I ruffled a few old feathers last week by suggesting that housing unaffordability among young people today has more to do with supply and inflation than with any lack of work ethic among today’s young adults. Several people were kind enough to tell me how much harder things were 30 or 40 years ago, and that Millennials and Gen Z simply expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter.

It felt a bit like listening to Adam and Eve lecture Cain and Abel about walking to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways.

Yes, things are easier today than they were when I was 25. In some ways, remarkably so. That’s how civilization works.

In 1986 I was a fresh college graduate, working an indoor job with air conditioning and little chance of coming home covered in either blood or grease. That same year the Los Angeles Times described my generation as “18- to 25- or 30-year-olds lingering in adolescence with no desire to be anywhere else.” The article quoted parents, teachers, therapists, and counselors who called my peers and me “uncommitted,” “unmotivated,” “lazy,” and “floundering.” Titled “Why American Youth Are Growing Up Later,” it cited estimates that roughly one-third of my contemporaries were “severely dysfunctional or just functioning marginally.”

In 1972, the title of a Time magazine article asked, “Is the Work Ethic Going Out of Style?” The piece discussed challenges to (then) traditional attitudes about work and responsibility, especially among younger workers seeking more meaning and less pure toil. It reads like several emails I received this week.

Life is just easier today than it once was. A thousand years ago, a typical adult spent the majority of his working life trying to acquire enough food for survival. Today it takes 30 seconds to order groceries or a steak dinner for immediate delivery.

Every generation grows up with a new baseline, higher than the one before it. As survival becomes more secure and the physical and material demands of simply existing continue to decline, the visible markers of “hard work” change.

It’s not just successive generations of Americans who’ve considered young people lazy and spoiled. One well-respected Italian writer opined that each generation is worse than the last and that each will produce more corrupt offspring. Another European author described young people as high-minded, overconfident, and certain they know everything because they have not yet been humbled by life. “They think they know everything, and they are always quite sure about it.”

That well-respected Italian writer was Horace, writing in 23 BC. The other European author was Aristotle, writing about 350 BC.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.