Yesterday on Twitter Ezra Klein wrote:
Now, granted, at 36 I am only “young” in the sense that if I died tomorrow people would say “oh, such a shame, he was so young,” but that type of young lasts until you’re in your early fifties, at which point by no other metric are you considered young, except by older people who will still say things like “you whippersnapper.” But even so, let me take a crack at it…
Dear old people:
As I look out on this sea of wrinkled, crumply faces today, I have only one thought. It is not “man, you people should smile more,” even though smiling old people are much more pleasant for young people to look at, because when you’re frowny you make everybody more miserable and also you remind us of our own mortality. Seriously, you old people should just smile as much as possible. Unless your teeth have all fallen out, in which case you should stick to a close-lipped grin, or perhaps a magical twinkle in your eyes like Morgan Freeman has.
But no, the one thought I have for you is “get some perspective.” Which is funny, because if there’s one thing older people pride themselves on, it is having a greater sense of perspective. This is, I understand, based on the fact that old people traditionally have more life experience than young people, by virtue of being older. And to be fair, this is not the worst argument in the world. But let’s be honest: about one person in three lives practically their entire life in the same 100-square-mile patch of land, and four people out of five will live in three or less patches of land that size. (And that’s in the First World. In poor countries – let’s just say you’d really better enjoy looking at that one tree you like.) There is a limit to how much experience you can get this way, is my point.
But it’s not completely wrong to say that older people have more perspective, because I know I’ve got more perspective than when I was thirty, or twenty, or ten. In truth, I know much more than I did back then and I can make better decisions then I did back then. But this is the thing I’ve managed to figure out and so, so many of you old people have not: even knowing what I knew at twenty is not applicable to someone who is twenty now. Someone who is twenty now has different challenges than I did – and the gap between me and a twenty-year-old now is only sixteen years. Between you, you loveable old people you, and a twenty-year-old right now, there is a vast gulf, and your life experience means tremendously little – because so little of it is now applicable. Even if you do like Mos Def.
Let us pick a sixty-year-old person in the crowd, because sixty is basically the benchmark where we start considering people “old,” no matter how much we might talk about how many good years you have left – sixty is the age where cancer stops being a tragedy and starts becoming “that, or a heart attack or a stroke.” Someone who is sixty today was born in 1952 – basically you’re Sally on Mad Men. (Speaking for young people, we’re sorry that you had to see Roger Sterling get that blowjob.) You grew up with the Beatles, you remember JFK getting shot, maybe you marched in anti-Vietnam protests if you’re American – but all of that is background, really, because every generation has its music and its deaths and its political struggle.
What matters, really, is that you, the sixty-year-old person, were born into a society where you had it all. You had enormous purchasing power. Yes, computers have gotten cheaper, and that’s great, but the cost of basic shelter has increased and if we’re talking about home ownership it has exploded. At twenty-four, you the sixty-year-old person in 76 (the year I was born!) would be out of university – which cost you much less than it cost me, to say nothing of what it cost a kid today, because university tuition has wildly outpaced inflation over the past thirty-six years. That’s assuming you even decided to go to university, because in 1976 you could get a decent job with a high school diploma – and when we say “decent,” we mean “above the median salary” decent. Depending on what country you lived in, your access to quality healthcare would vary, but generally speaking it was easier for you to get it then than it is for a comparable young person to get it now, be that because a given country’s private system has collapsed or its public system has been chronically underfunded (but not for senior care, which so often manages to escape the knife). And of course you were guaranteed healthy retirements, and anyone my age or younger has been systematically trained to believe that retirement is something we’re never actually going to get to do. (Systematically trained, one would note, by old people. It is convenient how that goes.)
Young people don’t vote – it’s a truism, has been for a long time now. The reason we don’t vote (well, I vote, of course, but I am using the larger “we” here, bear with me) is because from day one in civics class – if we have civics class any more, that is, it may have been cut along with all the arts education funding and everything else that isn’t “useful” – we’re told that the purpose of government is for people to come together and address common concerns. And we keep hearing from every politician how young people are important – and then we see that what’s actually important, in practice, is to address the concerns of old people. Some of the young hippies would say “rich people,” of course, and that’s not incorrect – but other than Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake and LeBron, there aren’t a whole lot of young rich people.
Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people, who were also old people, all decided it really wasn’t that important any more – in part because they will all be dead when global warming really starts to screw over the human race in earnest – and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.
And young people could see the writing on the wall, and it said “you’re fucked, young people,” as the cost of simply having a life went up and up and up – to say nothing of the cost of bettering ourselves (which you demanded we do, even to get a shitty job working in a soulless office somewhere). And what was more galling was, again, your lack of perspective when you did these things, because at the same time as it became harder and harder for young people to get by, old people started to lecture young people more and more that they were not being young in the right way – e.g. the way that the old people had been young. Which meant an endless deluge of whiny newspaper articles about how young people were still living with their parents into their twenties and not getting married young like they used to and what about all the video games and the hoodies and the rap music? I am pretty sure Rex Murphy – yes, Mr. Murphy, I can see you over there in row twenty-nine – complains about how young people aren’t doing things properly at least once a month. Granted, in Mr. Murphy’s case “young people” can technically mean “everybody younger than Rex Murphy,” which in turn means “everybody in the whole world” since I am pretty sure Rex Murphy is a lich of some sort. In the event that he is not, could the person next to him punch him in the nuts? – yes, that’s great, thank you.
On top of which, your lack of perspective is truly galling when we consider civil rights. Let’s be honest: all those laws against gay marriage and movements against gay people generally? Are old people. And what’s really offensive, old people, is that you know – you absolutely have to realize – that you can’t win on this issue in the long run and possibly not even the medium run. The demographics are completely against you. Every single year, the polling in favour of gay marriage everywhere goes up a little, as more old homophobes die off and not enough new young homophobes show up to replace them. (Granted, the young ones try harder.) Hell, the people pushing for these restrictive and discriminatory laws are now admitting openly that they won’t survive for more than a decade or two! But you continue to get these laws passed everywhere you can, using the power of Old People Vote And Young People Don’t. On behalf of all young people everywhere (albeit only technically in my case), let me say it for you: you’re going to die, and these laws are going to be revoked. When I say you need to get some perspective, part of that is deciding for yourself whether you want to be remembered by your descendants as a proud, forward-thinking individual or someone who was loved (or not) in spite of (or because of) their bigotry. Because that’s how this is going to go down.
Look. I’m not saying my generation – or any younger generation, really – has any moral standing over you in this matter. If it had been me born in 1952, I’m sure I would have taken full advantage of the opportunities you got, and I’m sure every kid who’s twenty right now would do exactly the same thing. We’re not really trained, as a species, to think generationally about long-term sustainability, and at some point we’re just going to have to learn. (The point at which we’re going to have to learn it approaches us much more quickly as a result of policies you invented and promoted, but again – not judging.) We’re resigned to what we as young people have to do, which is fix your mess. But we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t add insult to injury by judging us for not living life the way you lived it when the way you lived life is no longer possible (no more clueless and patronizing New York Times articles that make a hash of sociology, please), or by making things just that little bit harder by enacting hate-filled laws we’re just going to have to overturn. Presumably Rex Murphy – surviving from the power of a gem which contains the screaming souls of a thousand dead CBC employees – will still be complaining even then. But at that point it’ll just be him. So get some perspective, because you don’t all have soul-gems to keep yourselves alive to a sinful age. Thank you.
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I was born 1991, so I’m still pretty much young people, in the sense that everyone older than me still feels like old people (and also the sense that, you know, I’m 20). MGK? Nailed it.
Excellent piece.
The only old people I actually care about are my parents and some elderly Thai ladies I know. (Oh, and my grandmother in law, but I haven’t seen her in a long time.)
To my parents I have some things I’d like to say, “Mom, Dad, this is the lady I’ve been sleeping with for 13 years and her daughter, who I just bought a Prom Dress for. Yes, they’re black.
Stop pretending they don’t exist.”
I imagine if I could transform into Sean Hannity for a few days I might be able to influence them. (Although, probably not if I started talking about them accepting their son’s “race treason.” That would be a bridge too far. )
The elderly Thai ladies are wonderful people, but I might suggest to them that magnets can’t cure everything. “Yes, I know magnets are wonderful, but I still don’t think that sleeping on a magnetic mattress will cure my Dad’s cancer.”
