13 ms·

I'm terrified of old people

97 points by barry-cotter 2y ago

kstenerud 2y ago
Every 10 years or so I'll look back on my life and cringe at all the stupid stuff I said and believed over the past 10 years and how I naively thought that I knew everything. And then I'd breathe a sigh of relief now that I finally do know everything.
- artemonster 2y ago
  lets talk in 10 years!
- m463 2y ago
  "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
  - QuantumGood 2y ago
    – Mark Twain
- khimaros 2y ago
  also known as the Cosmic Schmuck Principle
- sublinear 2y ago
  I'll always be fascinated by what kind of life some other people must have led that they measure experience in years instead of activity!
- bregma 2y ago
  But I was so much older then, I'm younger then that now.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
badpun 2y ago
Being terrified of people who are smarter, wiser, more competent that you is not a healthy reaction. The world is not a hunger games (at least, not yet), so someone being better than you is not an immediate threat to you. However, the writer seems to be a self-centered and hyperambitious kind of person, in which case someone else's success can be seen as a diminishment of one's own accomplishments ("How am I going to climb to the very top if there are some many older people who are better than me?"). But that's obviously unhinged. There's a good chance this guy will cringe hard once he rereads this post in 10-20 years.
- AndrewDucker 2y ago
  He is not literally terrified. Reading his post there is no actual terror there. He's impressed with them and how much they've learned, and appreciating the amount of change and growth that happens over a lifetime.
  - badpun 2y ago
    What about this: > Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them.
    - AndrewDucker 2y ago
      Fair. I think I was taking that as hyperbole, but I could be wrong.
    - denton-scratch 2y ago
      The jiu-jitsu of older people (not really counting 50s) is simply that they know what they can and can't achieve, because they've mostly done whatever they're going to do. Sure, some over-60s have great things before them; but that's unusual. So on the whole, older folk aren't struggling to prove themselves; and they pretty much know who they are. Also, they've taken the knocks: they've faced physical injury, the pain of rejection, and often the kinds of illnesses that young people rarely get. They carry the scars and bruises. Perhaps what scares the author isn't old people as such, but rather the experiences they've had that the author has yet to face.
smokel 2y ago
It would be tremendously helpful if young people were told that next to stories and fairytales, there is entropy, randomness and incompetence. It took me a few years of life experience to understand that the latter three typically explain life better than the first two. I suppose that for every individual there are things that they overtrained early on in life, for which it then takes a lot of time to unlearn them. In that respect, keeping an "open mind" can be helpful, but having it opened a bit too much makes one an annoying person as well. Now where exactly was I going with this rant?
- roenxi 2y ago
  I think you've actually touched on something more interesting than you might realise. Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned. We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made. Pre-internet I'm not even sure how I'd be supposed to get my hands on things like the Hansard records. Billionaires are under similar pressure, look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big. I don't think the fairytales of entropy, randomness and incompetence exist. But I do think there is an excellent reason for that - up until around 2000 almost nobody knew how big a factor those things were. The discourse was gummed up by propaganda which was mainly myths of competence in the halls of power and it wasn't feasible to pick apart the mess because communication was hard.
  - riffraff 2y ago
    > Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned [Citation needed] Investigative journalism existed, stuff like "manufacturing consent" was published in the '80s, and I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are). Things are easier to access without intermediation but it's not such a qualitative change, IMO.
JodieBenitez 2y ago
What an odd title to read !
denhaus 2y ago
Not to be a hater but what exactly is the point of posts like this Nothing factual presented. Not a unique, stimulating, or even really coherent viewpoint. Just a self-confident stream of consciousness with no real takeaway. Eye-catching title though
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ggm 2y ago
  Perhaps when you're older like me, at 63 you'll understand, or perhaps as a crusty incorrigable 64+ year old you've forgotten the follies of youth? To say more would be ad hom. So I shall stop with a wise aphorism of my grandmother, born at the end of the 19th century: if you have nothing nice to add, consider saying nothing.
  - denhaus 2y ago
    I am sure that aphorism is quite apt for thesis defenses, critical debates, shareholder meetings, peer review, and forums of discussion.
    - ggm 2y ago
      The first 4 no. The last one..
- htthbjk 2y ago
  Engagement-bait. With a dash of humble-brag.
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    "Engagement-bait" That's a new term to me. I like it! It's a good word for the vacuous "Windows is rubbish" article that got submitted a couple of times yesterday.
- martin-t 2y ago
Tade0 2y ago
> I’m 26 years old now, I (hope that I) got a tiny bit wiser but I’m pretty sure I have no idea what I’m doing. > Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. My experience is that it takes on average 5-7 years for a person to realize this, so kudos to this guy for ticking this off early. The outlier on the long side is hard to work with in a team.
portaouflop 2y ago
While I agree with most in article but I really fear for the US having the choice between 2 extremely old people to run their country. I would take a 35 yo over an 80+ year old to run something any day.
- martin-t 2y ago
  This is what you get when the voting system is pretty much the worst you can come up with. https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
eastbound 2y ago
When you’ll be 50, do you think you’ll like the 20-year-you who made the major decisions for your life, or do you think you would have preferred the 50-year-you to make those decisions? This is an argument for traditionalists. Listen to your 50-year-you, aka your parents, your community seniors, etc. But reversely, if we tilted more towards listening to the elder-you, would there be enough renewal in society? Enough happiness at 20 years old?
- jaredsohn 2y ago
  50-year-you has lots of experience in the domain of 'you' and knows the future (via your lens) from when you were 20. 50-year-olds when you're 20 will lack those things. Also, everyone has holes in their knowledge/perspective. Could be the older people in your orbit when younger have thoughts that are too limiting compared to where you end up when making decisions as a 20-year-old.
pastage 2y ago
The workplace with out old people is boring, when ever you are in an environment with only one age group you should be careful. The group think among people the same age is terrible, much worse than many ideologies. Be as scared of your own as the old people.
- groestl 2y ago
