One of the great things about having children and grandchildren is that it becomes a lot more difficult to live in your own little bubble.

Let me share an example or two.

Thanks to Facebook, I’m able to enjoy the steady meme stream from older people like myself mocking the young for their coddled wimpiness. To hear Facebook tell it — and if it’s on Facebook it must be true — young people have never actually had to work a day in their lives and are incapable of functioning without their devices. They are a generation of snowflakes, intellectually afraid of competing viewpoints and are terrified of anything resembling physical work, mature commitment, loyalty or even basic human contact.

But because I am Facebook friends with many people born after 1990, I also have a front row seat on the often clever, but abidingly bitter, memes about how my generation has pretty much ruined not just human life but the planet on which it depends. In their youthful eyes, we are nothing but a generation of pillagers effectively destroying the middle class. We are the selfish ones willing to mortgage the future’s future with insane levels of national debt, while freely denigrating social and racial minorities, and merrily poisoning the planet.

And, of course, all of us, the old and young alike, are entirely correct in our assessments of each other.

Are the youngsters coddled? Yes. And who coddled them? The helicopter and snowplow parents who taught them to be afraid of street corners, strangers and shadows. Do the young ones seem overly cautious and afraid about the future? Wouldn’t you be, having grown up in a latch-key world filled with unspeakable dangers? Does it seem the young are afraid to follow the traditions of early marriage and homeownership? Of course they are — and why wouldn’t they be that way, having shared their formative years with the Great Recession, the collapse of health care and a gig economy that guarantees constant employment insecurity and rootlessness?

And what about us, the older ones? I can remember when we were young. Back then, it was our turn to be angry with the older generation. We who grew up under the Cold War threat of nuclear Armageddon to a degree unknown to the young people of today. We who had the nerve to suggest there were alternatives to war and that just because you were a woman or a member of a racial minority you were not a second-class citizen. We marched for Civil Rights and Women’s Rights and more, and we got some of it wrong but a lot of it right.

Earlier this week, I had a long and thoughtful conversation with a son of mine in his late 30s. He was polite, but wasn’t shy about suggesting that the world we’re leaving him isn’t all that great. I told him how, when I was young, I felt the same way about the world being left for us. And here’s what I told my son — yeah, we fixed some things that needed fixing, didn’t succeed in getting everything done we wanted to, and along the way we even managed to mess up some new things on our own. You who are young have every right to feel resentful about the world we’re leaving you.

And speaking of his generation I told him that in the future it will be your job to scratch and fight to fix our mistakes. And that you’ll get some of it right and some of it wrong. And that you’ll even mess up some things along the way that you didn’t intend to.

And then your children will one day make sure you’re aware of exactly how you’ve failed, even as they’re accepting all your successes with a big “whatever.”

It’s just the way things are, have been and always will be. We do our best, but mostly fail as much as we succeed. Meanwhile, I hope we can find a way to be kinder to those both above and below us on the generational ladder. We’re all just trying to do the best we can. We’re all just struggling to find our way.

Chris Huston is an author and award-winning columnist living in southern Idaho. Connect with Chris on both Facebook and Instagram at Chris Huston-Finding My Way and at chrishustonauthor.com.