- I know all sorts of stuff. For example, I know what usually causes your air conditioner to stop working on the hottest day of the year, and what to do about it.
- I don't care about what most people think. I will wear my house slippers to the mailbox, and once even to the grocery.
- I (usually) know what I'm doing. Corollary to (1).
- I have my own tools.
I realize that these are exactly the things that make older people either endearing or frustrating to young people, and often both. All I can say is, suck it young people. You will get your chance, and you will probably enjoy it as much as we are enjoying ourselves now. I know my parents' generation had a great time wandering around in their bermuda shorts and sandals with socks, eating cocktail wieners and telling us all how we didn't know how good we had it.
They were right. And I'm afraid we may all find out how good we had it very soon. It appears as though there may be challenging times ahead, and we are all going to need each other. Old people may not know how to get the pictures out of their phone, or what the Hell a "Twitter" is, but by and large they know how people and organizations really work, and how fundamentally unfair the world can be, and it is probably worth listening to what they have to say. Unless they are idiots. Aging usually just makes that worse.
And for those of us who think we've seen it all and know it all, we would probably do well to remember that the world is very different than it was only two decades ago, and that most of the knowledge taught in college today didn't exist when we were there. The "kids" who we think look too young to drive will do the heavy lifting that determines whether we end up living in our Crown Victorias, burning our 401K statements for heat.
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