I gotta wonder if people that propose this kind of thing have only interacted with older people in nursing homes or something.

If you think that age is some kind of limit to long term thinking, you definitely have little or no contact with older people that aren’t impaired.

If anything, the older people I’ve been around, even the ones in nursing homes, are better at long term thinking and planning. Comparing that to coworkers, fellow students in college, you know, the 25 to 50 range of people, I’d say that increasing age gives more perspective on what long term thinking really means because they’ve already seen the consequences of previous choices.

You think age removes a vested interest in the future? Nah. Capitalism does, greed does, but age means you are more likely to have kids, and grandkids, and great grandkids. That’s the future older folks start worrying about.

You don’t have to be a narcissist just because you’re old. Why the fuck do you think that someone hitting an arbitrary age means they don’t have a concern for the future? That’s a serious question, not rhetorical. What kind of people are in your life that you think that way?

People talk shit about boomers, but I’ve sat with people of that generation, and the two before them. Sometimes on their death beds. Usually when they’re facing the specter of their mortality, even if it isn’t that close. You have no idea how rare it is for them to not worry about the world they’re leaving behind.

The whole idea of their kids having a better life was so damn central a thread of the literal boomers that it might as well be their motto. The bad, short term decision-making they did wasn’t in their sixties or seventies, it was in their twenties and thirties.

This whole concept of generation warfare, and ageist bullshit is nothing more than a smoke screen blinding us from working together in constructive ways.

Like, I get that you think this is some kind of great idea, but it shows exactly how little perspective you have. We need the experience and considered decision making that’s the hallmark of the typical “senior citizen”, just as much as we need the energy and out of the box of the young. And we need the direct, hands on per perspective of the ages in the middle that are finally seeing what their decisions have led to, and know how things are working currently to help implement the new ideas and guide the long term ideas into the future.

Seriously my homie, don’t buy into the bullshit that the politicians are actually good examples of their generations. They aren’t. They’re the power chasers, the ones that hold the system as a goal in and of itself. They’re gaining their power in a system that rewards narcissism and sociopathy with more power.

You want to change who can hold positions of power? You gotta break free of the idea that those positions are the positions we need. The more power that is vested in the people, the more checks we have on the bigger picture, the better. Just limiting the ages of the people in office only means we get younger power mongers and sociopaths tearing things apart.

Go look at the young right wing. You think they’re going to be better than the older right wing? I mean, c’mon. They aren’t any more forward thinking than their older counterparts at all. If anything they’re worse because they rush shit along and do shit so they can gain power faster.

This is just such bad thinking.