From Victorian selfies and Ancient Rome’s own version of Facebook to a medieval brand of atheism that would make today’s skeptics blush, the world’s quirkiest habits aren’t as fresh as they feel. The phrase 10 symptoms modern captures the idea that what we label “new” often has deep‑rooted ancestors. In this roundup we’ll travel from lazy millennials to the timeless allure of listicles, proving that history loves to repeat its favorite jokes.
Why 10 Symptoms Modern Matter Today
10 Millennials
They’re portrayed as lazy, entitled narcissists who wouldn’t recognize a hard day’s work even if it smacked them in the face. Obsessed with selfies, Instagram, and a parade of frivolous distractions, millennials are often painted as the epitome of modern indolence.
Even though the label “millennials” is a recent addition to our lexicon, the traits we now slap on them have been tossed around for centuries. It’s tempting to pin the downfall of Western culture on this generation, yet every era before us has faced similar accusations.
Back in 1968, Life ran a piece claiming that the phrase “to make a living” had lost all meaning for baby boomers, branding them as work‑shy wimps. Decades later, a New York Times writer turned the same glare on Generation X, calling them lazy and immature.
Reach further back to ancient Greece, and you’ll find Hesiod lamenting that the younger crowd “only cares about frivolous things.” While Hesiod never posted a selfie, the sentiment mirrors today’s complaints perfectly.
This doesn’t mean millennials lack their own quirks; it simply shows that each generation repeats the same set of criticisms that older folks have hurled at them for ages.
9 New Atheism
Atheism—the absence of belief in a deity—has existed forever. New Atheism, however, is the modern, in‑your‑face brand that shouts on Twitter, brands believers as gullible, and reframes atheism from simple non‑belief to active anti‑religion.
In the 10th‑century Abbasid world, Syrian thinker Abu al‑Ala’ al‑Maarri earned the nickname “the Richard Dawkins of his era.” He openly mocked religion, declaring the world split between “brains without religion” and “religion without brains,” and attracted a following that would have fit right into today’s satirical magazines.
Even earlier, the 9th‑century Baghdad philosopher Ibn al‑Rawandi denounced Islamic tradition as illogical, called miracles hoaxes, and labeled religion irrational. Like modern New Atheists, he provoked believers with blunt challenges—yet both he and al‑Maarri lived to old age without the violent backlash that often greets contemporary critics.
8 Selfies
Nothing screams “the end of culture!” quite like the modern selfie obsession, which many claim is the ultimate expression of narcissism. In reality, selfies have been around as long as cameras themselves.
During the Victorian and Edwardian eras, bulky cameras forced early selfie‑takers to rely on mirrors, but the core idea—capturing one’s own likeness—remains unchanged. In 1914, Russian princess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova produced what could be considered the first teenage selfie, striking a bored pose that looks eerily familiar on today’s Instagram feeds.
Even earlier, Belgian artist Henri Evenepoel was snapping self‑portraits as early as 1898, and World War I soldiers used Kodak cameras to send personal mementos home. Those wartime “selfies” are now treasured historical artifacts.
7 Insane Fan Fiction
When you hear “fan fiction,” you probably picture misspelled tales of Kirk and Spock doing things that would make a seasoned adult blush. Yet fan‑created stories have been circulating long before the internet ever existed.
In the early Common Era, the Gnostic gospels acted as fan‑made rewrites of Christian narratives. For instance, the Egyptian Gnostic Basilides crafted a version where Simon of Cyrene is mistaken for Jesus and crucified, only for a laughing Jesus to stand beside the cross—an ancient echo of today’s alternate‑ending fanfic.
Fast forward to 1893: Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, prompting a wave of Victorian fan writers to pen their own Holmes mysteries. The era’s fanfic frenzy was just as intense as today’s, merely lacking the modern GIFs of Benedict Cumberbatch.
6 Social Media
Depending on who you ask, social media is either a glorious global think‑tank or a chaotic arena where social‑justice warriors and alt‑right trolls clash. While it feels uniquely digital, historian Tom Standage argues that social media dates back to Roman times.
In his book Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years, Standage points to graffiti uncovered in Vesuvius taverns that reads like a back‑and‑forth conversation, complete with a classic trolling line: “Successus, a weaver, loves the innkeeper’s slave girl named Iris. She, however, does not love him. Bye, loser!” followed by a snarky reply.
