The older I get, the easier I get irritated! Sometimes I just want to mouth off to someone, but instead I just bite my tongue since it’s the more pleasant thing to do. Quite often I find people to be quite ridiculous and not very thoughtful in their actions which affect others. It seems to be more and more often that it happens. So the big philosophical question I have is, have people become more and more thoughtless, or is my world view changing as I get older?
I think about this quote my professor from youth and society read to us the first day of class in college. It was something like “the youth are running amuck in the streets, have less respect for their elders, and they will be the downfall of our society in the next generation”. She had the class think about who said it and when they said it. It was an awesome exercise that opened my eyes to some of the issues of age (youth vs. elder). It turned out the person who said it was Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates (I always get the three mixed up, thus I was not a philosophy major. Clearly, youth have been seen as a scourge of society and likely to be the cause of it collapsing, which is obviously not the case.
So back to my conundrum- I’d like to think it’s my world view changing, not people being more thoughtless. And I’m pretty sure I can be accused of the same thoughtlessness.
