Adam Smith, the 18th century economist, wrote that it’s not uncommon to meet a mother in the Scottish highlands “who has born twenty children not to have two alive.”
I like to think that problems are like air and the brain is like a container. You can have different weights (analogous to difficulty of problems) of air, but that they'll end up occupying the same volume(analogous to worry).
So there will a person who at his time would have had to deal with wars and famines, but he'll also have a great-grand-son who'll worry just the same about not getting enough likes on his instagram photo.
The immigrant parent example cuts to the bone because it exposes a contradiction nobody wants to name. You grind so your children won't have to grind, then quietly resent them for not grinding.
The Adams line gets quoted a lot but people always stop at art. Nobody asks what comes after art. What does the generation that has food, shelter, security, education, balance, AND art worry about? Meaning. They worry about meaning. And that looks lazy from the outside because meaning doesn't produce anything visible.
Every generation's highest achievement is raising children who are free to solve problems their parents can't even recognise as problems yet. That's not spoiled. That's the mission working.
The "meaning" extension of the Adams sequence is the right one to pull on, and it reframes what looks like a generational softness problem into something more interesting — each layer of problem-solving requires a different kind of capacity, and the capacity for meaning-making is genuinely harder to develop than the capacity for survival, not easier. Survival at least gives you clear feedback. Meaning doesn't. What's easy to miss in the immigrant parent example is that the grind itself wasn't the lesson being transmitted — the intentionality behind the grind was. The kids who internalize "we worked hard toward something" land differently than the kids who internalize "suffering is virtuous." The Taylor Swift books aren't the variable. Whether the daughter understands that her grandfather's sacrifice was directional — aimed at something — is the variable. The generation that worries about meaning isn't lazy; it's operating at the frontier of what the previous generation's sacrifice made possible, which is exactly where they're supposed to be. What does transmitting that intentionality actually look like when you can't point to the grind as the proof of it?
For me, the term "grinding" is not specific enough. These so called repetitive struggles can be challenging and or rewarding in certain contexts. In the case of lab work, this is part of the exploration process and is tangential from having fun. Agree with the meaning problem.
What this made click for me is the difference between inherited comfort and inherited judgment.
The immigrant parent story and the Adams quote both show the same pattern: one generation works to buy their kids out of certain problems, then uses those old problems as the benchmark for what “real struggle” should look like. The mission (better problems) succeeds, but the metric (harder problems) doesn’t update.
That’s where a lot of the “spoiled” narrative comes from. We evaluate our kids’ lives on the difficulty of their circumstances instead of the quality of their responsibility. Solving for famine and polio was one kind of responsibility; solving for meaning, attention, and compound side‑effects of abundance is another. Both can fully occupy a life.
Maybe the real long‑term money question isn’t “Will my kids be tough enough?” but “Will they be trusted with problems that are worthy of the sacrifices that came before them?”
The distinction between inherited comfort and inherited judgment is the right place to land, and it reframes the "spoiled" anxiety in a way that's actually useful rather than just reassuring. The metric not updating while the mission succeeds is a precise diagnosis of something that plays out across generations in ways that go well beyond parenting — institutions do it, industries do it, investors do it. The harder question underneath Housel's piece is whether judgment transfers across problem types, or whether the grit built solving for survival is genuinely portable to solving for meaning. There's an argument that it isn't — that each generation has to develop its own version of resilience against the specific resistance their circumstances provide, and that comparing difficulty across eras is less useful than asking whether the next generation is being tested at all. The John Adams sequence only works if each generation actually engages with the harder problems their inheritance makes possible, rather than treating the inheritance as the destination. What does "trusted with worthy problems" actually look like in practice when you're the one deciding how much friction to remove for the people coming after you?
Once you have kids, you stop living for yourself. The Taylor Swift books in the daughter's room aren't a betrayal of the grandparents' sacrifice. They're the receipt.