  Na, been working with similar people a lot. You can get a lot done if you understand each other easily and it does not feel like your hands are tied behind your back. As long as the premise of your business is correct (this is something that you can decide for yourself), that's a nice place to be in.
  - martin-t 2y ago
    People of different ages and background bring different perspectives. Yet for you, it seems you consider that tying your hands behind your back. Strange. I never had difficulty understanding each other with competent people regardless of age.
    - groestl 2y ago
      I don't need different perspectives if I execute a vision as efficiently and fast as possible. I need different perspectives if I want to calcify a business model (sometimes, of course, that's also worthwhile to do).
      - skulk 2y ago
        This is the hopelessly arrogant attitude that creates our atomized, depressed, internet addicted society.
        groestl 2y ago
        I don't see how that follows. I certainly didn't feel atomized or depressed when I was part of a highly functional team. Maybe you mistook my comment for a statement on society at large? That was not my intention at all. My post is about small software engineering teams, not democracies.
monero-xmr 2y ago
https://youtu.be/XKTfBm0ryUQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/XKTfBm0ryUQ?feature=shared
nabla9 2y ago
Blog vs diary/notes. You don't have to publish what you write. Read what you wrote and rewrite. At least wait 1-3 years before publishing.
throwaway4233 2y ago
When I was junior/mid level engineer working in a 5-8 person engineering team, there was this particular senior engineer whom I disdained. It had nothing to do with them as a person, but I always had the feeling that they just did things at work without caring for the impact of it. The team and company grew in size over a period of 2 years and I went through a lot of first hand experiences of having to deal with unrealistic deadlines, chaotic lines of communication and multiple nights of tailing production logs to fix bugs. It was around this time, that the senior engineer during a company even got drunk and talked to me about their first few jobs.I realized that what they described, was quite similar to what I was facing right now and I came to understand why they cared so little about work they do on a daily basis.It honestly scared me at to think that I might either end up like this person or worse or burning out and quitting the field. Right now, I am close to age the senior engineer was when I met them and even though I may selectively decide not to involve myself with things that can overstretch me, I am in no way the same as that other person. The reason I am sharing this tangential story is to highlight my opinion about old age. It does not matter much if you have gained a lot of experience as you grow older, unless you are able to use it effectively.
- roenxi 2y ago
  To anyone in a similar situation; you might want to spend some time reflecting on the reality of your role - one of the failure modes of incompetence is using "care" as a proxy for "ability" because an incompetent person almost by definition can't assess ability directly. I fell for that once and consider myself lucky that I figured out what I was doing wrong while still a fresh-faced graduate. The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. They aren't shareholders; they don't reap the benefits of what they do, they don't control the direction of the company. They are there to achieve specific technical goals with professionalism. Bringing emotion or non-technical factors in to the deal is an obstacle to excellence.
  - crispyambulance 2y ago
    The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. As much as some may profess to actually believe that it simply isn’t even close to true. I am sure there are some unicorn exceptions (like the Spock character from Star Trek) but those who are excellent at their work also put a lot of time and effort into it, if not continuously then they’ve at least paid their dues for a span of decades. However they got there it represents a significant emotional investment involving pride and care or even a kind of love. One can’t know everything all the time. There are ALWAYS going to be gaps in your own ability especially when you’re doing new and difficult work, and the way to bridge those gaps is to be driven by a desire to overcome them— in other words by CARING enough to keep trying. The most successful people I can think of personally always care enough to overcome gaps in their ability. It looks like incompetence at first, then it becomes obsession, then it becomes problem solving, and it is ends with mastery, IF they CARE enough.
st-keller 2y ago
Hi I‘m 55. You are on the right path. The day you‘re not embarrassed by what you did yesterday is the day you stopped progressing! And don’t be terrified: A lot of „old“ (what that means changes) people are not wiser than you - they‘re still terrible incompetent, because they focused on „being happy“ instead in “getting wiser“. You did the right thing, and if you keep doing it, this feeling that you were stupid yesterday will stay - and this is fabulous!
TheCapeGreek 2y ago
I agreed all the way to the last paragraph. I think there's good points to be made about wisdom and decision making when you're older, but there is definitely still a sharp cognitive decline (which will include wisdom and decision making!) when you're hitting 75+, for most people. Having these people in positions of power is not a good thing. As advisors sure, but not directly in power with high influence.
mikewarot 2y ago
We old folks know what it was like back then and allow for it because we all did it too. Just keep writing, the ultimate audience is your future self, and you'll appreciate being able to look back on your life.
- chgs 2y ago
  No you don’t know what it was like. I’m in my 40s and have a very specific view of what things were like in my teens, or 20s, or even 30s. That view is wrong. Rose tinted Nostalgia glasses are very real.
  - ceuk 2y ago
    > No you don't know what it was like. Bit of an aggressive false dichotomy for a 40 year old to make
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  I concur. I recently dug up my old diary from my late teens and while it was fascinating it was also kinda horrifying. The things I cared about were, well, kinda dumb. My thought process was sloppy at best. I can see the kernel of person I am, but it is still a very weird experience.
BoredPositron 2y ago
The current issue is that there is an unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority. This presents a significant dilemma because many of these older decision-makers struggle to comprehend the reality faced by younger generations, including their own children and grandchildren. They frequently cling to outdated notions, such as the belief that a starter apartment costs only $400 or that well-paying jobs are readily available to anyone who simply shows up. This generational disconnect makes it challenging to address the evolving needs of society as a whole. In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion. It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced
- jajko 2y ago
  The disconnect was always there in 20th century too, if you actually cared to look hard enough at your / peers previous generation. The more you steered from some basic life path the more friction there was, and not even going into various social minorities who can now actually live a decent life. The idea that now young have it much tougher is simply not a reality in my surroundings, I had 1% of the options my children had and ie path to just freedom was where you risked your actual life. Some young just have little patience and want it all immediately, or otherwise they are failing in life and some form of communism needs to be installed promptly. Cant comprehend that social networks arent showing a reality, just few marketaeble slices of it. But this is largely failure of parents failing to explain to kids how world runs, what to expect and how to get what you want out of it.