To my grandmother-in-law, “Sorry about that big fight I had with your daughter. However, that was five years ago and while I didn’t handle it great you know that I was just looking out for our best interests. Besides, she forgave me a long time ago. ”
“Oh, and sorry that my parents always vote in such a way to make life more horrible for black people. I think my own voting record cancels it out to some extent… though I can’t go back in time and do anything about their vote for George Wallace.”
I honestly don’t think “it’ll happen eventually” is much of an argument against opposing gay marriage. From the perspective of the anti’s, by blocking it (as in my home state, NC, as of yesterday), that means they save traditional marriage or god’s law or preserve the rights of decent Christian people who don’t want to see homosexuals holding hands in public–whatever bullshit rationale they cling to–for at least a decade or two.
I also think that to some extent it’s like abstinence-only education: It’s not important that it doesn’t work, what’s important is that it sends the message Sex Before Marriage Bad. In the same way, opposing gay marriage sends the message that Homosexuality Bad and that America is still the domain of right-wing Christianity.
That aside, good post.
I don’t think that MGK is using ‘It’ll happen eventually’ as an argument against opposition to gay marriage. I just think he’s saying that since the movement is largely fueled by old people, it’ll sputter out sooner than later.
What really pisses me off is when people try to justify opposing gay marriage on the grounds that everybody else agrees it’s wrong. Being normal does not make you right. Racism and misogyny used to be normal (and in some places they still are).
It seems a bit like the “You can have my guns when you claw them out of my cold dead hands” argument. Chris is saying, “Okay, but you understand that you’re the one who dies, right? And you look like a dick for having done so? Do you really want to be demonized the way the pre-American Civil War south is, or made a mockery of the way Joe McCarthy is?”
Gay marriage is going to win through sheer demographical shift, so why make it harder and look like bigots?
Great piece, MGK.
I’d be curious to read some good sociology research about the ways in which individuals’ social views evolve over a lifetime. At first glance, it appears that older people grow more conservative, more intolerant, more cranky and stubborn, more prone to “in my day we did X and so should you” reasoning as they age. I’m not sure that’s really true, but it’s hard to imagine our current population of 70-year-olds as having lead the social reforms of Trudeaumania.
This concerns me. I don’t want to become to be that cranky old guy, yelling at the whippersnappers to stay off his lawn — or roof, because, you know, jetpacks — and digging in his octogenarian heels against the social reforms still to come. I don’t *think* I will — my views on social reform have changed in 20 years only in the sense that I have better reasons to believe them and better arguments to support them, and they are all things that would make Stephen Harper’s eyes glaze over. Same-sex marriage? Awesome, long over due, makes me proud to be Canadian. Legalize marijuana, legalize prostitution. You stop crime by eliminating poverty, not by building prisons.
But I wonder where the social change arguments will be in 40 years, and I worry that I might find myself railing against the onslaught on *my* “traditional” values. Will privacy cease to exist? Will gender? Will trans-humanism become prominent, and just freak me out?
I hope not. I think I’ll be able to stay open-minded and reasonable. Except about spelling. You, young people who can’t spell, or use the verb “to lay” properly: fuck you, you’re all idiots.
I was born in 1982. I don’t have the same heated “shit is fucked up and bullshit” passionate undercurrent as MGK does here, partly because that’s not my attitude in general, partly because I don’t read many of those inane editorials or see other frequent reminders, and partly because the old people I interact with tend to be well aware of the state of things. There’s no reason to get irate at people who are mostly already worried about the same problems I am, and in some cases more worried than me or even personally contrite about them.
But that’s just my personal reaction, and it’s the result of no small amount of luck – good choice of family. Intellectually I realize that things are indeed bad and likely to get harder, worse, or both. And the thing is, contrary to factoids about voting rates, it’s not like people of our generation aren’t trying to turn things around. We’re doing what we can. It would just be happening a lot quicker if most people over 40 (or pick whatever cutoff you want to blame the right people) weren’t trying to stay the course.
