A 4,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet records a teenager complaining about uncool clothing. Around 1800 BC, an Old Babylonian student named Iddin-Sin penned a cuneiform letter to his mother, Zinu, that reads remarkably like a modern, overly dramatic text message. Writing from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Larsa, the young man was outraged by the quality of the homemade garments she sent him. Rather than opening with warm pleasantries or asking about her well-being, Iddin-Sin immediately complained that the other young gentlemen's clothing was improving every year, while his mother insisted on making his 'poorer and more scanty' despite the household having plenty of wool. His indignation perfectly captures the timeless teenage horror of not fitting in with peers. To twist the knife, the ancient teenager compared his wardrobe to that of his father’s assistant’s son, who proudly boasted two brand-new outfits. Iddin-Sin then delivered the ultimate ancient guilt trip, writing: 'In spite of the fact that you bore me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him, while you, you do not love me!' Preserved for millennia on clay, this dramatic message serves as a comforting reminder that schoolyard peer pressure, status anxiety, and dramatic parent-child dynamics are not modern inventions of the social media age, but have been deeply hardwired into human nature for thousands of years. source: Oppenheim, A. L. (1967). Letters from Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia. University of Chicago Press.