▶ Your Answer : Old people usually say "Life isn't as easy as you think, boy", and the phrase "when I was in your age" or "when I was young" usually follows up. The premise of this saying is "contemporary people are having more comfortable life than old generations, so they shouldn't moan". However, personally I believe we cannot generalize that people nowadays are living with more ease than people in the old days. I believe in this way, for the following reasons. First of all, every generation has its own problems, and we cannot evaluate which one was more tough. It is because that pain is very subjective matter. For example, can we be sure that a veteran of World War II had a more difficult life than a unemployed man who decided to suicide? While the former person somehow managed to live until now, the latter gave up his life. Even though we might think that unemployment is a trivial matter compared to participating in a war, that kind of comparison doesn't have any meaning in our lives, because it is not a thing which can be compared, from the very beginning. We have never been in other's shoes, and we actually are never able to do so. Therefore, we must not hastly compare the weight of the different problems of different generations. Moreoever, not all person belonging to a certain generation went throught the same experience. Rather, personal experience varied, and even varies nowadays, according to their social statues. It is very dangerous to generalize the experience of people with the same age, because they all have different social backgrounds and wealth. In other words, it is absurd for a old person who was born in rich family to blame a young kid who was born in poor backgrounds. Based on my personal experience, usually people who believe that people today are way more comfortable were those who had not experienced tough situations when they were young. So It was impossible for them to understand the difficulties of people nowadays. Perhaps they also lacked sympathy for the poor of their generations. In conclusion, I strongly believe that nor life today is easier than the past, and vice versa, for the reason that every generation has its own problem, and even within a generation personal experience varies greatly.
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