Wander Talks: Episode 8 – The Downfall of Getting Older
You can’t sugarcoat the pitfalls of getting older.
This week on Wander Talks, I sat down with my friend Will Nogueira to discuss age and what comes with getting old. We started out with the question, “which is more of a problem to society, children or elderly people?”
Getting Older
It’s interesting being 21 and having such a weird perspective on children and older people. We ourselves aren’t exactly adults yet we haven’t been around long enough to claim a full-lived life. We still have millstones to hit, while we’ve already triumphed through big hurdles to get where we are today. Almost all of our wisdom and insight come from observation.
With that, Will went into his reasoning behind his opinion on why the elderly population is more detrimental to society than children are, based on his own interactions with this group of people. I found pro’s and cons in each group of people, and then carried the conversation on into the need for advice or experience.
Experience is practical. It cannot be taught, and no amount of advice can stop you from going through something. However, advice, as I pointed out, can be beneficial by helping us place our own experiences in perspective and help us better understand the happenings in our own lives. Jumping back to our previous topic, Will and I debated back and forth whether or not advice from elderly people was in fact useful or unnecessary.
Thinking about how people evolve over time and how each generation differs, yet similar in the way we progress is insane. When we get older, we’re thought to become these crippled individuals with a novel’s worth of knowledge tucked away because it’s based on an outdated life. The fear of getting old and dying resonates in our minds today because we know realistically that our fate is that of the generation that preceded us, yet we continue to look at them with such confusion and rebel against their older values. I think that the generation before us holds nothing but valuable insight on the world, but it is understandable why some feel as if they are more of a space-holder.
