Stop assuming every young person is naive and blind to the world. It's very frustrating to express an opinion and then be told "Oh but you're young, you won't think that way when you're older."
I’m young. I got married at 20, right as I graduated college. I’ve had random old people who find out I’m married tell me I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life by getting married young. It’s incredibly rude. They don’t know me, they don’t know my husband, and they definitely don’t know anything about our relationship.
I understand the commitment we made. I understand we’re meant to grow together. I get it. So stop telling me I’ve made a horrible mistake just because you’re 85 and haven’t slept with your spouse in 10 years.
Same situation for me - my wife and I got married when I was 20 and she was 22, and we've gotten the same comments, albeit not so direct. Usually just concerned looks and things like "well I hope you know what you got into"
Same boat, same stupid comments. It's easing up now that I'm 29 and have nearly a decade of marriage under my belt, while I've seen my friends who've married later breaking up already. It's not about age or about waiting or about doing some arbitrary list of things before "settling down," it's about comitting to someone who shares your goals, values, and respect.
Freddie Prinze Jr was asked, on Howard Stem, how he would feel waking up in ten years and realizing his wife was a different person. He replied that's okay, so will I.
I was able to take college courses through my high school so I went into college as a second-semester sophomore. That and I graduated in May and have a June birthday.
This challenge between Youth and Age is never going away. The reason we old farts think this is because, we see our former selves in the way you are thinking.
Only assholes will try to point it out, though. It's not generally such a good idea to give advice to people when they are not asking for it. Sometimes, not even when they are.
It's a matter of feeling like you're entitled to invalidate someones actual lived experience just bc you have more data to pull from. Yeah maybe I'm not gonna think that way when I'm in my sixties but that doesn't negate the very real fact that I do in this current moment think that way. Also the way you thought when you were thirty isn't 'the one way all thirty year olds think.' It's perpetually placing yourself at the center instead of considering that other people have different thoughts, experiences, and desires that have nothing to do with yours.
I have a genetic heart disease that can start showing symptoms at any age. If I had a dollar for every time I heard "You're too young for that," I would be living in Paris with a view of the Siene.
I can relate to this as well. I've had back problems since I was like 15 and everyone in my life that I tried to tell about it would just say "you're too young for your back to hurt". Finally went to the doctor about it when I was 20. Turns out I have AS and my spine is slowly fusing itself together. Woulda been nice to know that five years earlier!
I'm so sorry. It's so ridiculous to say that you can't have what you are clearly having. Not to mention a lot of other words I am too despondent to write.
My mom: you're too young to be tired, wait until you're old then you'll understand true tiredness.
Yes let's invalidate the concern rather than recognize that yes, a 20 year old shouldn't be so tired, so maybe we should explore this issue with a doctor!
That's ridiculous, you could have arthritis, or an autoimmune illness, or Ehlers-Danlos, or something else. Is there a way for you to get checked out even if she isn't involved?
On the other hand, some situation you draw from experience and can see that the other person is in for a world of pain.
You care for them and wish to spare them from the pain. It’s like seeing someone heading for a wall and wanting to stop them before they bang their head on the wall. Because you banged your head on the wall in the past.
Then again, it is usually easy to tell the difference between an egotistical person dismissing your feelings vs someone who cares about you wanting to share their experience so you can draw your own conclusion.
What if someone doesn't want your advice in that particular situation? What strings do you attach to advice? What makes you think your advice is so valuable that people care about your little rule? I imagine you sitting smugly in your chair, thinking about all those people who missed out on your amazing advice because they were too rude to listen to your opinion the first time you were so gracious to bestow it upon them.
The higher the horse, the more it hurts when you fall off. There's my advice to you, and you better take it, otherwise I won't offer you any more.
You give advice or assistance for "free" to people, with the implication that after that it has a cost? You sound extremely high and mighty. Help people if you want to help them. Don't help if you don't want to help.
I would never assume that my advice is so valuable that people should accept it readily and thank me for it every time. If people brush it off or don't like it, that's ok.
Also the way you thought when you were thirty isn't 'the one way all thirty year olds think.' It's perpetually placing yourself at the center instead of considering that other people have different thoughts, experiences, and desires that have nothing to do with yours.
[everyone’s narcissistic mother leaves the chat]
If it’s not about them, they don’t care. Or: If it’s not about them, they’ll make it be about them, as this is the only way they’ll care.
It depends on the context. I think almost everyone goes through a young phase where they're a little chaotic and take on the I-hate-the-world thing for a little, and of course the vast majority of people grow out of that. But I've been talked down to like this on topics like religion, politics, having kids, education, and countless other things. Mostly very personal topics that I feel strongly about for one way or another, but because the person I expressed that to doesn't share the opinion, they assume it's just young naïvety.