This post made me wish it was easier to share stuff from this blog on Facebook. And for the record, I rarely share stuff on Facebook or post anything there at all, probably less than once a month, but I thought it was that important. (Oh well. It won’t kill me to copy-paste the link manually and stuff.)
On an unrelated note, I didn’t recognize the name Rex Murphy. Canadian personality, as I might have guessed under the circumstances. I felt that at 65 he was actually too young to be the target of such ire – there are plenty of 80-year-olds out there polluting the political environment even worse than he does, and as for my personal reaction he’s younger than my and my girlfriends’ parents – but judging by pictures of him, the lich comments are spot-on. Dude looks like the Cryptkeeper.
Rex Murphy came out of his mother’s womb aged 65 and time has only just started to catch up.
MGK, excellent post. I would strongly urge you to create a revised version (a little shorter, maybe take out the pithy Rex Murphy jokes and such, as fun as they are); there is serious truth in here, but presented like this it’s not very palatable for mass consumption, and this message needs spread.
I’m so frustrated by the direction we’re heading, collectively. I’m in my 30s, doing OK, and so are most of my friends. The ones that are also doing OK don’t want to talk about this… they’ve avoided the pit – if we rock the boat now we might lose what little ground we’ve managed to stake out for ourselves. The ones that are struggling are too busy trying to get by to ‘worry about politics’.
I see their points too… the system is a carnival show, stack against us no matter who we back, no matter what we do. I just don’t see the winning play.
Great article. This is a message that needs spreading.
I wish I’d had this to link to when Clint Eastwood gave that stupid interview a few years back.
Ooh! Ooh! Punch Rex Murphy again.
this complements my long standing theory that the reason ‘everything keeps getting worse’ (especially in regards to the financial sector) is that life expectancy just got too high. people have re wired their brains to worry about hoarding things, cash, control, etc for their later years which is a mindset we didnt have 100 years ago. well, we did, but nowhere near the extent that we do now.
Hey, was this the long, introspective post that kept getting interrupted by goofy fun posts?
Either way this is brilliant (if depressing) stuff.
Is it that we live to long, or that we’re OLD too long? Does the act of aging create a generational barrier, or will societal expectations do that regardless?
The same generation that championed racial rights now fights sexual rights… can’t they see the parallel – that its the same fight?
Or is the truth that there really are no social issues, that the masses just parrot what they hear on TV and it’s all just a game to keep the powerful in power?
Just for curiosity’s sake, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about what changed in the last three decades. This was a couple years ago, but I suspect it’ll hold up just fine.
Since I was born:
(Everything relevant here is adjusted for inflation.)
…education costs have tripled.
…health care costs have doubled.
…housing prices went up 70%.
…gas prices are almost the same (they went down for a long time before coming back up).
…cars went from $18K to about $24K. (current dollars)
…household debt went from about 70% of disposable income to 130%.
…worker productivity, even if you subtract CPI, is up significantly.
…union membership has been cut in half, as a percentage of the workforce.
…and median wages have gone down very slightly.
…the top .01 percent went from making a little under 200 times as much as the bottom 90%, to making a thousand times as much.
…capital gains tax rates (Paid mostly by large investors- i.e., the rich) went from 28% to 15%.
…the top income tax rate went from 70% to 35%, as the bottom went from 14% to 10%.
Draw your own conclusions.
joe.distort: Actually, unless you’re in the upper quintile (i.e., you make a lot of money), your life expectancy has NOT improved, even a little bit. Dying just got more expensive.
@supergp good point. I wish I could remember where but I saw an article on raising the retirement age that made the point that why should construction workers retire later because lawyers are living longer.
“Actually, unless you’re in the upper quintile (i.e., you make a lot of money), your life expectancy has NOT improved, even a little bit.”
Super, on which population’s quintile are you basing this claim? MGK’s article is clearly meant to apply to Canada and the US, or, at a stretch, “the Western World”. And for Canada’s population, your assertion seems absurd from the point of view of a back-of-the-envelope-stats calculation.
35 years ago, at-birth life expectancy in Canada was 75. (See http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=3). Today, it’s 81. To raise the average life expectancy overall from 75 to 81, while adjusting the value for only 1/5 of the population, requires an average at-birth life expectancy for the upper quintile of 105. This is unreasonable.