I think this is a great perspective to have. I struggle with this for my own kids. Can hard work be learned? Can the value of struggle actually be passed down generationally? This perspective might be very localized I believe. Yes in the past people died from war and famine, but they did so also 50 years ago and they do so today. And in some parts like the Middle East and Africa, ancient problems still persist today. All in all, life is more safe and generally better for most people.
I love this. I think about how happiness is merely your relationship to expectations. I joke to the kids that I teach that I always keep low expectations so I can stay happy.
I think the only thing I'll say here is if a generation does collectively worse than the last generation, it's grounds for mass discontent. It's just too hard not to recognize you're not providing the quality of life to your kids that your parents gave you.
The ratchet runs in both directions. Each generation solves the previous generation's problem and inherits a harder, more abstract one to worry about. Which is progress, not ingratitude.
What I keep coming back to is the transmission problem. You can tell your kids what scarcity felt like. You cannot make them feel it. And some lessons only stick when they arrive with real consequences attached. That may be the one thing wealth genuinely cannot solve — not because the next generation is spoiled, but because the curriculum keeps changing.
It shows up in health too. The generation that worried about dying at 55 from a heart attack handed its children the problem of whether their 70s will actually be worth living. Quantity solved. Quality is the new problem. And unlike financial wealth, you cannot inherit physical resilience — every generation has to build it themselves.
Adams had the vision right. He just couldn't pre-solve the inheritance problem for us.
lovely writing. in taiwan, they call younger people (born 1980s-ish and onwards) the "strawberry generation" - implying that we bruise easily, like strawberries, and are unable to withstand serious difficulties that older generations were made to suffer. but is this a lack of resilience? strawberries, like all fruit & produce, must come from somewhere. who planted them? and now that we have them, who will take care of them? how *should* we take care of them?
A lot of parents I meet worry about raising spoiled or entitled kids. As you say, a child or grandchild who appears “spoiled” by previous generations’ standards may simply be proof that the plan worked - to give our kids and their kids a better life. The real question is whether we’re also preparing them to handle prosperity well. They need knowledge, skills, confidence, values, good role models... That’s why starting early is The Wisest Investment.
This is Maslow's hierarchy playing out across generations. One generation earns survival, the next inherits it and immediately starts climbing toward belonging, purpose, self-actualisation.
The paradox: each rung feels just as hard as the one below. Loss aversion doesn't scale with objective difficulty, it scales with expectation. A child losing a Taylor Swift book feels the same intensity as a grandparent losing a meal, because the brain calibrates pain relative to its own baseline, not history's. That's not a character flaw. That's how we're wired.
The real question isn't "how do we keep the next generation from being spoiled?" It's "how do we help them develop the self-awareness to recognise what they've inherited and the character to do something meaningful with it?"
The reframe from "spoiled" to "beneficiary of accumulated hard work" is the one worth sitting with, because it changes the unit of measurement from a single generation to the whole chain. What Housel is pointing at is that every generation's complaints look like ingratitude from below and look like progress from above, simultaneously, and both readings are correct. The part that connects directly to how people think about wealth-building is the higher-order problems point — financial security doesn't eliminate anxiety, it just promotes you to a more expensive tier of worry. People who achieve financial independence are often surprised to discover this, which is why "enough" is such a hard number to define and such a common source of post-success disorientation. The immigrant parents story is the clearest version of the argument: the granddaughter's Taylor Swift books aren't a failure of values transmission, they're evidence that the mission succeeded. The harder question is whether the values that built the wealth — frugality, grit, delayed gratification — survive the transition into a life that no longer requires them, and whether they need to. What does financial resilience look like when it's never been tested by actual scarcity?
It doesn’t get easier, we are adding more problems than solutions, like today’s generation are facing problems like social media addiction, mental health struggles then the coming generations are probably facing problems like more mental health struggles, climate change effects like intense heatwaves, wildfires, etc
I like to think that problems are like air and the brain is like a container. You can have different weights (analogous to difficulty of problems) of air, but that they'll end up occupying the same volume(analogous to worry).