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    Problem is world isn't fair, some people do get it all for free, absurd/perverse scenarios happen all the time. I think what's different in this generation is that it's becoming much more visible to everyone, so even if these are the outliers everything is judged accordingly. Also it's kind of making extremes more acceptable slowly because they are always in the attention sphere. Just look at the political spectrum - Trump really changed the game even here in Europe, politicians lost so much shame - stuff that would previously cause you to resign - now they just do some stupid spin, double down and get even more support from the tribe. I'm mid 30s and I feel things have changed considerably in last 10 years, loss of shame in particular - once you get stuff chewed up by social media as the latest shock fad - everyone gets used to it so fast and it becomes almost normalized (not shocking at least).
teh_infallible 2y ago
Life just has seasons
papaver-somnamb 2y ago
> figuring out if people I just met were (1) right for the role, (2) work well with me, (3) I work well with them. I recommend figuring out if: (1) they are good at doing what they'll be responsible for, (2) they enjoy doing it, and (3) if you can live with each other. (1) You want to know that they will succeed in whatever you delegate to them. (2) Can they persist over the long term, seeing their tasks to completion and success? (3) Especially with a lower headcount, it's similar to a second marriage, and you might end up spending time with them more than the professed love of your life. Can you overcome conflicts? > If I’m starting a company today, I’m simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1. I'm coming round to the same opinion. A better-than-good ops person can have one of the largest influences on success. If we view success as parts preparedness, execution, and luck, they provided an outsized boost to all 3. EDIT: Clarified the benefits of the ops person.
sebmaynard 2y ago
Kudos to you gaining the self awareness to realise you don't know shit; I'm 40 now and it's taken me until relatively recently for that to dawn on me. Enjoyed the article, keep writing!
redrove 2y ago
I do think there's a fair bit of selection bias. The vast majority of people growing old have not spent their lives learning; while enchanting to look at the 60-70+ year olds that are undoubtedly exceptional (think Warren Buffet or the older COBOL dev you think is cool), the reality is they're in the extreme minority. The author thinks everyone is like him (or us commenting for that matter) and just think of the possibilities in 30-40 years! Most people are just not that impressive and I wouldn't falsely assume that by just having spent time on the Earth while it spun around the sun over 60 times they're automatically a pillar of wisdom.
- m_fayer 2y ago
  I used to be disappointed when encountering elderly people that were petty and shortsighted and self involved. Eventually I realized that simply getting through the bulk of your life is not necessarily associated with learning and growth. Then, I saw that reaching old age without wisdom and equanimity produces a suffering and ugly person whose last years will do nothing but spread misery all around. It’s an under appreciated reason to always try to better oneself: to avoid the carnage that will result in old age, should one fail to do so.
  - manmal 2y ago
    I think a lot of that comes down to taking care of one’s own health, the whole life long. Maybe a bit zany comparison, but: That 60’s old timer car that’s still in good shape and can drive - it’s seen a lot of care and likely no accidents (a result of being careful).
Yaa101 2y ago
Get some older friends, they are fun, they have a lot of info, they are generally less scared of consequences so they let you do stupid stuff, they give you room to grow and get wiser, they generally have more money and cause better opportunities. As young person I always were around the generation of my parents and I never regret it, it provided me with the baggage to get through life without too much problems. When middle aged make younger friends to keep you young and to be able to pass on the culture to young people that want to be around older ones.
- redrove 2y ago
  To add to that: get some younger friends as well. As someone pointed out in this thread, the group think that forms in same-age groups can be downright dangerous.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom. Many are dumb, many others are clever, some came up to crazy conclusions from their experiences and others opened up a lot to the world and keep learning on to of all their knowledge. More than anything, while we're optimizing our heuristics years over years, the world keeps changing and what we assumed to be invariants were just slowly moving phenomenons that also see sudden breakdowns from times to times.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  > One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom. I have a theory that most people peak in their 20s and from there on change incredibly slowly.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    This seems like an attitude that would be held exclusively by people in their 20s.
mvellandi 2y ago
“wanting to impress people is the result of not knowing what you want” That’s quite reductive unless you’re overloading “impress” with “awe”. Because making strong impressions and influencing specific action is the whole point of sales, whether it be convincing your parents about something meaningful as a child. An employer the value you’ll bring. A bank or VC a safe or fantastic long term ROI.
posix86 2y ago
As Mark Manson put it: As long as you look back at your past self and cringe, you know you're growing :)
- monacobolid 2y ago
  I sometimes have the following thought (disclaimer: cringe is not the most adequate word for the concept in my mind, but since you've already used it, I guess it's okay): If I look back at my 10-year-younger-self and cringe (at the things I did/said/created/liked/hated/etc. and I obviously do cringe), does that mean that I am being cringe right now? Or at least, how can I have some level of confidence that I'm not being cringe right now and that in 10 years I'm not going to reject everything and anything I'm saying today? And if I was cringe 10 years ago, and if I'm cringe right now, will I be also be cringe in 10 years too? What about 20? 30? Will it ever stop? Will I ever reach a point in which I will not cringe? Another one is like this: There are people who I respect/admire for the things they did, and now they are doing something obviously completely stupid. Were those things they did just random results I got to see, compared to a bunch of other stuff they probably did I did not get to see, thus creating this sort of false image of their intellect (or character, or something like that), or are they actually right in believing in this new thing, and I'm just being oblivious? How come some really smart people do some really dumb stuff (while believing they are doing the right thing)? I believe I'm somewhat smart, but what does that even mean if it doesn't prevent me from doing some really, really dumb stuff. At some point, my friend told me something like (or at least this is how I understood it) - it is good that you realize that good/smart people do bad/stupid things, and vice versa; the fact that you start from this belief that you might be wrong gives you a greater chance of being less wrong, at least in the long run.
