The statement always follows action (or inaction) on the side of the more youthful, which does not win the approval of the elder person.
This doesn’t mean all older persons say it, or that only the elderly say it.
I’ve heard teenagers of 18 or 19 say it, disapproving in some way of kids only five years younger than themselves; I’ve said it myself.
People say this because they don’t understand the culture of these younger persons. Not to say they are always wrong, the youth more often than not lack the wisdom donned by age, but more on that later.
Culture is an organism, constantly changing and evolving, and this often leads to discrepancies between the way the things were done 30, 15 or even five years ago, compared to today.
Of course I am not an expert on the matter, but I’d like to think that this was always the case.
Can you imagine how Aramer of Mesopotamia would have reacted when his daughter spent all day with her tablet (of stone), doing this intangible thing that is writing, instead of her work or spending time with her family?
What would Dante Alighieri have thought when all his friends had FB accounts (Florence Bank accounts) and he was suddenly the only one left to catch up with the new banking craze?
Maybe he would have written the Debitor’s Tragedy.
In the same breath, I’m sure many people who were alive during World War Two wouldn’t exactly have approved of the drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll of the hippie era.
I do believe the young are often misunderstood for the things they do and the way they choose to live, but I’ll return to my earlier point.
With age comes wisdom. There are few people who learn the location of this rare jewel early in life, as it is usually broken into many morsels and scattered by our innate human nature.
People who are older than us have generally experienced more than us and learnt from it.
They can offer us an allegorical “soupe du vie”, comprised of all the ingredients and flavours they picked up along the way.
Young people are generally either confounded by the size of the kitchen or don’t see the rest of the kitchen and think they rule supreme in their own corner – and it takes us a long time to truly start reading the cookbooks we’re given.
We are often blinded by our own apparent know-how and ambitions, while we are offered so much wisdom by those who want to guide us towards the right appliances.
On the other hand, most of us want that “soupe du vie” in the end, different for each of us, but a tasty soup to share with others, and we cannot make that soup if we don’t get the ingredients ourselves.
Wisdom gives us the books and appliances to do what we have to, but the end result will only be water if you don’t have sweet and sour, or if you don’t break the eggs or make some lemon juice.
In the end, I think we could all benefit from the guidance given to us, but we also have to make our own mistakes from time to time.
By the way, the whole soup and kitchen story (I know it dragged on a bit) was a metaphor for life… and it still is, it didn’t change halfway through the paragraph.