So there will a person who at his time would have had to deal with wars and famines, but he'll also have a great-grand-son who'll worry just the same about not getting enough likes on his instagram photo.
The immigrant parent example cuts to the bone because it exposes a contradiction nobody wants to name. You grind so your children won't have to grind, then quietly resent them for not grinding.
The Adams line gets quoted a lot but people always stop at art. Nobody asks what comes after art. What does the generation that has food, shelter, security, education, balance, AND art worry about? Meaning. They worry about meaning. And that looks lazy from the outside because meaning doesn't produce anything visible.
Every generation's highest achievement is raising children who are free to solve problems their parents can't even recognise as problems yet. That's not spoiled. That's the mission working.
This quote by Viktor Frankl shows just how important meaning is: “"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how".
The "meaning" extension of the Adams sequence is the right one to pull on, and it reframes what looks like a generational softness problem into something more interesting — each layer of problem-solving requires a different kind of capacity, and the capacity for meaning-making is genuinely harder to develop than the capacity for survival, not easier. Survival at least gives you clear feedback. Meaning doesn't. What's easy to miss in the immigrant parent example is that the grind itself wasn't the lesson being transmitted — the intentionality behind the grind was. The kids who internalize "we worked hard toward something" land differently than the kids who internalize "suffering is virtuous." The Taylor Swift books aren't the variable. Whether the daughter understands that her grandfather's sacrifice was directional — aimed at something — is the variable. The generation that worries about meaning isn't lazy; it's operating at the frontier of what the previous generation's sacrifice made possible, which is exactly where they're supposed to be. What does transmitting that intentionality actually look like when you can't point to the grind as the proof of it?
For me, the term "grinding" is not specific enough. These so called repetitive struggles can be challenging and or rewarding in certain contexts. In the case of lab work, this is part of the exploration process and is tangential from having fun. Agree with the meaning problem.
What this made click for me is the difference between inherited comfort and inherited judgment.
The immigrant parent story and the Adams quote both show the same pattern: one generation works to buy their kids out of certain problems, then uses those old problems as the benchmark for what “real struggle” should look like. The mission (better problems) succeeds, but the metric (harder problems) doesn’t update.
That’s where a lot of the “spoiled” narrative comes from. We evaluate our kids’ lives on the difficulty of their circumstances instead of the quality of their responsibility. Solving for famine and polio was one kind of responsibility; solving for meaning, attention, and compound side‑effects of abundance is another. Both can fully occupy a life.
Maybe the real long‑term money question isn’t “Will my kids be tough enough?” but “Will they be trusted with problems that are worthy of the sacrifices that came before them?”
Excellent piece of writing.
The distinction between inherited comfort and inherited judgment is the right place to land, and it reframes the "spoiled" anxiety in a way that's actually useful rather than just reassuring. The metric not updating while the mission succeeds is a precise diagnosis of something that plays out across generations in ways that go well beyond parenting — institutions do it, industries do it, investors do it. The harder question underneath Housel's piece is whether judgment transfers across problem types, or whether the grit built solving for survival is genuinely portable to solving for meaning. There's an argument that it isn't — that each generation has to develop its own version of resilience against the specific resistance their circumstances provide, and that comparing difficulty across eras is less useful than asking whether the next generation is being tested at all. The John Adams sequence only works if each generation actually engages with the harder problems their inheritance makes possible, rather than treating the inheritance as the destination. What does "trusted with worthy problems" actually look like in practice when you're the one deciding how much friction to remove for the people coming after you?
Once you have kids, you stop living for yourself. The Taylor Swift books in the daughter's room aren't a betrayal of the grandparents' sacrifice. They're the receipt.
I think this is a great perspective to have. I struggle with this for my own kids. Can hard work be learned? Can the value of struggle actually be passed down generationally? This perspective might be very localized I believe. Yes in the past people died from war and famine, but they did so also 50 years ago and they do so today. And in some parts like the Middle East and Africa, ancient problems still persist today. All in all, life is more safe and generally better for most people.
