06/28/02: Doling out Respect

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by juju

A few days ago, a guy I work with found out that I am 26. He was even more astonished to discover that I am 2 years younger than the assitant manager. After a few seconds ponderance, he stated, "I'll have to start giving you more respect".

What an idiot. Why didn't he just come right out and say "I've been dissing you because I thought you were a sprout."
:-)
There's plenty of reason to expect an older person to be acting from a larger experience base than a younger one. There's no guarantee of better judgement from an older person, of course...there are elderly idiots and boy geniuses.

That said, there are nuances of life and human behavior that are very difficult to pick up on unless you've simply been around people for a long time. Again, being older is certainly no guarantee of this...some folks are simply paying more attention than others. But expecting someone, say, under twenty, to understand some issues in the same depth and way most forty year olds do is just not smart, no matter how much it appeals to someone's sense of egalitarianism.

Ther are some life expereinces that are transformative. One is having and raising children. Another is losing friends and family --especially parents-- to death. There are a lot of others. For me learning to fly an airplane turned me into a very different person, because it required me to come to grips with fear, courage and self-confidence in very different ways. And if I'd learned to fly at 16, as some people do, it would have affectied me very differently than it did happening when I was 35.

You might want to explore with yourself why this is such a hot-button issue for you. The answer might be interesting.