I agree wholeheartedly with this message, but also don’t disregard advice from elders simply because they’re old. There are some real nuggets of wisdom you may miss.
My 70 something year old mother drinks chunky milk, because she says that expired milk is still good even after its expiration date, and then wonders why she keeps getting diarrhea. So, some elders have better advice than others. Especially better than my mom.
The trick with elder advice is that you have to be intelligent and wise enough to understand what’s useful and what’s just wistful nostalgia. Like this meme says, some of it will just be longing for things that will not come back.
I even see the other side of this when I give advice to my 20 yo son. Some of the things I say just isn’t as important as it once was.
Never before in history has our lives been so different than that of our parents. We live in a world that my grandparents wouldn’t recognize. We live in a world that my great grandparents couldn’t comprehend.
They cannot prepare us for what’s to come. I fear we may not be able to do any better for our children. Perhaps all we can do is support them as best we can and hope that they’ll figure it out.
I don’t necessarily disagree with OP, it makes a good point, but I also think it’s really dangerous to make blanket statements like yours.
Some of my grandparents may have struggled with some aspects of technology (a couple actually loved everything cutting edge) but they also survived the holocaust, and considering the state of the world, were they still around, I think they would have a lot of extremely relevant insight and advice to provide.
I think the same applies to all those who managed to survive the atrocities of the past, and there is good reason we say that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Sure, ignore them telling you to walk through town handing out CV’s to businesses to get a job, or that you shouldn’t have a problem buying a house if only you worked full time, that’s all out of date, but the deadly cores of our society - capitalism and the bigotry and oppression it depends on, are just as dangerous as they were in the past, if not more due to both their now extended reach, as well as the growing desperation of the working class making us more easy to exploit.
Your friends and even you yourself prepare constantly for the world that is not real - what you deem “real” it just your interpretation of what happened - which in most cases is not even correct (as you rarely know everything about other people, economy, or anything that’s happening). This image is nonsense. Elders’ advice can be good as well as advice of someone your age might be shitty.
Just think for yourself.
Yeah the statement suggests as if elder people don’t currently live in the same world as us today, while some of them may be out of touch, they have the same ability to understand the current climate as young people do. Some are stuck in the past but that’s for too broad of a generalization
The funny thing is that your elders said exactly the same thing to their elders. It was a member of the “silent generation” (pre-boomer) who coined the phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Even when those elders told them that their elders (great elders?) told them the same thing your elders didn’t believe their elders either.
The flip side is that many of your elders, who realized that their elders didn’t have all the answers now think that they have all the answers.
Smart money says that your generation will do exactly what all the other generations did; Do a lot of youthful rebellion against the obviously stupid stuff from previous generations, mix in rebellion against a bunch of stuff that’s actually not stupid, discover nuance, strive for a system that combines the best elements of the past with the best ideas of the present, fail, get jaded, forget about nuance, assume that you have all the answers, get frustrated that your kids are making obvious mistakes that you’ve told them how to avoid.
You shouldn’t smoke though. It’s not good for you