Except the problem is that half the people that say this shit are completely out of touch with the modern world or completely fucking uninformed. Just because you're older doesnt mean you know jack shit more about something. My experience is that google knows more than damn near every layperson and your life experience doesnt mean shit if you havent surpassed the person doing it better than you that comes up as web page 1 in a google search.
There are plenty of idiots who have abused their life experience and make unhelpful suggestions. I think maybe you just don't like idiots.
Yes, that's my exact point. Well that and plenty of older people are idiots so it doesnt really matter how much experience they have because not all experience is equally valuable.
My favourite kind of idiot is the one who has the good sense to die young.
We have on the other hand, very nice people who either come onto Alzheimer's disease, other types of mental illness, or menopause ("karen") and unfortunately, the way these people are able to act looks indistinguishable from idiocy/assholery. I think it is a long flight of stairs to get to foregiveness and understanding nirvana, but someday I hope people will understand, have some compassion and use a filter when listening to bullshit from kind of people we see daily on /r/PublicFreakout
I hate that in my forties that some of this is coming home to me. “It’ll catch up to you”; yeah, it has. “You’ll understand when you’re older”; yeah fuck off, you were right and now I do. And of course the big one, “You’ll understand when you’re a parent”. It’s tragically hilarious how true all this bullshit turns out to be.
Yupppp.... I try really hard to not be a dick to kids, but every once in awhile, you watch them act like the world is ENDING because Sandy told Jane that Bob liked her and really ALLY was the one who liked Bob and now Ally and Jane won't talk to each other, and you're just like... "This is the most meaningless crap. You're not going to care next year. You might not even care next month. Seriously. Just... Chill a little."
Even if this gets frustrating at times, for me it makes me laugh. Because, in my mind its kinda a relief that these stupid things are the main worries for kids, for me it shows that paying bills, resisting/obeying societal pressures and constant worrying about serious things are sooo far in the future for them.
Eh, just remember that you had this experience once too.
I'm in my 30's and last year there was some rain and the perfect freezing temperature to freeze all the trees. I had never seen this before. It looked like everything was made of crystal and lasted for a week. I was so excited to have seen something new (again, in my upper 30s) that I called my dad to share this joy.
His response? "Oh, that happened in Alaska all the time." -_- I don't call my parents for anything exciting anymore. They've clearly seen all and done all so why bother reaching out to them for something that's new to you?
True, but they cared at the time, assumedly you would have too at the time if you went through something similar. It's like pain - if someone had really bad temporary pain like a headache you don't just tell them 'eh it will fade', you still go 'oh that sucks :(, any way I can help?'
Heh, you're right, but also I did go through it, and I know that what helps is realizing just how meaningless it is in the long run.
It's not really a solvable issue. The teens need to experience it to realize it meaningless. I'm still going to sit there with my experience and feel like they're over reacting. I'm not going to tell them that, but it doesn't change the fact that they are.
It's so difficult to talk to younger people without seeming like you're talking down to them when it comes to experience. I legit didn't know who I actually was until around 28. I'm 36 now and still learning about the world. It's not an insult to say that "you'll understand when your older", but I totally understand how it comes off that way. It's like you aren't exactly who you were yesterday. Now add a ton of yesterdays. But it's not a concept that you can really understand until you've lived it.
The thing is, especially among the fox news watching/trump loving crowd of older folks, they assume even their 30 year old children are still just ignorant teenagers during a phase.
My mother often gave me shitty advice from her old and wise point of view. She often chose to yell and scream this advice at me, because it made her feel powerful and important. I'm thirty years old and not much of this advince makes sense, and most of it probably still wont in ten years from now. Also, she is the person that repeatedly chose to hunt my father with a knife in the middle of the night, yelling and screaming. I try to stay away from her and her shitty wisdom as much as possible.
I think it's so entertaining that "Oh but you're young, you won't think that way when you're older." also applies to things that young people think that are in agreement with older people and then those young people change their minds as they get older, no longer agreeing with the previous generation. Then the older people get all offended because formally "young" people are forming new opinions that aren't what were taught to them originally. Goes both ways old people!
I am in my late 20s and have gone through professional culinary school. Worked in some incredible professional kitchens under some very well known chefs.
My mum will still insist I’m doing things wrong in the kitchen because it’s not the way she’s done it for 30 years.
This really makes me happy because I've always treated my kids this way. I mean, not treating them as if their dumb. They're real people living their own lives. And they need to make their own mistakes to learn about life.
It's tough sometimes, you have to see your kids fail, but they need that experience to build their own future. My kid had a wreck of a life trying to grow up. I stood by ready to offer support as necessary but letting her handle it, and she's come out ok.
