Don't use age to patronize

Last summer, while visiting my parents' island summer home, my father and I stopped by a little museum in town and talked with the middle-aged woman (not much older than 50, if even that) who was running the place. I explained to her that I was on vacation from Seattle and that I had been coming to the island since I was an infant. She quipped that it looked like I still was one — apparently a very untactful way of saying that I seemed really young to her.

The woman almost certainly didn't mean to offend me, but if that's true, she failed. I was tempted to fire back an equally snide remark, but the island's culture of courtesy would have made such a response extremely unbecoming. So I bit my tongue.

Zooming forward to the present, I just read someone's online account of speaking to a group of current students at the high school she formerly attended. This person — whose Facebook profile puts her at 31 years old — recounted an instance in which one of the students asked her whether she had music to listen to while she was in the Peace Corps. She answered by asking the student whether he knew what a Walkman and casette tapes were. In a previous online posting, this person shared her perception of being "old" over the notion that she was a student in high school when some of these current students were born.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that age is all relative. The aforementioned 31-year-old would still be considered a kid to someone of my parents' generation; yet to a person who has attained 80 years or older, 50 or 60 still sounds youthful, and 31 must sound positively infantile. Regrettably, this notion is almost always lost on those who would use their age to belittle those who are younger on that basis alone — like the woman at the museum on the island, or the woman speaking at her alma mater. They may think they've been endowed with special wisdom their juniors don't have by sheer virtue of the years they've lived. Or perhaps they're simply proud of their age. This is evident in those who repeatedly complain about or make reference to their elderly status: If they truly were embarrassed about it, they wouldn't mention it so often, would they?

Age is not a predictor of wisdom or intelligence. It is usually a predictor of life experience (which isn't the same thing as the former two), though not even necessarily that. A 55-year-old who has never been married may very well have less experience with romantic relationships than a 35-year-old who has already been married for a decade. A 65-year-old who has never left the United States probably has less experience with cultural diversity than a 25-year-old who has traveled all over the world.

The examples go on. They're why I tend to respond uncharitably toward those who ignorantly patronize people younger than themselves.