He also highlights Roman abbreviations such as “SPD” (salutem plurimam dicit), which function much like today’s “LOL” or “NSFW.” Whether or not you call it true social media, the impulse to broadcast brief, witty messages is undeniably ancient.
5 Annoying Advertisements
Romans were already perfecting the art of intrusive pop‑ups long before Don Draper ever existed.
Julius Caesar launched the Acta Diurna, an early newspaper that mixed propaganda with human‑interest stories—think heart‑warming animal tributes alongside plain‑spoken adverts. One surviving ad, posted by a fellow named Maius, shouted “second‑story apartments fit for a king!” on the daily wooden boards of the forum.
Wealthy Romans could even perform a primitive form of AdBlock by instructing a slave to copy the paper while skipping the commercial sections. And Rome wasn’t alone: in Thebes, 3,000‑year‑old written ads offering rewards for runaway slaves have been uncovered, proving that the annoyance of ads is truly timeless.
4 Overpaid, Hedonistic Sports Stars
Modern athletes are often accused of being overpaid, booze‑loving tabloid fixtures. Yet the ancient world boasted sports icons whose wallets dwarfed today’s multimillion‑dollar contracts.
Take Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a 2nd‑century Roman chariot racer. Over a 24‑year career he started roughly 4,200 races, finishing first or second in about half of them. By the end, he amassed 36 million sesterces—enough to pay every Roman soldier’s salary for two months, equivalent to roughly $15 billion today, making him arguably the highest‑paid athlete in history.
Then there’s Milo of Croton, the legendary wrestler famed for his prodigious strength and prodigious drinking. Stories claim he could down eight quarts of wine in a single sitting. His demise was equally theatrical: an elderly Milo attempted to split a tree with his bare hands, became trapped, and—according to some accounts—was devoured by wolves.
3 Cash Grabs And Unimaginative Sequels
Calling today’s Hollywood “unoriginal” feels like a fresh accusation, yet the industry’s penchant for cash‑grab sequels dates back to cinema’s earliest days.
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 blockbuster Birth of a Nation shocked modern audiences with its glorified Klan portrayal. Its massive box‑office haul spurred an immediate sequel, Fall of a Nation (1916), which flopped spectacularly. Critics lambasted it as propaganda and “sometimes preposterous.” The sequel is now considered lost forever.
But the trend wasn’t confined to film. After H.G. Wells released War of the Worlds, author Garrett P. Serviss rushed out an unauthorized sequel where Thomas Edison flies to Mars to kick Martian butt. Even earlier, an illicit continuation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote outraged the original author, prompting him to finish his masterpiece.
2 Modern Disney Stories
Most Disney hits feel fresh, yet many are rooted in centuries‑old folklore. Frozen adapts a Hans Christian Andersen tale; Tangled retells the classic Rapunzel story. Recent scholarship suggests that a surprising number of these narratives predate the 1500s by millennia.
A study in Royal Society Open Science traced the ancestry of tales across 50 Indo‑European languages, finding that roughly a quarter have deep, ancient lineages. “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for example, was linked to a 5,000‑year‑old tradition dating back to the split between Western and Eastern Indo‑European branches. Other stories, like Beauty and the Beast, may be a full millennium older than commonly believed.
The researchers even identified a tale dubbed “The Smith and the Devil” that likely originated in the Bronze Age. If Disney ever turned that into a feature, it would hold the record for the longest gap between oral tradition and cinematic adaptation.
1 Listicles
Journalists love to gripe about listicles, yet the format has been a staple of human communication for centuries. Modern outlets publish tongue‑in‑cheek titles like “35 Reasons I Hate Lists,” but the disdain is hardly new.
One 19th‑century example, “The Fate of the Apostles,” was hailed by Smithsonian Magazine as a viral sensation of its day. It cataloged the deaths of Jesus’s apostles in chronological order and was reprinted roughly 110 times—equivalent today to a list being featured on The Guardian, CNN, BBC, and The New York Times simultaneously.
Even the greats were list‑makers: Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin kept meticulous lists, while literary figures like Umberto Eco argue that Homer and Thomas Mann embedded list structures in their works. As Eco famously said, “The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it.”
So the next time you scroll past a numbered roundup, remember: you’re part of a tradition that stretches back to antiquity, proving that humans have always loved to rank, organize, and—yes—occasionally brag about it.