Do you have a source to back up your assertion? How do reconcile it with the findings presented in a recent issue of Explor. Econ. Hist., the introduction to which concludes:
“Taken together, the results from the seven studies included in this special issue strongly challenge the idea of fundamental differences between social groups that historically have led to a more or less constant advantage of upper classes in terms of life expectancy. … Overall, a consistent causal link between [socio-economic status] and mortality is open to serious doubt.”
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2011.05.004
Actually, Stephen, Paul Krugman was discussing this a while back.
First off, at-birth life expectancy is a shitty metric to use because it ties life expectancy unfairly to infant mortality rate. Life expectancy at 30 is a better statistic to use.
And second: rich people have higher life expectancy than poor people, and always have had. By the at-30 life expectancy metric, the lower quintiles have barely seen their life expectancy raise at all while the upper quintiles have seen it raise notably. That’s the issue.
[…] Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » Dear The Old People – MGK's response to Ezra Klein's ask: what would you say in a reverse-commencement address, where young people address their elders on what they should know? […]
MGK,
Disregard the notes about editing this down for length or jokes. Given that this was a commencement speech to old people, it’s more than proper for it to be slightly long, and with a couple of side comments/jokes.
Shared on Facebook, because I do agree that this is a message that needs to get spread. I’m coming up on 30 this year, and I know how hard things are for my partner and I. I know that as hard as things are for us, for people even 5 or 10 years younger, it’s even worse.
This is fantastic. I spent most of the last two years living in transitional housing, which meant being surrounded by my fellow poverty-liners and specifically old ones. I was the only person under thirty there and one of the only under forty. And I feel terrible saying this, because of the situation we were all in, but these were, taken as a group, a pack of old farts who seemed hell-bent to uphold regrettable social positions and political beliefs designed to keep them in the gutter.
Due to circumstances half my own making and half from lack of other options, I am facing the possibility of homelessness. It sucks, but I will live. My biggest anger point is that I work a 40 hour a week job, I pretty much have for years. No, I don’t have a career, I have a job. Something to try to pay my way.
I find myself most days just trying to get by, but that’s not the problem. I was taught when young that if you do your job dilligently, work hard and carefully, it is rewarded. Now? It does not seem to be that way so much. So here I am.
Right now I work for a company providing support for the Blue Phones of Canada. I can honestly say having seen thier ethic- go anywhere else. But this is the problem. The ones taking slices of the income that people with merely jobs have no care for those they are overcharging, euchering and abusing. I can’t honestly say it’s ever been entirely different, but I can say that when I was younger it definitely seemed like real opportunity was more open to any willing to work thier way along.
Sorry for the incoherency. I just hope we can hang tight until things begin to ease up.
I am glad that this post talked about the important issues of today.
Especially the scarcity of soul-gems.
Shorter MGK: “Hey, old people! Get off my lawn!”
But seriously, great post.
“Hey old people! Stop hoarding all the lawns!”
“We’re not really trained, as a species, to think generationally about long-term sustainability, and at some point we’re just going to have to learn.”
Drop the word sustainability, and put in the word planning. As a species, we are horrible at long term planning, which is why bridges fall down due to lack of maintenance. 🙂
Grr, lack of an edit for formatting.
Bravo. In my gloomier moments I think most of the world’s problems are caused by the baby-boomers and the way they have pulled the ladder of opportunity up after them. Here in the UK the thing that really sticks in my craw is the way they abolished free higher eductation after reaping the benefits. That and the crippling rents my generation pay them as they own all the houses.
JP – we used to spend generations building a single structure, and build them to last centuries. Don’t blame the species, blame modern society.
Is it fixed now?
that should do it.
If not, we’ll try this.
Hopefully one of those worked.
How about em? Does that do it?
Ok, JP Cardier broke the internet. Close your tags people!
foxed
*fixed
fixed
Most sorry! A thousand apologies!
@Jacob: We used to do that sporadically. Most buildings put up in the Middle Ages were not cathedrals.
This is brilliant.
This has stuck with me.