I'm Terrified of Old People

The current issue is that there is an unprecedented percentage of elderly individuals in positions of power, and they are often reluctant to relinquish their authority. This presents a significant dilemma because many of these older decision-makers struggle to comprehend the reality faced by younger generations, including their own children and grandchildren. They frequently cling to outdated notions, such as the belief that a starter apartment costs only $400 or that well-paying jobs are readily available to anyone who simply shows up. This generational disconnect makes it challenging to address the evolving needs of society as a whole.

In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion.

It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced

Every 10 years or so I'll look back on my life and cringe at all the stupid stuff I said and believed over the past 10 years and how I naively thought that I knew everything. And then I'd breathe a sigh of relief now that I finally do know everything.

I do think there's a fair bit of selection bias.

The vast majority of people growing old have not spent their lives learning; while enchanting to look at the 60-70+ year olds that are undoubtedly exceptional (think Warren Buffet or the older COBOL dev you think is cool), the reality is they're in the extreme minority.

The author thinks everyone is like him (or us commenting for that matter) and just think of the possibilities in 30-40 years!

Most people are just not that impressive and I wouldn't falsely assume that by just having spent time on the Earth while it spun around the sun over 60 times they're automatically a pillar of wisdom.

I prefer this Douglas Adams quote to the Boris Johnson one, but it has much the same thought behind it:

"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so — but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."

As a 50-something I'd say the chance to spot patterns one has encountered before is the super-power and getting in a rut is the kryptonite.

Oh and my brain does like to spend time at 2am thinking about embarassing and humiliating mistakes I have made. Those accumulate, so there's something to dwell uncomfortably upon as one (at any age) looks to the future. I guess it gives one an incentive to make fewer...

It would be tremendously helpful if young people were told that next to stories and fairytales, there is entropy, randomness and incompetence.

It took me a few years of life experience to understand that the latter three typically explain life better than the first two.

I suppose that for every individual there are things that they overtrained early on in life, for which it then takes a lot of time to unlearn them. In that respect, keeping an "open mind" can be helpful, but having it opened a bit too much makes one an annoying person as well.

Now where exactly was I going with this rant?

> What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world?

One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom.

Many are dumb, many others are clever, some came up to crazy conclusions from their experiences and others opened up a lot to the world and keep learning on to of all their knowledge.

More than anything, while we're optimizing our heuristics years over years, the world keeps changing and what we assumed to be invariants were just slowly moving phenomenons that also see sudden breakdowns from times to times.

The workplace with out old people is boring, when ever you are in an environment with only one age group you should be careful. The group think among people the same age is terrible, much worse than many ideologies. Be as scared of your own as the old people.

When I was junior/mid level engineer working in a 5-8 person engineering team, there was this particular senior engineer whom I disdained. It had nothing to do with them as a person, but I always had the feeling that they just did things at work without caring for the impact of it. The team and company grew in size over a period of 2 years and I went through a lot of first hand experiences of having to deal with unrealistic deadlines, chaotic lines of communication and multiple nights of tailing production logs to fix bugs. It was around this time, that the senior engineer during a company even got drunk and talked to me about their first few jobs.I realized that what they described, was quite similar to what I was facing right now and I came to understand why they cared so little about work they do on a daily basis.It honestly scared me at to think that I might either end up like this person or worse or burning out and quitting the field.

Right now, I am close to age the senior engineer was when I met them and even though I may selectively decide not to involve myself with things that can overstretch me, I am in no way the same as that other person.

The reason I am sharing this tangential story is to highlight my opinion about old age. It does not matter much if you have gained a lot of experience as you grow older, unless you are able to use it effectively.

I agreed all the way to the last paragraph.

I think there's good points to be made about wisdom and decision making when you're older, but there is definitely still a sharp cognitive decline (which will include wisdom and decision making!) when you're hitting 75+, for most people.

Having these people in positions of power is not a good thing. As advisors sure, but not directly in power with high influence.

Being terrified of people who are smarter, wiser, more competent that you is not a healthy reaction. The world is not a hunger games (at least, not yet), so someone being better than you is not an immediate threat to you. However, the writer seems to be a self-centered and hyperambitious kind of person, in which case someone else's success can be seen as a diminishment of one's own accomplishments ("How am I going to climb to the very top if there are some many older people who are better than me?"). But that's obviously unhinged.

There's a good chance this guy will cringe hard once he rereads this post in 10-20 years.

Not to be a hater but what exactly is the point of posts like this

Nothing factual presented. Not a unique, stimulating, or even really coherent viewpoint. Just a self-confident stream of consciousness with no real takeaway.

Eye-catching title though

> Again, the only way to get these connections is to literally just wait.

I have several 20+ years long close friendships, but it’s definitely not because I just waited. It’s a ton of time, sacrifice, and even more patience and empathy. People change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to handle to what they become. But at the end, these occasions definitely help you to understand people.

Unfortunately, this cost also a lot of money, because you need to travel a lot. After 15-20 years almost all of these kind of my friends live far away from each other. I had to cross even the Atlantic every 2-3 months because of this for a while.

One for sure, If you just wait, you’ll loose close friendships.

> figuring out if people I just met were (1) right for the role, (2) work well with me, (3) I work well with them.

I recommend figuring out if: (1) they are good at doing what they'll be responsible for, (2) they enjoy doing it, and (3) if you can live with each other.

(1) You want to know that they will succeed in whatever you delegate to them. (2) Can they persist over the long term, seeing their tasks to completion and success? (3) Especially with a lower headcount, it's similar to a second marriage, and you might end up spending time with them more than the professed love of your life. Can you overcome conflicts?

> If I’m starting a company today, I’m simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1.