dcminter 2y ago
I prefer this Douglas Adams quote to the Boris Johnson one, but it has much the same thought behind it: "One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so — but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous." As a 50-something I'd say the chance to spot patterns one has encountered before is the super-power and getting in a rut is the kryptonite. Oh and my brain does like to spend time at 2am thinking about embarassing and humiliating mistakes I have made. Those accumulate, so there's something to dwell uncomfortably upon as one (at any age) looks to the future. I guess it gives one an incentive to make fewer...
- happymellon 2y ago
  The problem with the Boris quote is that he would have to do something extremely clever at some point. Unfortunately he is just a racist rich white man who got burnt by his own lies.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    Racist?
    - relaxing 2y ago
      It means showing prejudice or antagonism towards people based on their membership in a marginalized ethnic group.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Like using ‘white man’ as an epithet
shusaku 2y ago
> I’ve always thought that I was very competent. Now I at least realize that I have no fucking clue how anything works. Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? I wonder if there is a kind of overfitting that keeps the playing field level for young people. Like you read more books, have more experiences, etc, but in the end you’re less capable than the naive approach. He mentions having more connections as you get old. I think of Bill Belichick’s final years with the Patriots, and how he never seemed to be able to hire the right guys, stuck on old friends and colleagues. You might overfit to “I once hired a left handed guy on a Tuesday to write the backend, maybe I should do that again…”
ruszki 2y ago
> Again, the only way to get these connections is to literally just wait. I have several 20+ years long close friendships, but it’s definitely not because I just waited. It’s a ton of time, sacrifice, and even more patience and empathy. People change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to handle to what they become. But at the end, these occasions definitely help you to understand people. Unfortunately, this cost also a lot of money, because you need to travel a lot. After 15-20 years almost all of these kind of my friends live far away from each other. I had to cross even the Atlantic every 2-3 months because of this for a while. One for sure, If you just wait, you’ll loose close friendships.
andyjohnson0 2y ago
> and by the time you’re 50 or 60 or 70 you do know what you want. I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true. Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head. That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?" > I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making. My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow. Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing
- andyjohnson0 2y ago
  To add: Obviously theres a context to this article in Biden's recent debate performance. As a non-USian observing it all, I understand the concern. But I wish people would remember that a national leader is just the head of of a decision-making team. They don't decide everything themselves, they lead the team and set the direction. And they almost never ever have to make decisions alone at the tempo of an adversarial debate. Its possible to imagine scenarios where Biden would have 30 seconds to make a nationally existential decision, but such things only happen in films, not real life. Wisdom not raw power. But his opponent is an extremely dangerous individual, so I get the concern.
lordnacho 2y ago
Reading this makes me think his pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Experience has decreasing marginal returns. Being 40 doesn't make you 4 times as experienced as an adult as a 25 year old. Being 80 doesn't make you 8 times as experienced. Being a 25 year old you actually have learned a lot about being an adult, and you shouldn't think that time on its own will increase that. It's more the variety of experience that teaches things than time itself, especially if you repeat things for a long time.
kkfx 2y ago
Well, IMVHO the issue is not a matter of age (38 myself) but about education: ruling classes formed schools to produce the kind of Citizens they want, witch was the goal when reforms was set, but things change and most people are formed to be unable to adapt because if you are in power you want to hold your position so the ideal society you try to achieve is one frozen with you in power. As a results every ruling class demand conformism and conformism demand "stability" and stability means in general being unable to change. Long story short most of the people are born in a model, have absorbed that and are unable to move. When the time passes we need to change and the "old" generations are simply from another time, unable to be citizens of the present. The current state of thing is a previous generation born on high growth after a world war, in a high competitive society, a society with strong emotions but also oppression, younger generations are born in a degrading society with much less vivid emotions but much more cooperation, so it's normal to have inter-generational issues where the old generation fear to loose a competition because they ware grown as running horses, if you stop you are dead, while the younger one do not understand why they are so harsh and focused. Back then to keep people subjugated in a fast growing world the rule was "always do the same, trust the system" (at least in most EU) while today the rule is "always doubt and reason on anything, be ready to change" because we are in a degrading society who need to change to reborn. Unfortunately while most people are kind and honest, most are also mentally unable to evolve and that's why we derail, the world change, the population strive to avoid the change instead of do their best to direct it.
swiftcoder 2y ago
Lord give me back the unearned confidence of a 26 year-old...
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance." (David Mamet) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E I don't think it is intentional, but the consequences are certainly quantifiable. Everyone thinks the asymmetry of power structures is unfair... right up until perspectives shift when they take on the same roles... https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845 https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po... Have a great day, =3
sys_64738 2y ago
The next generation being born now will see the current "young people" as "old" in twenty years. What people in their 20s today who are terrified of "old people" will grasp quickly is that nobody is immortal and every older person generally feels embarrassed and stupid about things they did/thought in their younger years. Some will even have blogs to look back on to enhance their cringeworthy utility.
jelliclesfarm 2y ago
I am terrified of young people fresh out of our public school system who are entitled, raised by the state and aren’t half as productive as the ‘old people’.

