best informed people in history.  Why are you so uninformed and misinformed?"  To hear young people talk, one would think that my generation is out of touch because we haven't kept up with all the changes, don't understand them, and are afraid of them.  While it's true that a few among us still look upon certain developments as if they were alien inventions, most of us have embraced the new technology.  After all, we played a greater role in developing it than did the youngsters who can barely read, write, or do simple mathematics.  We aren't the ones who are using the explosion in information technology for little more than playing games and exchanging sophomoric gossip.

The same applies to morality, ethics, and values.  We are not prudes who subscribe to some Victorian value system that suppresses human instincts and, if anything, is more likely to encourage hypocrisy than virtue.  We've had our raunchy days, and we were largely responsible for making acceptable behavior a little more flexible.  However, we may now regret having given our children so much flexibility that we inadvertently encouraged them to flaunt all the rules.  We look around and see people expecting respect and consideration while extending none themselves.  Young people seem to think that our only concern is that they don't respect their elders.  While this is true, we are far more concerned that they don't seem to respect or consider others, not even each other.  We're concerned that the whole social contract can fall apart when nobody really cares about anyone else.

The justification for much bad behavior, from lack of courtesy to outright cheating, is that we live in a highly competitive society.  We know that; we've been there.  Very few of us raised and supported families and, yes, adapted to a rapidly changing world without jumping some very high hurdles.  We were taught, however, that one should compete by building one's strengths, not by capitalizing on the weaknesses of others.  We were taught to jump the hurdles, not kick them over or go around them by cheating or by whining that the hurdles were unfair.  We aren't denying that life can sometimes resemble a boxing match, but even a boxing match has rules of decency and fair play.  It isn't a free-for-all where anything goes.

What has us so depressed is not only that people are engaging in virtually rule-free combat but that such behavior is becoming accepted as the way of life.  We aren't expecting everyone to be selfless altruists, nor are we saying that everyone should altogether foresake personal needs and desires to coddle the ignorant, the helpless, and the unfortunate.  Human beings aren't built that way.  Yet history reveals many societies in which survival of the fittest was carried to an extreme, and all of those societies eventually self-destructed.

Yes, we older folks are grumbling, but younger folks might use a little logic and recognize that we aren't making noises just because we like to make noises.  As I've noted above, why should we care?  Logic says that if the younger generation wants to create a society in which most people are crude, inconsiderate, self-seeking, and morally lax, we should let them do it.  It's the world that they will have to live in; we will be long gone.

Perhaps what is really troubling us is that too many people accept the way things are and don't want to change or challenge anything.  It is seen as politically incorrect to criticize the extremists in any group, whether these people represent an ethnic group or a powerful lobby.  All kinds of antisocial behavior is exused with psychobabble about what drove the behavior, almost as if people had no free will.  As values decline and discourtesy, immorality, and outright crime mount, the easy way out – the way that allows us to do nothing – is to say, "That's just the way things are."  That, young men and women, is far more cynical and fatalistic and self-defeating than any of the grumbling that we old folks are doing.