The Sage Wisdom of Our Elders

[discordantcat]

Dear Learned Adults, People Who May One Day Become Learned Adults, and Anyone Else Who Ever Gives Anyone Advice, At All (Including My Future Self),

I have some things for you to keep in mind while you dish out your hard learned wisdom, which, with all sincerity, I do respect.

1. Life lessons are learned by living. Not by being told about them. That's

Comments

[arsinyk]

Yes. This. All of this.

Did anything in particular happen to prompt this post?

[discordantcat]

I've just been receiving some pearls of wisdom lately and I needed to a) vent, and b) put in writing that no, there are actual reasons this is a dumb thing to do that don't just boil down to "Teenagers -- what can you do? They know that they know everything."

[arrowwhiskers]

This resonates a lot. I think it's because people have this instinct to generalize and it takes a lot of forethought to successfully make generalizations while accounting for the fact that if your generalizations are negative, it behooves to be very aware of who is receiving your information.

I can't think of any examples right now, but I know for a fact that people have made comments to me thinking I'd be relating to them, when in fact they'd unknowingly insulted me/people dear to me. Then again, I've also been on the other side, making assumptions that turned out to be unfortunate and inopportune, so idk if I can fully judge.

[arrowwhiskers]

Oh, but I will say, it is absolutely true that people assume crazy things about people just because they happen to be young. And there really isn't any excuse for that. If you don't know someone, don't know what they've been through, you can't assume that there's anything in particular that they don't know or haven't experienced or suffered. Maybe if you're talking to a 15 year old you can assume that they don't know what it's like to have a 30th birthday party, but really, when it comes down to it, that's about the extent of the assumptions you can make.