"Becoming softer" is something that parents lament of their kids' generation.
Parents work hard to make sure that their kids have it easier than they did - and then resent the kids for it.
Whether the kids have it any easier is debatable. The kids have a
different set of problems. There's always a different set of problems. I'm glad that I'm not in my twenties nowadays, struggling under a crippling burden of student debt, unaffordable housing, and work available only in the gig economy.
And - well, I'm glad that I wasn't born much earlier. 1950's antibiotics saved my hearing - and I have nearly-deaf cousins who are only a little older, who had the same sort of infection. God knows what diseases I escaped in 1960's immunization campaigns - certainly, all the kids knew grownups who'd been damaged by paralytic polio. Measles damn near killed me. 1990's surgical technique definitely saved my life - which was quite touch-and-go, even the surgeons weren't all that optimistic. 2010's surgical technique has saved my vision - and I had an auntie who went blind from the same condition in the 1970's with nothing to be done for it. I wouldn't have been tougher if I'd been born thirty years earlier and been part of the Greatest Generation. I'd have been dead.
Kids are always disrespectful to grownups - because it's impossible to give the respect that the elders think they're entitled to and still retain any personal autonomy.
And for all the complaining I hear, I can't help remembering one nice group of college kids that I met on the trail. The guy who'd dragged his friends along said to me, "Wow, I think it's great that you're doing this at your age. My parents must be ten years younger, and I can't them to do anything!. Yeah, I wanted to slap him.
But he was being nice, as best he knew how. (I gave the kids a lift to their car - they'd made a wrong turn and came out at the wrong trailhead, with a 5-mile roadwalk to get back to where they wanted to be.)
Anyway, those kids were doing a section of Devil's Path in the Catskills. You can't be entirely soft and take on that hike. It's an infamously tough trail.