I’ve been paying closer attention to YouTube comments and feedback lately. Those comments and perspectives from mostly younger viewers seem to match what I’ve been observing all around me. Specifically, people under the age of let’s say 45, definitely like to discount or diminish what I might offer as background information or helpful advice in a situation where added experience or information should be welcomed.
Sometimes we will get the same treatment from our own kids. Their response to any added background I might offer to a problem’s solution is never mean spirited or angry, but it sort of falls in line with an unspoken or under the breath feeling like, “what do you know; you’re old”. Yet, maybe that is exactly the point.
When you get to be 65 or older and move on to retirement, society at least in America, starts to believe that we’re all just “done”. Now diminished in physical and mental capacity, reclining deeply into our La-Z-Boy chairs, watching reruns of Jeopardy, eating vanilla pudding, wearing diapers and occasionally yelling at neighborhood kids to get off our lawns. I say that because I used to think that about old people when I was a kid. Maybe this turnabout is fair play.
What gets discounted is that we all have actually been around a bit. Most of us have traveled by now and experienced other strange lands, different cultures, languages and foods. We’ve grown up with the technology boom and at least for me was the entire basis of my career. We’ve lived through massive economic hardships multiple times and experienced our countrymen and women being thrust into war. We’ve all been taken advantage of by slick salesmen and shifty politicians. We’ve lost money, sometimes big money in our retirement funds or when forced to sell a home in a down market. We’ve most likely accidentally injured ourselves with some sort of power tool. We’ve all likely been in some sort of car accident. We’ve had airlines lose our luggage. We’ve been lied to, stolen from, humiliated and scorned. Life; it can be a bitch.
We Know What We Know
But, we have our successes too. By now we can tell just by the texture of the meat when the fish or chicken or beef is fully cooked on the grill. We know how much seasoning is too much seasoning in our saucepans. We can tell by the way our cars handle that one tire is low on pressure. We can tell almost immediately when something is too good to be true. We are getting really good at quickly spotting liars and hucksters. (Hucksters… I love that word). We have learned where to stand, what to wear and how to operate a chainsaw safely. We know how to handle a hotel booking, what a fair price is on a rental car, and when a restaurant is overpriced. We’ve accomplished significant things in our chosen professions. We’ve raised kids that work hard, pay taxes and didn’t turn out to be axe murderers. We treat people with respect try to be empathetic towards their own individual set of circumstances. We know how and when to laugh, and when not to snort in the process. You. I’m talking about you. I never snort. (You may have just caught me in a lie there).
So when something comes up in a casual conversation where someone starts to talk about a problem they are having in the wood shop, or with a car, or an appliance, or when looking for a new house, we tend to want to help. We offer commentary or advice simply because we’ve probably been there in the exact same circumstance and know how to get past that hurdle. It’s never intended to be a “hey, look at what I know” thing. We truly just want to add some value to the conversation and perhaps offer some sort of path forward based on our own life lessons.
Life experience has it’s rewards. It helps us avoid making the same mistake twice. Sometimes pain is a wonderful teacher too; it often takes physical, financial or emotional pain to make us learn that hard lesson. By extension, that also makes us want to help others avoid that same pain. It seems like it should be the human, empathetic thing to do. If only that advice was welcomed.
It’s funny to me that the likelihood of someone appreciating your own personal perspective is directly correlated to their age. At our volunteer wood shop work at the local theater, most of us are retired now, all definitely over 60 and yet people willingly accept information or guidance when offered. When one of them was talking about setting up a trust, I offered the name of a local guy who did great work at a fair price. It was accepted with thanks. When I started talking about an issue I was having with one of my shop’s hand planes, another told me about a great shop that does sharpening and re-calibration. Our conversations in the group always seem to be a welcome back and forth exchange of information without the condescension we might get from younger folks who without actually saying it, already think they know everything.
One of my kids recently was looking to extend credit and get a backup credit card. I think they actually heeded our advice when we had one of our own credit cards hacked while traveling. Thankfully we had a backup card to use while the other was frozen. But in this case, our adult/kid had received an email from a non recognizable credit card company offering them a super deal, low interest rate, immediate approval and high credit limit. All this if they provided all the sensitive personal data on a credit app and an up front $50 fee paid in advance. All that sounded fishy to me. No legitimate institution should be charging you money for a credit card application. Home loans? Yep, they get to charge fees up front but credit cards or car purchases? Anyway, it was something they chose to figure out on their own.
Maybe this is where we have to land here in America. Other countries do a much better job respecting the legacy, and the experience of their elder community. Not so much here. Regardless of our own contributions to the workforce and to society and to the betterment of our own communities, we are now a bit physically weaker and slower. We are however still mentally sharp, with plenty of life experiences to help guide us towards future decisions and actions. We know what we know. Sometimes we want others we care about to know what we know too.
I think that independent younger people just want to “SEE” for themselves and figure it out on their own. I can in the end, respect that. It was probably what I was like 30 years ago too. Although I can remember hearing and taking some advice from my relatives and elders, in most other cases I simply thought I knew better. Many of those situations, like my first attempts at home remodeling weren’t complete disasters, but maybe I should have listened more intently when my dad was talking about proper ways to frame in a door. Not that I have a story I could tell, or want to tell about my first attempt at framing a door. Never mind. Let’s talk about something else.
Maybe, just maybe we have something valuable we can share about a situation that you might be faced with. All we want to do is help, not lord it over you or wag a finger in your face. I mean, there are some older folks who actually do that and give the rest of us a bad name. But hey, I’m not like that at all. Although maybe my own kids should be the final judge of that last sentence.
Anyway. I am just an old man trying to get you to see.
(Not Ernest Hemingway)
TFW Woodworking 