When we think about young people, in general, we tend to think of their errors — their naiveté, their recklessness, their pretensions, etc. — however, we fail to see the ways in which young people are perhaps wiser than the aged.
I argue that young people are generally wiser than adults in some important ways. This wisdom may stem partially from the fact that young people have not yet been fully indoctrinated and broken by society, and in the sense that they seem to understand that life is to be enjoyed to the fullest. Yes, they are prone to mistakes because they lack life experience, but they intuitively know that adults have become neurotic with worries. They can see from the careworn faces of adults that they are beaten down — trampled in the rat race for money and status.
Most adults are miserable. They desperately clamor for status to impress others, or to prove that they are normal or successful. The happy marriage, the good job, the big house, or even the special attention and sympathy that comes with victim status — these things become an obsession for so many adults.
Young people — if they haven’t already been brainwashed by the dominant culture, or toxic subcultures — tend to laugh at these pursuits, and would much rather just be having fun with their friends. (Note: Yes, status games tend to start in the teenage years — due to the prison-like social environment most young people are thrust into — however, status seeking does not seem to reach its obsessive climax in most individuals until the adult years).
Adults tend to create problems where none actually exist. They believe they have been harmed just because they were told so. They are consumed by fears — many with no basis in reality. They use their fears to justify an excess of authority in the home, in the school, and in society in general. In the age of woke signaling, the only oppression that seems to have popular support is the oppression of youth. (This is not to argue that young people do not need leadership from elders, but rather to argue that this leadership is often taken to authoritarian extremes.)
Adults, and especially religious authorities, do their best to make sure guilt and shame are heaped onto young people for any real or perceived misstep in their ways. They must be brought to heel for their own good, and for the sake of their “eternal souls”.
Young people tend to lack the pretense of metaphysical certainty, and they seem to be naturally irreligious in the absence of indoctrinating influences. They tend to see through religious pomp, and often mock the senseless narratives of the world’s major religions. Adults, on the other hand, are so terrified of death and punishment in a supposed afterlife, that they revere or cling to whatever superstition wins the popularity contest in their culture.
Young people are often idealistic, sometimes naively so, and many adults love nothing more than to shoot down youthful idealism. “Life isn’t fair” — who hasn’t heard this cliché in their youth? Incidentally, this cliché seems to be employed most frequently by those who want to justify unfair conditions. What is missing in this retort is the sort of nuance that would make it worth uttering. What should be said is: “Life isn’t fair. We must accept those unfair aspects of life that we currently can’t change, and work on those we can — in order to make things more fair.”
If we can learn to recapture the wisdom that we had in youth, we can combine this with the aspects of wisdom that come with age. We can start to live for fun again, but do so in a less reckless way. We can recapture our idealism, and temper it with an understanding of what we can control and what we cannot. We can jettison our superstitions and neuroses and live life without a concern for status games, and without an irrational fear of death.
We were all fools in some ways when we were young, but we should also consider that we were wiser in some ways. Never let your youthful spirit die.
“A man’s maturity — consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play. ” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Epigrams and Interludes, 94