97 points by barry-cotter 2y ago

Every 10 years or so I'll look back on my life and cringe at all the stupid stuff I said and believed over the past 10 years and how I naively thought that I knew everything. And then I'd breathe a sigh of relief now that I finally do know everything.

artemonster 2y ago
lets talk in 10 years!
m463 2y ago
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
- QuantumGood 2y ago
  – Mark Twain
khimaros 2y ago
also known as the Cosmic Schmuck Principle
sublinear 2y ago
I'll always be fascinated by what kind of life some other people must have led that they measure experience in years instead of activity!
bregma 2y ago
But I was so much older then, I'm younger then that now.

deleted 2y ago

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badpun 2y ago

Being terrified of people who are smarter, wiser, more competent that you is not a healthy reaction. The world is not a hunger games (at least, not yet), so someone being better than you is not an immediate threat to you. However, the writer seems to be a self-centered and hyperambitious kind of person, in which case someone else's success can be seen as a diminishment of one's own accomplishments ("How am I going to climb to the very top if there are some many older people who are better than me?"). But that's obviously unhinged. There's a good chance this guy will cringe hard once he rereads this post in 10-20 years.

AndrewDucker 2y ago
He is not literally terrified. Reading his post there is no actual terror there. He's impressed with them and how much they've learned, and appreciating the amount of change and growth that happens over a lifetime.
- badpun 2y ago
  What about this: > Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them.
  - AndrewDucker 2y ago
    Fair. I think I was taking that as hyperbole, but I could be wrong.
  - denton-scratch 2y ago
    The jiu-jitsu of older people (not really counting 50s) is simply that they know what they can and can't achieve, because they've mostly done whatever they're going to do. Sure, some over-60s have great things before them; but that's unusual. So on the whole, older folk aren't struggling to prove themselves; and they pretty much know who they are. Also, they've taken the knocks: they've faced physical injury, the pain of rejection, and often the kinds of illnesses that young people rarely get. They carry the scars and bruises. Perhaps what scares the author isn't old people as such, but rather the experiences they've had that the author has yet to face.

smokel 2y ago

It would be tremendously helpful if young people were told that next to stories and fairytales, there is entropy, randomness and incompetence. It took me a few years of life experience to understand that the latter three typically explain life better than the first two. I suppose that for every individual there are things that they overtrained early on in life, for which it then takes a lot of time to unlearn them. In that respect, keeping an "open mind" can be helpful, but having it opened a bit too much makes one an annoying person as well. Now where exactly was I going with this rant?

roenxi 2y ago
I think you've actually touched on something more interesting than you might realise. Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned. We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made. Pre-internet I'm not even sure how I'd be supposed to get my hands on things like the Hansard records. Billionaires are under similar pressure, look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big. I don't think the fairytales of entropy, randomness and incompetence exist. But I do think there is an excellent reason for that - up until around 2000 almost nobody knew how big a factor those things were. The discourse was gummed up by propaganda which was mainly myths of competence in the halls of power and it wasn't feasible to pick apart the mess because communication was hard.
- riffraff 2y ago
  > Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned [Citation needed] Investigative journalism existed, stuff like "manufacturing consent" was published in the '80s, and I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are). Things are easier to access without intermediation but it's not such a qualitative change, IMO.

JodieBenitez 2y ago

What an odd title to read !

denhaus 2y ago

Not to be a hater but what exactly is the point of posts like this Nothing factual presented. Not a unique, stimulating, or even really coherent viewpoint. Just a self-confident stream of consciousness with no real takeaway. Eye-catching title though

deleted 2y ago
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ggm 2y ago
Perhaps when you're older like me, at 63 you'll understand, or perhaps as a crusty incorrigable 64+ year old you've forgotten the follies of youth? To say more would be ad hom. So I shall stop with a wise aphorism of my grandmother, born at the end of the 19th century: if you have nothing nice to add, consider saying nothing.
- denhaus 2y ago
  I am sure that aphorism is quite apt for thesis defenses, critical debates, shareholder meetings, peer review, and forums of discussion.
  - ggm 2y ago
    The first 4 no. The last one..
htthbjk 2y ago
Engagement-bait. With a dash of humble-brag.
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  "Engagement-bait" That's a new term to me. I like it! It's a good word for the vacuous "Windows is rubbish" article that got submitted a couple of times yesterday.
martin-t 2y ago

Tade0 2y ago

> I’m 26 years old now, I (hope that I) got a tiny bit wiser but I’m pretty sure I have no idea what I’m doing. > Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. My experience is that it takes on average 5-7 years for a person to realize this, so kudos to this guy for ticking this off early. The outlier on the long side is hard to work with in a team.

portaouflop 2y ago

While I agree with most in article but I really fear for the US having the choice between 2 extremely old people to run their country. I would take a 35 yo over an 80+ year old to run something any day.

martin-t 2y ago
This is what you get when the voting system is pretty much the worst you can come up with. https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/

eastbound 2y ago

When you’ll be 50, do you think you’ll like the 20-year-you who made the major decisions for your life, or do you think you would have preferred the 50-year-you to make those decisions? This is an argument for traditionalists. Listen to your 50-year-you, aka your parents, your community seniors, etc. But reversely, if we tilted more towards listening to the elder-you, would there be enough renewal in society? Enough happiness at 20 years old?

jaredsohn 2y ago
50-year-you has lots of experience in the domain of 'you' and knows the future (via your lens) from when you were 20. 50-year-olds when you're 20 will lack those things. Also, everyone has holes in their knowledge/perspective. Could be the older people in your orbit when younger have thoughts that are too limiting compared to where you end up when making decisions as a 20-year-old.

