Why We Think People Are Getting Weaker
How civilization succeeds by making old forms of strength unnecessary
I wish good essays could pay rent on their own.
Until they learn how, paid subscriptions keep this publication alive.
Every generation eventually reaches the same conclusion. The next generation has become weaker. Too soft. Too sensitive. They’ve been saying it for centuries. The question isn’t whether they’re right. The question is why they keep being right in exactly the same way.
Usually, they’re not imagining it.
Young people are less willing to tolerate what their parents accepted without complaint.
The mistake is thinking that’s the explanation.
The hardships change.
The technology changes.
The economy changes.
The rules change.
It would be strange if people didn’t change with them.
They’re pointing at something real.
They just aren’t pointing where they think they are.
Humans are professional adapters. We’ve survived ice ages, collapsing empires, religions, revolutions, factories, skyscrapers and smartphones by doing one thing exceptionally well. We become the kind of people our surroundings keep asking for. That’s not modern. That’s the oldest thing about us.
The moment something becomes normal, it almost disappears.
We stop questioning it.
We stop noticing it.
Eventually, we stop imagining life without it.
That’s how something can remain completely visible while becoming almost impossible to see.
Every victory ends the same way. It becomes normal. Once a hardship disappears from everyday life, people stop seeing the victory. They only see the life the victory made possible. Eventually the struggle disappears from memory, then from imagination.
The child of a farmer does not need to know every hardship their parents faced to build a different kind of life. The child of a factory worker does not need to suffer the same conditions to prove they are strong. Sometimes the greatest evidence that people succeeded is that their children no longer understand why certain battles existed.
The struggle was the environment. The strength was the human response to it.
When the environment changes, the response changes too.
This is where we make the mistake. We assume that if a strength is no longer visible, it no longer exists. But every world creates the kind of person it needs. A person who survives a harsh world develops the ability to endure it. A person who inherits a better world develops the ability to question it, improve it, and imagine something beyond it.
Neither one is weaker. They were shaped by different battles.
Many great achievements don’t ask to be admired forever. They ask to be forgotten. A bridge succeeds because people stop talking about crossing the river. A cure succeeds because people stop fearing the disease. A protection succeeds because people stop noticing what it protects them from. That’s the paradox. Success reaches its highest form the moment it disappears into everyday life.
The world remembers what changed. It doesn’t remember what it cost.
The greatest compliment history can pay a generation is forgetting how desperately it fought. Success always erases its own evidence. We inherit the outcome without inheriting the fear that produced it. That’s why what sounds like ingratitude is often history continuing exactly as it always has. Young people are judging the world from a place previous generations spent decades trying to build.
For centuries, survival dominated everything else.
Food.
Disease.
War.
Shelter.
Children worked because families couldn’t survive without them.
Whole economies were built on slavery.
Violence became unavoidable because danger was part of life.
The people who built the world we inherited never had the luxury of living in it. They spent their lives creating conditions they would never experience themselves.
Their greatest legacy was changing what the next generation would expect from it.
Every solved problem permanently changes what future generations still consider necessary. Once humanity proves that one form of suffering no longer has to exist, every remaining form of suffering begins looking a little less inevitable too.
If this burden disappeared, why should any of the others remain?
The easiest way to become the establishment is to spend your youth fighting it. Build enough of the future, and eventually you’ll start protecting it from the future. Then someone younger starts questioning it. Suddenly you’re no longer defending the past. You’re defending yourself. That’s when you become the person you spent your youth arguing with.
The older generation keeps saying, “You have no idea what we survived.” They’re right. The younger generation keeps saying, “You have no idea what you normalized.” They’re right too. Neither sentence cancels the other.
Preservers.
Questioners.
Civilization needs both.
It cannot survive without either.
The purpose of civilization has never been to create people who can endure anything. It has been to create a world where they no longer need to. Children who refuse to accept the suffering their parents accepted are not betraying civilization. They’re proving it worked. The betrayal begins the moment a generation decides the work is finished.
We’ve been measuring strength by the wrong thing.
For thousands of years, strength meant surviving a cruel world. It had to. There was no other choice. Endure the hunger. Endure the violence. Endure the humiliation. Endure the loss. The world demanded survivors, so survivors became our definition of strength.
But the need for extraordinary strength is usually a sign that ordinary life is failing.
The strongest generation isn’t the one that accepts the most unnecessary suffering. It’s the one that leaves the least behind.
That’s why every generation eventually looks weaker than the last. They’re not being measured against the world they inherited. They’re being measured against the world their parents survived.
Maybe that’s why every generation has this argument.
The old see resilience.
The young see preventable suffering.
They’re both looking at the same world.
They’re just seeing different parts of its story.
The greatest achievements of one generation eventually become the minimum expectations of the next.
The greatest proof that a generation succeeded is that the next one is free to criticize the world it built.
I don’t love asking for support.
I do love writing these pieces.
If you’d like to help me write more essays,
a paid subcription is the best way to do it.
Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
If this has earned a coffee,
I promise it'll become another essay.
Prefer PayPal? That's here too.
This is part of The Bigger Picture.
More essays are on the way.
© 2026 Pelle Martens. All rights reserved.
I agree with this for the most part, but there is one downside. And that is the danger of what we are seeing now: When people accept that the bridge has been built and can be used and taken as a fact, they must not forget that it needs to be maintained or it will eventually collapse and people will be back to square one. The same is true for things like vaccination programs and liberal democratic constitutions and alliances and rules based international orders.
Yes, it is a triumph when a new generation no longer needs the survival skills their forebears needed, but it dangerous if they take too much for granted about the world into which they have been born. Just because something is normal does not mean it is necessarily natural.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."
-Socrates