Do not sleep on the great gift of having friends who are older than you

Left to their own devices, young people stick to their kind. Their age, their stage, their cohort. It's natural. Humans of all kinds do this. Stick to their kind.

The US's relationship with older people is, to put it mildly, tragic. We're a culture that lionizes youth, energy, beauty, feats of fitness. We value speed; older people aren't fast. We value strength; older people are more feeble. We value collagen; older people are wrinkly.

In other cultures, the elderly are revered for their wisdom, their guidance, the fact that they have learned so many things, have internalized so many lessons, many of them hard won and worth much more than anything any blog post or listicle could confer.

In America, older people are to be shunned, avoided, cast aside, forgotten to exist. Not seen, not heard, and especially not driving on our roadways. They are to be discarded into a nice "Gracious Living" community where they can slowly melt into the taupe wallpaper and whittle away their final days quarantined safely away from civil society, with all the other husks-who-haven't-turned-into-oil-yet.

But do not - I repeat, do not - sleep on the boon that is having older friends in your life.

It's a perfect win-win. Older people get much less attention than younger people. Everyone seeks, craves, loves attention. Give them attention and a listening ear, and you will make their day. Meanwhile, there is so much you can learn from older people. They know things you can never learn from textbooks, you won't find in Google, you won't get from ChatGPT. They carry in their bodies truths about the way life used to be lived, about how different things are today, about where we've improved and where we've strayed. Knowing the past is key to understanding the present. Older people have such a bounty of knowledge here. Their knowledge is your gift.

You don't get a manual for life. They've been through things you haven't, and they've learned how to navigate life. They can give you valuable knowledge about what has worked and what hasn't. As somebody said, "It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's even better to learn from other people's mistakes."

Older people help you think critically and challenge your beliefs. We need more wise people saying "I know you think you have it figured out, but have you thought about X, Y and Z?" If you talk to some older people, it turns out a lot of them know a lot about the world, and can spot patterns better than you can. And of course they can, at least half of pattern recognition is simply amassing a larger sample of experience from which to pull patterns. They have volume.

They can remind you about things you need to do but might be forgetting, like establishing a will (especially crucial if you have kids - yes, even if you're still 25), or making sure you have money saved, or cleaning your gutters if you own a home. From the banal to the essential.

If you're a homeowner, you can bet your older neighbor has seen things that will make your life ten times easier the next time you're confounded by some repair needed in your home.

They help you practice making yourself smaller. They're likely to give you a whole different perspective on life than your same-cohort friends would. Both are vital. One provides you validation, emotional sustenance, camaraderie; the other, insights from different angles you might have overlooked, counters to your beliefs which can reveal blind spots in your thinking, should you have the humble curiosity to investigate them honestly.

Then there's the fact that they can commiserate with you about life's challenges. They might have gone through something similar. One of the great amplifiers of pain is the false belief that when we experience an emotionally difficult challenge, we are alone. Nobody else has felt pain like this, nobody else could understand. As a general rule, this is never true. In fact, it's the opposite. There are many out there who have gone through something similar, and they would love nothing more than to connect with you about the pain you're going through. To see you, hear you, and let you know you can get through it. You will get through it. Ask anyone who has come public about a source of shame in their past - like having been assaulted by a family member, or having had suicidal ideation. When they come free with it, they almost always receive a flood of people thanking them dearly for giving voice to this pain, as they have bared it too. One thing about humans is, it's tough to bare anything alone. But we can bare anything together.

And above it all, they can give you friendship. Steady, reliable friendship. And there truly is nothing so valuable as that in this world.