Stop Saying: “When i Was Your Age”
When I was younger I despised people who used the Old People Card. "Oh, when you get to my age you'll chill out", "You're too young to think that way" and the worst one goes along the lines of: "Aw, you're still a fetus!"
As a hot-tempered teenager, I always looked the other way and doubled down on my youthful anger. The Old People Card pissed me off because it invalidates the emotions and struggles of youth. More than that, it denies that there might be a metaphysics of youth untainted by the dye of life experience.
But gradually, after about a decade of taking bombastic leaps, disregarding career advice from sensible adults and charting my own path, I noticed myself mellowing out a little as I was getting closer to my mid-20s.
Life experience taught me that there are inherent limitations to ungrounded dreams and that not every idea can be actualized. I started to understand where older people are coming from and realized that life experience does have the power to jade an uncorrupted dream. It gets harder to stay aligned with our early ambitions as we age. However, this is still not an excuse to pull out the Old People Card whenever a younger person displays that hint of our forgotten passion.
I remember reading an essay titled: "Experience" by Walter Benjamin. He wrote the piece when he was 21 and in retrospect, it almost reads like a letter to his future self, reminding him not to get jaded by the drudgery and hardship of life.
In the piece, Benjamin equated life experience with a mask that adults wear to snuff out the spirit of youth. The mask, rather than being expressionless, carries a smile in a superior fashion (Benjamin 3)1, [devaluing] the years we will live by saying: "This will also happen to you (3)". Everything energetic, from young love to ambitious rites, is "sweet youthful pranks" and "childish rapture" to the adult masked behind life experience. Real life, to these well-meaning people, should be a "long sobriety of [seriousness]." And young people should get their squabbles out of their systems as soon as possible before settling down to a respectable, measured way of life. Drudgery becomes the default way of living, and the Old People Card becomes the marker for the end of youth.
But as Walter Benjamin reminds us, these dreadful life experiences remain "their experience (3)", not ours. "Have they ever encouraged us to do anything great or new or forward-looking?" Wrote Benjamin. No, because they have "never grasped that there exists something other than experience (4)."
Perhaps they've never known the rapture of writing in a decrepit apartment with a friend until 4 am. Perhaps they've never known the painful rapture of falling head over heels in love right after meeting someone over the guise of coffee. Perhaps they're mute to the poetry written in the margins of an academic reference book. The adult no longer experiences any pain or rupture, resigning to repetitive experiences. But the eternally youthful who strives might encounter "experiences that are painful", but it will "scarcely lead him to despair (4)" since blunders are not to be feared, but embraced as aids to truth (Spinoza).
A few days ago I walked around Carlton Gardens with my friend Hannah who's also working on her philosophy thesis. When we stopped at the traffic light I said to her:
"You know, one day when we're a little more settled, I'll always miss these moments when we're taking a walk as no-bodies."
"But we'll never miss it if we never settle and remain no-bodies." She said as the pedestrian light turned green.
From now on, I'll resist the temptation to use The Old People card and soak up the lust for life whenever I can find it because no one should be punished for imagining a better world. In every case, happiness isn't the repetitive satisfaction we get from "having lived", but a subtle dissatisfaction that pushes us to strive for a better future.
