St John’s Ambulance was doing free blood pressure checks. Mine was 140/80. But they need ageism training: “How many years young are you?”, “You look good for your age”. Like every living thing I’m getting older. I’m fine with that. I look like one 64 year old looks.
@Miraz "I'm here to give blood I have no fucks to give about your opinion of my looks."
... my inner voice is, uh, not kind.
@simonwoods I did point out both those things were ageist. Things I've seen suggest ageism is actually a bigger problem than ageing. Anyone who isn't ageing is dead, so I'm fine with ageing. 😀
@Miraz @simonwoods I just finished reading Skin in the Game in which Taleb comments that the Romans dismissed youth and honored age, which is appealing. While I'd be okay not dismissing youth, the obsession of youth in modern cultures is, well, tiresome and annoying. #wisdomFTW
@kitt Is wisdom necessary in a postmodern world where truth is relative and all opinions are equally valid? Oh, also 🙄 to all that.
@kitt @simonwoods Agreed re the obsession with youth. I wish we could just go with the notions that in general terms different age bands are likely to exhibit different characteristics — 20 year olds may have more energy than older folks; older folks probably have more life experience than 10 year olds and so on. But stereotyping seems a not useful approach to life.
@kitt The respect for wisdom of age was pretty common, if not near-universal, in premodern and pre-industrial societies. I’m not sure what happened to make it disappear in the West….
The flip side of our current youth obsession problem is that we are stuck with a bunch of old people without wisdom (exhibit A: the Senate, which name conviently comes from the Latin word for “old men”) and dismiss young people with it (exhibit B: Greta Thunberg, March for Our Lives/Stoneman Douglas HS people, Rep Ocasio-Cortez, etc.), while still obsessing over youth in pop culture and other ways. // @Miraz @simonwoods @dgreene196
@smokey Literacy and communication have helped break down reverence for age, experience and wisdom in modern societies.
In pre modern societies, learning is passed down by word of mouth and personal experience which by default makes elders the keepers of knowledge gained by those methods. Plus specialists like bards, wise-people, etc. who are specifically tasked with remembering oral history and passing it along to younger generations. That is vital in an illiterate society where most people will live their entire lives within a 10 mile radius of where they were born.
I read somewhere that we modern people see more strangers just commuting into our city jobs than someone in the country in the 1400's might encounter in their lifetimes. Add illiteracy and lack of communication on to that and suddenly elders with experience and some smarts become valuable in that society.
"The young people think the old people are fools -- but the old people know the young people are fools."
-- Agatha Christie