The Old versus the Young (and vice-versa)

We tend to see ourselves as belonging to one of only two groups, the Old and the Young. A philosophjy teacher once told me that the world is divided into two groups: the ones who believe the world can be divided into two groups, and the ones who don't. We do seem to have a tendency to simplify as well as to group together, so perhaps it isn't puzzling that the Old see the Young as all being alike, and the Young do likewise.

Muzafer Sherif, the famous social psychologist, pointed out that when we see any group as outside our "latitude of acceptance", we tend to see its members in a simplified and extreme manner. They are seen as all very different from "us" and all very alike to one another. The actual boundaries, if they exist at all, are vague and arbitrary. When I was 18 I saw anyone older than 30 as Old. At 30 I saw 50 as Old. Somewhere between 40 and 60 I wasn't sure where I belonged personally, but Old was somewhere north of 70. At 77 I see that while I'm... on the Old side, the Young now include anyone under 40.

In our minds we exaggerate the qualities that make the other group "different" from us. The Young see all us Old as pretty much alike, and as very different from themselves. I asked my grandmother, when she was about 80, what it was like for her to be Old, she said "I feel just like I did when I was 18, only I'm stuck in an old body". That was the most frightening thing I had ever heard to that point. Surely being old meant you lived in a different world than us young did. I did not want to think that there might be common experience between us or that, even worse, that being Old wasn't really different from being Young, and that someday I would experience this as well.

I didn't want to belong to a group that would become Old and die. I belonged to the Young! The Young were....different from the Old; the Old were ugly and wrinkled and alone, and were going to die, and I certainly didn't want to be a member of a group that did things like that! Sherif was right (as he was so often) in saying that we dis-identify from groups to which we don't belong. Dis-identifying gives us some protection from the thought that we might share the same basic feelings and fate as members of the "other" group.

Well, I see the Young as pretty much all alike. Their taste in clothes and music..they're all alike. Us Old are like Ents, and we see the Young as "hasty" and impulsive, led by their emotions and impulses, with no more judgment than we had when we belonged to their group. I'm still not going to die, though.