I love this. I think about how happiness is merely your relationship to expectations. I joke to the kids that I teach that I always keep low expectations so I can stay happy.
I think the only thing I'll say here is if a generation does collectively worse than the last generation, it's grounds for mass discontent. It's just too hard not to recognize you're not providing the quality of life to your kids that your parents gave you.
We often call it being spoiled. Perhaps a better word is progress.
Patience is the rarest edge in markets. Most people know it intellectually but can't hold it behaviorally.
The ratchet runs in both directions. Each generation solves the previous generation's problem and inherits a harder, more abstract one to worry about. Which is progress, not ingratitude.
What I keep coming back to is the transmission problem. You can tell your kids what scarcity felt like. You cannot make them feel it. And some lessons only stick when they arrive with real consequences attached. That may be the one thing wealth genuinely cannot solve — not because the next generation is spoiled, but because the curriculum keeps changing.
It shows up in health too. The generation that worried about dying at 55 from a heart attack handed its children the problem of whether their 70s will actually be worth living. Quantity solved. Quality is the new problem. And unlike financial wealth, you cannot inherit physical resilience — every generation has to build it themselves.
Adams had the vision right. He just couldn't pre-solve the inheritance problem for us.
lovely writing. in taiwan, they call younger people (born 1980s-ish and onwards) the "strawberry generation" - implying that we bruise easily, like strawberries, and are unable to withstand serious difficulties that older generations were made to suffer. but is this a lack of resilience? strawberries, like all fruit & produce, must come from somewhere. who planted them? and now that we have them, who will take care of them? how *should* we take care of them?
A lot of parents I meet worry about raising spoiled or entitled kids. As you say, a child or grandchild who appears “spoiled” by previous generations’ standards may simply be proof that the plan worked - to give our kids and their kids a better life. The real question is whether we’re also preparing them to handle prosperity well. They need knowledge, skills, confidence, values, good role models... That’s why starting early is The Wisest Investment.
"solving new problems".
What are these new problems that people are solving?
This is Maslow's hierarchy playing out across generations. One generation earns survival, the next inherits it and immediately starts climbing toward belonging, purpose, self-actualisation.
The paradox: each rung feels just as hard as the one below. Loss aversion doesn't scale with objective difficulty, it scales with expectation. A child losing a Taylor Swift book feels the same intensity as a grandparent losing a meal, because the brain calibrates pain relative to its own baseline, not history's. That's not a character flaw. That's how we're wired.
The real question isn't "how do we keep the next generation from being spoiled?" It's "how do we help them develop the self-awareness to recognise what they've inherited and the character to do something meaningful with it?"
The reframe from "spoiled" to "beneficiary of accumulated hard work" is the one worth sitting with, because it changes the unit of measurement from a single generation to the whole chain. What Housel is pointing at is that every generation's complaints look like ingratitude from below and look like progress from above, simultaneously, and both readings are correct. The part that connects directly to how people think about wealth-building is the higher-order problems point — financial security doesn't eliminate anxiety, it just promotes you to a more expensive tier of worry. People who achieve financial independence are often surprised to discover this, which is why "enough" is such a hard number to define and such a common source of post-success disorientation. The immigrant parents story is the clearest version of the argument: the granddaughter's Taylor Swift books aren't a failure of values transmission, they're evidence that the mission succeeded. The harder question is whether the values that built the wealth — frugality, grit, delayed gratification — survive the transition into a life that no longer requires them, and whether they need to. What does financial resilience look like when it's never been tested by actual scarcity?
This is a masterpiece as always. Thanks for sharing
It doesn’t get easier, we are adding more problems than solutions, like today’s generation are facing problems like social media addiction, mental health struggles then the coming generations are probably facing problems like more mental health struggles, climate change effects like intense heatwaves, wildfires, etc