pastage 2y ago

The workplace with out old people is boring, when ever you are in an environment with only one age group you should be careful. The group think among people the same age is terrible, much worse than many ideologies. Be as scared of your own as the old people.

groestl 2y ago
Na, been working with similar people a lot. You can get a lot done if you understand each other easily and it does not feel like your hands are tied behind your back. As long as the premise of your business is correct (this is something that you can decide for yourself), that's a nice place to be in.
- martin-t 2y ago
  People of different ages and background bring different perspectives. Yet for you, it seems you consider that tying your hands behind your back. Strange. I never had difficulty understanding each other with competent people regardless of age.
  - groestl 2y ago
    I don't need different perspectives if I execute a vision as efficiently and fast as possible. I need different perspectives if I want to calcify a business model (sometimes, of course, that's also worthwhile to do).
    - skulk 2y ago
      This is the hopelessly arrogant attitude that creates our atomized, depressed, internet addicted society.
      - groestl 2y ago
        I don't see how that follows. I certainly didn't feel atomized or depressed when I was part of a highly functional team. Maybe you mistook my comment for a statement on society at large? That was not my intention at all. My post is about small software engineering teams, not democracies.

monero-xmr 2y ago

https://youtu.be/XKTfBm0ryUQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/XKTfBm0ryUQ?feature=shared

nabla9 2y ago

Blog vs diary/notes. You don't have to publish what you write. Read what you wrote and rewrite. At least wait 1-3 years before publishing.

throwaway4233 2y ago

When I was junior/mid level engineer working in a 5-8 person engineering team, there was this particular senior engineer whom I disdained. It had nothing to do with them as a person, but I always had the feeling that they just did things at work without caring for the impact of it. The team and company grew in size over a period of 2 years and I went through a lot of first hand experiences of having to deal with unrealistic deadlines, chaotic lines of communication and multiple nights of tailing production logs to fix bugs. It was around this time, that the senior engineer during a company even got drunk and talked to me about their first few jobs.I realized that what they described, was quite similar to what I was facing right now and I came to understand why they cared so little about work they do on a daily basis.It honestly scared me at to think that I might either end up like this person or worse or burning out and quitting the field. Right now, I am close to age the senior engineer was when I met them and even though I may selectively decide not to involve myself with things that can overstretch me, I am in no way the same as that other person. The reason I am sharing this tangential story is to highlight my opinion about old age. It does not matter much if you have gained a lot of experience as you grow older, unless you are able to use it effectively.

roenxi 2y ago
To anyone in a similar situation; you might want to spend some time reflecting on the reality of your role - one of the failure modes of incompetence is using "care" as a proxy for "ability" because an incompetent person almost by definition can't assess ability directly. I fell for that once and consider myself lucky that I figured out what I was doing wrong while still a fresh-faced graduate. The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. They aren't shareholders; they don't reap the benefits of what they do, they don't control the direction of the company. They are there to achieve specific technical goals with professionalism. Bringing emotion or non-technical factors in to the deal is an obstacle to excellence.
- crispyambulance 2y ago
  The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. As much as some may profess to actually believe that it simply isn’t even close to true. I am sure there are some unicorn exceptions (like the Spock character from Star Trek) but those who are excellent at their work also put a lot of time and effort into it, if not continuously then they’ve at least paid their dues for a span of decades. However they got there it represents a significant emotional investment involving pride and care or even a kind of love. One can’t know everything all the time. There are ALWAYS going to be gaps in your own ability especially when you’re doing new and difficult work, and the way to bridge those gaps is to be driven by a desire to overcome them— in other words by CARING enough to keep trying. The most successful people I can think of personally always care enough to overcome gaps in their ability. It looks like incompetence at first, then it becomes obsession, then it becomes problem solving, and it is ends with mastery, IF they CARE enough.

st-keller 2y ago

Hi I‘m 55. You are on the right path. The day you‘re not embarrassed by what you did yesterday is the day you stopped progressing! And don’t be terrified: A lot of „old“ (what that means changes) people are not wiser than you - they‘re still terrible incompetent, because they focused on „being happy“ instead in “getting wiser“. You did the right thing, and if you keep doing it, this feeling that you were stupid yesterday will stay - and this is fabulous!

TheCapeGreek 2y ago

I agreed all the way to the last paragraph. I think there's good points to be made about wisdom and decision making when you're older, but there is definitely still a sharp cognitive decline (which will include wisdom and decision making!) when you're hitting 75+, for most people. Having these people in positions of power is not a good thing. As advisors sure, but not directly in power with high influence.

mikewarot 2y ago

We old folks know what it was like back then and allow for it because we all did it too. Just keep writing, the ultimate audience is your future self, and you'll appreciate being able to look back on your life.

chgs 2y ago
No you don’t know what it was like. I’m in my 40s and have a very specific view of what things were like in my teens, or 20s, or even 30s. That view is wrong. Rose tinted Nostalgia glasses are very real.
- ceuk 2y ago
  > No you don't know what it was like. Bit of an aggressive false dichotomy for a 40 year old to make
A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
I concur. I recently dug up my old diary from my late teens and while it was fascinating it was also kinda horrifying. The things I cared about were, well, kinda dumb. My thought process was sloppy at best. I can see the kernel of person I am, but it is still a very weird experience.