I'm coming round to the same opinion. A better-than-good ops person can have one of the largest influences on success. If we view success as parts preparedness, execution, and luck, they provided an outsized boost to all 3.

EDIT: Clarified the benefits of the ops person.

> I’ve always thought that I was very competent. Now I at least realize that I have no fucking clue how anything works. Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have?

I wonder if there is a kind of overfitting that keeps the playing field level for young people. Like you read more books, have more experiences, etc, but in the end you’re less capable than the naive approach.

He mentions having more connections as you get old. I think of Bill Belichick’s final years with the Patriots, and how he never seemed to be able to hire the right guys, stuck on old friends and colleagues. You might overfit to “I once hired a left handed guy on a Tuesday to write the backend, maybe I should do that again…”

While I agree with most in article but I really fear for the US having the choice between 2 extremely old people to run their country. I would take a 35 yo over an 80+ year old to run something any day.

Hi I‘m 55. You are on the right path. The day you‘re not embarrassed by what you did yesterday is the day you stopped progressing! And don’t be terrified: A lot of „old“ (what that means changes) people are not wiser than you - they‘re still terrible incompetent, because they focused on „being happy“ instead in “getting wiser“. You did the right thing, and if you keep doing it, this feeling that you were stupid yesterday will stay - and this is fabulous!

“wanting to impress people is the result of not knowing what you want”

That’s quite reductive unless you’re overloading “impress” with “awe”. Because making strong impressions and influencing specific action is the whole point of sales, whether it be convincing your parents about something meaningful as a child. An employer the value you’ll bring. A bank or VC a safe or fantastic long term ROI.

> I’m 26 years old now, I (hope that I) got a tiny bit wiser but I’m pretty sure I have no idea what I’m doing.

> Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life.

My experience is that it takes on average 5-7 years for a person to realize this, so kudos to this guy for ticking this off early.

The outlier on the long side is hard to work with in a team.

Get some older friends, they are fun, they have a lot of info, they are generally less scared of consequences so they let you do stupid stuff, they give you room to grow and get wiser, they generally have more money and cause better opportunities. As young person I always were around the generation of my parents and I never regret it, it provided me with the baggage to get through life without too much problems. When middle aged make younger friends to keep you young and to be able to pass on the culture to young people that want to be around older ones.

We old folks know what it was like back then and allow for it because we all did it too.

Just keep writing, the ultimate audience is your future self, and you'll appreciate being able to look back on your life.

Kudos to you gaining the self awareness to realise you don't know shit; I'm 40 now and it's taken me until relatively recently for that to dawn on me.

Enjoyed the article, keep writing!

The next generation being born now will see the current "young people" as "old" in twenty years. What people in their 20s today who are terrified of "old people" will grasp quickly is that nobody is immortal and every older person generally feels embarrassed and stupid about things they did/thought in their younger years. Some will even have blogs to look back on to enhance their cringeworthy utility.

When you’ll be 50, do you think you’ll like the 20-year-you who made the major decisions for your life, or do you think you would have preferred the 50-year-you to make those decisions?

This is an argument for traditionalists. Listen to your 50-year-you, aka your parents, your community seniors, etc.

But reversely, if we tilted more towards listening to the elder-you, would there be enough renewal in society? Enough happiness at 20 years old?

Well, IMVHO the issue is not a matter of age (38 myself) but about education: ruling classes formed schools to produce the kind of Citizens they want, witch was the goal when reforms was set, but things change and most people are formed to be unable to adapt because if you are in power you want to hold your position so the ideal society you try to achieve is one frozen with you in power. As a results every ruling class demand conformism and conformism demand "stability" and stability means in general being unable to change.

Long story short most of the people are born in a model, have absorbed that and are unable to move. When the time passes we need to change and the "old" generations are simply from another time, unable to be citizens of the present.

The current state of thing is a previous generation born on high growth after a world war, in a high competitive society, a society with strong emotions but also oppression, younger generations are born in a degrading society with much less vivid emotions but much more cooperation, so it's normal to have inter-generational issues where the old generation fear to loose a competition because they ware grown as running horses, if you stop you are dead, while the younger one do not understand why they are so harsh and focused. Back then to keep people subjugated in a fast growing world the rule was "always do the same, trust the system" (at least in most EU) while today the rule is "always doubt and reason on anything, be ready to change" because we are in a degrading society who need to change to reborn.

Unfortunately while most people are kind and honest, most are also mentally unable to evolve and that's why we derail, the world change, the population strive to avoid the change instead of do their best to direct it.

Blog vs diary/notes. You don't have to publish what you write. Read what you wrote and rewrite. At least wait 1-3 years before publishing.

As Mark Manson put it: As long as you look back at your past self and cringe, you know you're growing :)

"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance." (David Mamet)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E

I don't think it is intentional, but the consequences are certainly quantifiable. Everyone thinks the asymmetry of power structures is unfair... right up until perspectives shift when they take on the same roles...

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Have a great day, =3

Reading this makes me think his pendulum has swung to the other extreme.

Experience has decreasing marginal returns. Being 40 doesn't make you 4 times as experienced as an adult as a 25 year old. Being 80 doesn't make you 8 times as experienced.

Being a 25 year old you actually have learned a lot about being an adult, and you shouldn't think that time on its own will increase that. It's more the variety of experience that teaches things than time itself, especially if you repeat things for a long time.

Lord give me back the unearned confidence of a 26 year-old...

> and by the time you’re 50 or 60 or 70 you do know what you want.

I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true.

Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head.

That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?"

> I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making.

My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow.

Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing

I am terrified of young people fresh out of our public school system who are entitled, raised by the state and aren’t half as productive as the ‘old people’.

What an odd title to read !

Life just has seasons