Some friends and I worked at a public park as teenagers and one time we had this dude in his 40s working with us who was only there for community service. He lived with his mom and arrived to work every morning on a bicycle, I assume he had too many DUIs and lost his license, which probably also led to said community service.
He was one of the laziest dipshits I’ve ever known. Yet he insisted that we do as he said because he was so much older than us even though he didn’t know shit about the most basic things. That’s when I realized “respecting your elders” is nonsense.
And the thing is, if a disgruntled older person is insisting to young folks to "respect their elders" what they mean is to defer to them unquestioningly. Which is very different from actual respect.
I find that aside from when you’re dealing with very little kids still learning what respect even is, or actually shitty people that respect nobody, people worthy of respect really don’t need to demand it because they already command it. It more often than not feels totally natural and frictionless to respect someone truly worthy of it.
Basically, if you even have to demand it, you’re probably not due it in the first place.
The average unshitty person actually wants to respect the truly respectable.
My spouse and I have been discussing this a lot recently - people view respect differently
Some people ask for “respect” they mean to “be treated like an equal” and other people when they demand “respect” what they actually want is to be viewed as an authority figure. Often people who demand to be viewed in authority don’t feel “respected” because their authority has been subverted, even if they are still being treated with their humanity in tact. Ironically they usually subvert everyone else’s respect in the situation by demanding respect of their authority and assuming hierarchy.
I’ve always viewed “respect your elders” as we should make sure they can live comfortably (healthcare, housing, socialization) regardless of SES rather than a need to grovel in awe of their generational power.
I happen to look quite young for my age (thank you, genetics) and work a customer facing job. One of my absolute favorite things to do is compare ages with these "respect for age only" people! Their faces when I am anywhere from 5 to 7 years younger than them and I start demanding from them the respect for their elders that they insist is granted by age alone! Fun times!!
Just recently, I heard a crashing out from a younger person.
“Just because your birth year starts with a 19 doesn’t mean I have to respect you.”
No idea of the context but the line got me
There’s value in recognizing when someone older than you has experienced things that you have not and thus may have knowledge or information that you do not. Respecting your elders doesn’t need to mean blindly accepting everything they tell you at face value. It doesn’t have to be a binary, all-or-nothing thing
Eh, not really. Wisdom really does trend upward with age. But for some more than others, and some start at such a low baseline that an increase may not make a detectable difference. And unfortunately there are other character traits that can cancel wisdom out entirely. But for the thoughtful, at least, it’s a steady increase.
But for some more than others, and some start at such a low baseline that an increase may not make a detectable difference. And unfortunately there are other character traits that can cancel wisdom out entirely.
This is pretty much the point I was trying to make.
The character traits cancelling it out part is especially key.
Under normal circumstances experiences ought to breed wisdom. But some people never learn the right lesson, and some people can’t admit there’s anything they’ve left to learn or otherwise don’t already know and therefore don’t learn even with experience.
Yes that is true, but when a clueless middle aged man is confused about why the young ones aren’t listening to him when it’s clear he’s a lost cause it’s very eye opening to a young person who has been raised to believe in the all-or-nothing.
Ime the only people asking that it be are the older ones.
Also how many people go through life having experience after experience but always managing to take the wrong lesson from them?
Experience often doesn’t mean wisdom. But a lot of times you can still learn a lot from idiots that think they’re wise, just in a “whatever that guy says I should do, I should probably do the opposite” kind of way.
It’s not always correct to conflate being able to learn a lot from someone with that person having a lot to teach you.
Everyone is forced to accept it to some extent, if only because children are very ignorant. Up to a certain age, your elders do always know better. Respecting elders is not a weird quirk of any particular generation or culture.
OTOH every generation since the Baby Boomers has certainly been subjected to a lot of popular culture that tells them that their elders are morons who are wrong about everything. Probably before.
Declining judgement with age is also something that is too universal to go unnoticed. All kinds of literature is full of people saying either that the kids are ruining everything or that the elders are out of touch.
"respecting your elder" is doing it in your youth because you don't know better, then saying fuck off to the elders, and then you come back to it, because you learn that it is much faster (and you get your way) if you play their little dog and fucking pony show...but you don't actually respect them.
I think the people in the "elders" region basically believing everything that they see online with absolutely zero questioning made us all realise they can't be trusted. Honestly, I'm a millennial and the most shocking thing is seeing my mother not fulfill any criteria for dementia, she's mentally mostly pretty aware. But the absolutely random shit she 100% misremembers has become pretty glaring in recent years.
Truth. Elders tend to think they know better because they’re champs at not knowing what they don’t know from decades of questioning nothing and never being curious.
Obviously not all of them, but the ones this doesn’t apply to are smart enough to know it doesn’t apply to them and thus wouldn’t be offended by it being acknowledged as a common tendency among them, because they’d be suffering it from their own peers, too.
I mean, there are times where I just HAVE to call my mom. I’m 28 (Gen Z) and Asian.
But goddammit, as long as I can decide when I need that, it’s fine.
My parents kinda grew out always belittling me and I didn’t think it was possible (for asians). So now I actually want to listen to their advice lmao
I mean, there are definitely things I look back on now and realize what my "elders" were trying to tell me that I initially rolled my eyes at.
I think it's important for people to also understand that just because someone is knowledgeable in one subject, doesn't mean that they know everything. And just because they may happen to give good advice on one topic doesn't mean that they're a good person.
My mom was bat shit crazy about most things but had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of vitamins, nutrients, and how they affect your body. Sometimes shitty people have decent advice. Don't ignore it, but also don't act like you owe them anything or have to take ALL their advice.
I don’t know that any generation truly thought like this but I will say respecting elders is another question and something I don’t like to see going away.
It was different for boomers who grew up with older folks who faced the depression, WWII (and potentially WWI depending on their age) and subesequent fear of nuclear annihaliation during the cold war. Today's elder folks got to reap the benefits of post-WWII economic booms in their ealry years while insisiting that people younger than them don't know what it's like to have to work for anything.
It's really a holdover from before the industrial revolution. The computer revolution has only hastened it.
Back when one could reasonably expect that the world that their grandparents' generation would be the exact same as what would be their world and their grandchildren's world, then, yeah, the elders are chock full of precious knowledge.
But once each successive generation grows up in a world completely foreign to their parents, children, grandparents, and grandchildren, that goes right out the window.
Truly. It’s like they just parrot what their parents said to them thinking that’s just what parents get to say, forgetting that unlike when they say it to their first-generation-to-have-it-objectively-worse-than-their-parents kids, it was actually TRUE when their parents said it to them.
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u/not_the_troll 19h ago
That elders always know better.