BoredPositron 2y ago

The current issue is that there is an unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority. This presents a significant dilemma because many of these older decision-makers struggle to comprehend the reality faced by younger generations, including their own children and grandchildren. They frequently cling to outdated notions, such as the belief that a starter apartment costs only $400 or that well-paying jobs are readily available to anyone who simply shows up. This generational disconnect makes it challenging to address the evolving needs of society as a whole. In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion. It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced

jajko 2y ago
The disconnect was always there in 20th century too, if you actually cared to look hard enough at your / peers previous generation. The more you steered from some basic life path the more friction there was, and not even going into various social minorities who can now actually live a decent life. The idea that now young have it much tougher is simply not a reality in my surroundings, I had 1% of the options my children had and ie path to just freedom was where you risked your actual life. Some young just have little patience and want it all immediately, or otherwise they are failing in life and some form of communism needs to be installed promptly. Cant comprehend that social networks arent showing a reality, just few marketaeble slices of it. But this is largely failure of parents failing to explain to kids how world runs, what to expect and how to get what you want out of it.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  Problem is world isn't fair, some people do get it all for free, absurd/perverse scenarios happen all the time. I think what's different in this generation is that it's becoming much more visible to everyone, so even if these are the outliers everything is judged accordingly. Also it's kind of making extremes more acceptable slowly because they are always in the attention sphere. Just look at the political spectrum - Trump really changed the game even here in Europe, politicians lost so much shame - stuff that would previously cause you to resign - now they just do some stupid spin, double down and get even more support from the tribe. I'm mid 30s and I feel things have changed considerably in last 10 years, loss of shame in particular - once you get stuff chewed up by social media as the latest shock fad - everyone gets used to it so fast and it becomes almost normalized (not shocking at least).

teh_infallible 2y ago

Life just has seasons

papaver-somnamb 2y ago

> figuring out if people I just met were (1) right for the role, (2) work well with me, (3) I work well with them. I recommend figuring out if: (1) they are good at doing what they'll be responsible for, (2) they enjoy doing it, and (3) if you can live with each other. (1) You want to know that they will succeed in whatever you delegate to them. (2) Can they persist over the long term, seeing their tasks to completion and success? (3) Especially with a lower headcount, it's similar to a second marriage, and you might end up spending time with them more than the professed love of your life. Can you overcome conflicts? > If I’m starting a company today, I’m simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1. I'm coming round to the same opinion. A better-than-good ops person can have one of the largest influences on success. If we view success as parts preparedness, execution, and luck, they provided an outsized boost to all 3. EDIT: Clarified the benefits of the ops person.

sebmaynard 2y ago

Kudos to you gaining the self awareness to realise you don't know shit; I'm 40 now and it's taken me until relatively recently for that to dawn on me. Enjoyed the article, keep writing!

redrove 2y ago

I do think there's a fair bit of selection bias. The vast majority of people growing old have not spent their lives learning; while enchanting to look at the 60-70+ year olds that are undoubtedly exceptional (think Warren Buffet or the older COBOL dev you think is cool), the reality is they're in the extreme minority. The author thinks everyone is like him (or us commenting for that matter) and just think of the possibilities in 30-40 years! Most people are just not that impressive and I wouldn't falsely assume that by just having spent time on the Earth while it spun around the sun over 60 times they're automatically a pillar of wisdom.

m_fayer 2y ago
I used to be disappointed when encountering elderly people that were petty and shortsighted and self involved. Eventually I realized that simply getting through the bulk of your life is not necessarily associated with learning and growth. Then, I saw that reaching old age without wisdom and equanimity produces a suffering and ugly person whose last years will do nothing but spread misery all around. It’s an under appreciated reason to always try to better oneself: to avoid the carnage that will result in old age, should one fail to do so.
- manmal 2y ago
  I think a lot of that comes down to taking care of one’s own health, the whole life long. Maybe a bit zany comparison, but: That 60’s old timer car that’s still in good shape and can drive - it’s seen a lot of care and likely no accidents (a result of being careful).

Yaa101 2y ago

Get some older friends, they are fun, they have a lot of info, they are generally less scared of consequences so they let you do stupid stuff, they give you room to grow and get wiser, they generally have more money and cause better opportunities. As young person I always were around the generation of my parents and I never regret it, it provided me with the baggage to get through life without too much problems. When middle aged make younger friends to keep you young and to be able to pass on the culture to young people that want to be around older ones.

redrove 2y ago
To add to that: get some younger friends as well. As someone pointed out in this thread, the group think that forms in same-age groups can be downright dangerous.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom. Many are dumb, many others are clever, some came up to crazy conclusions from their experiences and others opened up a lot to the world and keep learning on to of all their knowledge. More than anything, while we're optimizing our heuristics years over years, the world keeps changing and what we assumed to be invariants were just slowly moving phenomenons that also see sudden breakdowns from times to times.

anal_reactor 2y ago
> One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom. I have a theory that most people peak in their 20s and from there on change incredibly slowly.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  This seems like an attitude that would be held exclusively by people in their 20s.

mvellandi 2y ago

“wanting to impress people is the result of not knowing what you want” That’s quite reductive unless you’re overloading “impress” with “awe”. Because making strong impressions and influencing specific action is the whole point of sales, whether it be convincing your parents about something meaningful as a child. An employer the value you’ll bring. A bank or VC a safe or fantastic long term ROI.

posix86 2y ago

As Mark Manson put it: As long as you look back at your past self and cringe, you know you're growing :)

monacobolid 2y ago
I sometimes have the following thought (disclaimer: cringe is not the most adequate word for the concept in my mind, but since you've already used it, I guess it's okay): If I look back at my 10-year-younger-self and cringe (at the things I did/said/created/liked/hated/etc. and I obviously do cringe), does that mean that I am being cringe right now? Or at least, how can I have some level of confidence that I'm not being cringe right now and that in 10 years I'm not going to reject everything and anything I'm saying today? And if I was cringe 10 years ago, and if I'm cringe right now, will I be also be cringe in 10 years too? What about 20? 30? Will it ever stop? Will I ever reach a point in which I will not cringe? Another one is like this: There are people who I respect/admire for the things they did, and now they are doing something obviously completely stupid. Were those things they did just random results I got to see, compared to a bunch of other stuff they probably did I did not get to see, thus creating this sort of false image of their intellect (or character, or something like that), or are they actually right in believing in this new thing, and I'm just being oblivious? How come some really smart people do some really dumb stuff (while believing they are doing the right thing)? I believe I'm somewhat smart, but what does that even mean if it doesn't prevent me from doing some really, really dumb stuff. At some point, my friend told me something like (or at least this is how I understood it) - it is good that you realize that good/smart people do bad/stupid things, and vice versa; the fact that you start from this belief that you might be wrong gives you a greater chance of being less wrong, at least in the long run.

