If it were that easy to get young people to listen, don’t you think every baby boomer would have been a perfect little Angel? It turns out, for the most part, your kids don’t give a crap about what you went through or your experience. The same way most people when they are young resent and question the “wisdom” of those older and parents- “sure boomer, that worked for you but the world isn’t the same as when houses were that cheap and etc etc…” “if you know so much why is the world so messed up..?”
Then one day you’ll get old if you live long enough, and if we grow up, we do care about our parents struggles and we realize what they went through and what we put them through and can relate. We find ourselves in the age group of people making decisions and shaping the world and… it’s still messed up. Your parents inherited a messed up world from theirs, back and back for generations, and your kids will probably inherit a messed up world from you.
You can try to say you weren’t part of the problem, just trying to “live your life and get by,” but that is for the most part what everyone else before you was doing too. So in the end, your kids will have their own problems and those will likely mean a lot more to them than any problems you faced no matter how harsh. There’s also the simple fact that living through something and taking it to heart are two different things. Bad things happen every day, people live through bad things, arguably worse than us, so there isn’t some honor in making it through hardship. If you pass through the other side unchanged, you didn’t likely learn anything. If you didn’t learn anything, the fact that you suffered especially had no meaning to anyone else. All that says at best is that you are tough, or lucky, or know how to keep your head down and avoid getting caught up in trouble. If you want your hardships to possibly mean anything to anyone, you have to learn some lesson-
Even then that lesson is one YOU learned. If we were that good at learning from others mistakes there would be no hubris or negligence or such. If millions or billions of other people survived or thrived the same hardship that’s barely a hardship so much as it is “just life,” what I mean is that when people generally listen and want to learn from someone it is someone who overcame challenges that few can overcome, or who succeeded far beyond simply the average. For our words to reach others they generally have to have some respect or admiration for us. They have to in some way want what we have or want to be more like who we are. But in the end, we just can’t relate to things too far beyond our own experience and generally aren’t interested in following things that don’t relate to our lives.
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Then one day you’ll get old if you live long enough, and if we grow up, we do care about our parents struggles and we realize what they went through and what we put them through and can relate. We find ourselves in the age group of people making decisions and shaping the world and… it’s still messed up. Your parents inherited a messed up world from theirs, back and back for generations, and your kids will probably inherit a messed up world from you.