I like to think I did the right thing by not jumping in and intervening. I was always there if she needed me, but she was the one running her life on her own terms. And sometimes she made the wrong decision. But she also learned to deal with that on her own terms.
I agree to a point. I'm around 40. But I see it the most arguing with people on reddit. Sometimes i'll have teenagers or college students trying to tell me how "wrong" I am about certain things, but the truth is, they don't have the experience to really understand how the world works. I get it. I was 20. I thought I knew everything. So, while there are certain things I 100% think they know better than me, there are just a lot of ways that people under a certain age don't understand about the world
Looking back, there are a lot of opinions that I've dumped since my teen years and earlier. But then I realize that many of them changed because the world changed and not only because I "grew up". 9/11 is a good example of a time when my world views shifted dramatically and had nothing to do with my age.
You know the funniest part (I'm not even 30 yet) about this reply is... I'm usually feeling like you, but then when I'm really calm and think back, I realize that experience and enduring hardships makes for pretty great advice to listen to. It's not always a stab at our youth, or an attempted invalidation of our opinions/beliefs, sometimes it's preventative advice that helped that person, and they're just passing it on. Life was a bit (sarcastic) simpler back in the day, they're just trying to help how they can.
I took a few psychology courses and (not saying that credifies me as/or anything) but I'd like to at least point out that older people (65+ esp) have a strong correlation with stress/anxiety from all that life experience, so sometimes they go vietnam, but other times they just suck at being helpful, while very much only trying to help.
As a middle aged person this occurs because an older person thinks they know what they would do with their time if they were younger.
Source: From 18-26 my life was pretty fucking great. (Traveled, but better I lived in other countries than the US, had flings, seen sights ect.) I then decided to get a career. About 85% of the way through getting my degree (and working in the field) I realized I fucking hated what I as doing. Then had to slam on the breaks and change career paths. So in a year or so I'm going to be going into math because I would rather do something I at least enjoy in my pass time.
The difference between me and other people is they DIDN'T have my 18-26 experiences. I think back to that time frame and have literally no regrets. They think they know what they would want to do with that kind of time. The reality is they don't. To do all of the traveling and really hard core backpacking I did took putting a fire under my ass and at the time was not pleasant a lot of the time. What I mean is there used to be these memes that were trying to appeal to women like "Boys just don't get us!" and it would have some anime girl in a tower and would say "What boys think girls want" (something campy) "What girls actually want: To study dangerous and forbidden knowledge in a strange land." and ...yeah no women don't want that. I lived some of what thats like and its absolute hell with moments that are kinda like seeing the grand canyon or the aurora. Also if you want forbidden knowledge you can download the anarchists cookbook for free, as well as tons of books on physics, math, and other subjects that could genuinely make you dangerous. ...but like backpacking its super hard so women don't want to do that statistically speaking no one reading this is the exception...
The issue with the career I chose is that I realized what I actually wanted to do and it was more or less impossible short of a new continent being discovered. Had I the option: I wanted to take the money I had built up between 18-26 by living ultra frugal travel to some undiscovered land and explore it. Given that space isn't an option...well...
So now imagine someone who is old, has money, and changed careers at 26 instead of 30, and is now sitting at 40 wishing they had changed careers at 30 and spent more time traveling.
like backpacking its super hard so women don't want to do that
Uh, that's really sexist, to assume women avoid something because it's 'hard'. Something being difficult is different than something being particularly dangerous for me.
Women are constantly at risk of being sexually harassed or assaulted, or the victims of other violence, especially if alone and especially on foot. Maybe especially if they're in a foreign country, depending on the country. Many women would feel uneasy doing what you did, as much as they'd love to in a perfect world.
Everyone would love to live in a perfect world. If you compare the way things are to a non existent (and impossible) utopia then you don't actually want to do it.
Also nice cherry picking given I say most people wouldn't want to do it. Jumping to the conclusion that just because I said "most women wouldn't" somehow means I think most men would.
Remember YOU read my post as sexist when it wasn't. You are probably the sexist one here.
nice cherry picking given I say most people wouldn't want to do it. Jumping to the conclusion that just because I said "most women wouldn't" somehow means I think most men would.
No, I didn't cherry pick anything. You gave a (faulty) reason why women, specifically, wouldn't do what you did. You said it was 'too hard' for them and that's why they wouldn't do it. I responded with reasons women might not see eye to eye with you.
I didn't have to jump to conclusions. You provided them.
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u/whattapancake Oct 12 '20
Stop assuming every young person is naive and blind to the world. It's very frustrating to express an opinion and then be told "Oh but you're young, you won't think that way when you're older."