To understand why we keep doubting the young generation, we first need to appreciate the full scope of the problem. That means we can’t just look at any individual grump. In the vastness of history, a guy like Joe Scarborough is meaningless, his biases blended in with every other dumb thing anyone else has said.

Our earliest texts are littered with youth bashing. From 600 to 300 BC, texts of the ancient Greeks complain of children becoming tyrants, contradicting their parents and wolfing down the best treats at the table. The comedies of Plautus, a Roman playwright who died in 185 BC, often feature a disappointing son with a taste for prostitutes. “In the plays, ancient versions of sitcoms, there is a debate about whether fathers should be strict or indulgent toward the moral failings of their sons,” writes Richard Saller, professor of history and classics at Stanford University.

By the first century AD, Seneca the Elder is writing, “Our young men have growth slothful. Their talents are left idle, and there is not a single honorable occupation for which they will toil night and day.”

Scholars of European, African, Chinese, and Japanese history all tell me their texts contain some versions of youth hating. Pick a time, pick a place, and you’ll find it. Renaissance writers complained of rowdy youth who’d sing bawdy songs in inappropriate social settings. In precolonial Africa, a youth wasn’t considered a full-fledged person until they’d gone through an initiation — and even then, they were not fully respected until they became a parent. One of the reasons Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, says Mark Elliott, professor of Chinese and Inner Asian history at Harvard University, “was that he feared the younger generation, lacking the experience of the older generation of revolutionaries, would be too ‘soft.’”

Older generations blame this softness — or today, millennials’ entitlement — as a tangible loss. Something was good, but it will crumble in the next generation’s hands. Today, it’s work: These coddled kids won’t grind at the office the way their forbearers did. For the 14th-century Japanese monk Yoshida Kenkō, it was language: “The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened,” he writes. “People used to say ‘raise the carriage shafts’ or ‘trim the lamp wick,’ but people today say ‘raise it’ or ‘trim it.’” For writer Anna A. Rogers, writing in the Atlantic in 1907, it was the institution of marriage: “The rock upon which most of the flower-bedecked marriage barges go to pieces is the latter-day cult of individualism; the worship of the brazen calf of the Self.”

Youth bashing isn’t the exclusive province of older people. Young people get into it too, especially those inclined to sentimentality. Consider the journalist Gregg Easterbrook. In 1980, Easterbrook, then in his mid-twenties, noticed something troubling. The young generation seemed detached from the world, putting up a wall of indifference between them and anything meaningful. So he took to the pages of the Washington Monthly, condemning the collective youth in a piece titled “Fear of Success.” He accused the era’s twentysomethings of longing for boring and unchallenging jobs, self-sabotaging their romantic relationships, and even refusing to vote for fear of believing in change. This damaged generation, he wrote, “believe[s] it foolish to gamble for accomplishments when accomplishments will cause more to be expected of [them].”

Where did his youthful negativity come from? He has at least one culprit: The generation before him. “My generation heard all the rhetoric: ‘the greatest generation wins World War II, overcomes the Depression,’” says Easterbrook today, 38 years after writing his essay. “You think, ‘These are great achievements. What have people of my age ever done that compares to that?’ I think you could find that cyclically in history. The young worried that they’re not as good as the old.”

Talk to any millennial or Gen Zer now and you’ll see the front end of this cycle. “Right now, in this day and age, people are constantly trying to schedule the next thing, check on this, on that,” Jace Norman, 18, recently told me. “It’s so much noise and not much substance.” Norman is the star of a Nickelodeon show called Henry Danger, and his (less famous) peers have told me the same sorts of things — that they’ve become too distracted by their screens or have become slaves to frivolity. It’s a strange way for young people to talk: They’re not speaking about their own experience, but rather, they’re speaking in contrast to someone else’s. “In this day and age,” Norman tells me. As compared to what? A time no teenager saw themselves. An invented past.

What monsters we become. We bring a new generation into this world, only to convince them of their shortcomings so they can wield the same charges against their peers. We send children off into the future, telling them the greatest moments have already passed.

And why do we do it?

Again, because we’re afraid.