dcminter 2y ago

I prefer this Douglas Adams quote to the Boris Johnson one, but it has much the same thought behind it: "One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so — but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous." As a 50-something I'd say the chance to spot patterns one has encountered before is the super-power and getting in a rut is the kryptonite. Oh and my brain does like to spend time at 2am thinking about embarassing and humiliating mistakes I have made. Those accumulate, so there's something to dwell uncomfortably upon as one (at any age) looks to the future. I guess it gives one an incentive to make fewer...

happymellon 2y ago
The problem with the Boris quote is that he would have to do something extremely clever at some point. Unfortunately he is just a racist rich white man who got burnt by his own lies.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  Racist?
  - relaxing 2y ago
    It means showing prejudice or antagonism towards people based on their membership in a marginalized ethnic group.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Like using ‘white man’ as an epithet

shusaku 2y ago

> I’ve always thought that I was very competent. Now I at least realize that I have no fucking clue how anything works. Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? I wonder if there is a kind of overfitting that keeps the playing field level for young people. Like you read more books, have more experiences, etc, but in the end you’re less capable than the naive approach. He mentions having more connections as you get old. I think of Bill Belichick’s final years with the Patriots, and how he never seemed to be able to hire the right guys, stuck on old friends and colleagues. You might overfit to “I once hired a left handed guy on a Tuesday to write the backend, maybe I should do that again…”

ruszki 2y ago

> Again, the only way to get these connections is to literally just wait. I have several 20+ years long close friendships, but it’s definitely not because I just waited. It’s a ton of time, sacrifice, and even more patience and empathy. People change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to handle to what they become. But at the end, these occasions definitely help you to understand people. Unfortunately, this cost also a lot of money, because you need to travel a lot. After 15-20 years almost all of these kind of my friends live far away from each other. I had to cross even the Atlantic every 2-3 months because of this for a while. One for sure, If you just wait, you’ll loose close friendships.

andyjohnson0 2y ago

> and by the time you’re 50 or 60 or 70 you do know what you want. I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true. Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head. That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?" > I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making. My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow. Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing

andyjohnson0 2y ago
To add: Obviously theres a context to this article in Biden's recent debate performance. As a non-USian observing it all, I understand the concern. But I wish people would remember that a national leader is just the head of of a decision-making team. They don't decide everything themselves, they lead the team and set the direction. And they almost never ever have to make decisions alone at the tempo of an adversarial debate. Its possible to imagine scenarios where Biden would have 30 seconds to make a nationally existential decision, but such things only happen in films, not real life. Wisdom not raw power. But his opponent is an extremely dangerous individual, so I get the concern.

lordnacho 2y ago

Reading this makes me think his pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Experience has decreasing marginal returns. Being 40 doesn't make you 4 times as experienced as an adult as a 25 year old. Being 80 doesn't make you 8 times as experienced. Being a 25 year old you actually have learned a lot about being an adult, and you shouldn't think that time on its own will increase that. It's more the variety of experience that teaches things than time itself, especially if you repeat things for a long time.

kkfx 2y ago

Well, IMVHO the issue is not a matter of age (38 myself) but about education: ruling classes formed schools to produce the kind of Citizens they want, witch was the goal when reforms was set, but things change and most people are formed to be unable to adapt because if you are in power you want to hold your position so the ideal society you try to achieve is one frozen with you in power. As a results every ruling class demand conformism and conformism demand "stability" and stability means in general being unable to change. Long story short most of the people are born in a model, have absorbed that and are unable to move. When the time passes we need to change and the "old" generations are simply from another time, unable to be citizens of the present. The current state of thing is a previous generation born on high growth after a world war, in a high competitive society, a society with strong emotions but also oppression, younger generations are born in a degrading society with much less vivid emotions but much more cooperation, so it's normal to have inter-generational issues where the old generation fear to loose a competition because they ware grown as running horses, if you stop you are dead, while the younger one do not understand why they are so harsh and focused. Back then to keep people subjugated in a fast growing world the rule was "always do the same, trust the system" (at least in most EU) while today the rule is "always doubt and reason on anything, be ready to change" because we are in a degrading society who need to change to reborn. Unfortunately while most people are kind and honest, most are also mentally unable to evolve and that's why we derail, the world change, the population strive to avoid the change instead of do their best to direct it.

swiftcoder 2y ago

Lord give me back the unearned confidence of a 26 year-old...

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance." (David Mamet) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E I don't think it is intentional, but the consequences are certainly quantifiable. Everyone thinks the asymmetry of power structures is unfair... right up until perspectives shift when they take on the same roles... https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845 https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po... Have a great day, =3

sys_64738 2y ago

The next generation being born now will see the current "young people" as "old" in twenty years. What people in their 20s today who are terrified of "old people" will grasp quickly is that nobody is immortal and every older person generally feels embarrassed and stupid about things they did/thought in their younger years. Some will even have blogs to look back on to enhance their cringeworthy utility.

jelliclesfarm 2y ago

I am terrified of young people fresh out of our public school system who are entitled, raised by the state and aren’t half as productive as the ‘old people’.