Kid, let me tell ya... (1)

[Prometheus]

"The older you get, the smarter I’ll be."

Dad's little pearls of wisdom always started off with, "Kid, let me tell ya...." Like any other young person listening to their parents, I pretty much disregarded anything that came next, but after hearing them time and time again, they got stuck in my head, and I even found myself dropping some of them on my own kid.

Now I'm dropping them on you and this one seemed the best place to start because it's true: Dad's wisdom did become more apparent as I grew older and had more real life experience.

Younger generations think the preceding ones simply "don't get it"; that we're stuck in our old ways of thinking; that we failed them somehow. They don't like hearing about "how bad we had it" when we were their age and they really don't want to hear about how good they have it because of us.

"OK Boomer!" is the response of the Millennials and Zoomers: a phrase rife with the bigotry they supposedly hate.

They tell us about how horrible the world is and that it's our fault. They tell us how they are going to fix everything.

Yeah. I remember saying shit like that to my dad too. He'd laugh a bit and tell me to go on and try. He told me where my generation would falter. He told me that we'd never get everything we wanted. I'd tell him with all the power of my youthful conviction that we would.

"Kid, let me tell ya... The older you get, the smarter I’ll be."

We faltered where he said we would. We didn't get everything we wanted... but we got some of it.

And now our kids blame us as if we never tried.

Whatever.

If believing that gives them the strength to reach the goals we couldn't, then more power to them.

But they probably won't. We just have to hope that it gets us a little further down the road.

And our sadistic side hopes that their kids give them the same shit so that they realize how smart we actually are.