Listen to the Old People!

Our culture places a lot of value on empirical evidence - we love science and technology, we require safety studies for new products, we generally believe that repeated observation leads to greater understanding about the way the world works.  It's inherent in almost every aspect of our lives and our zeitgeist.

So then, I wonder why we don't spend more time listening to what old people are saying about their lives, which choices worked out well for them, and how they wished they had shifted their priorities.  This logic is the cornerstone of parenting - the idea that more experienced humans who have tasted more of life will be able to make better choices and therefore provide guidance and structure to the younger humans that will help them lead good lives.  Somehow I think we lose that sense once we reach adulthood.

My grandfather with my nephew & brother-in-law at my wedding.  trefpool.com

A palliative care nurse collected the dying regrets of her patients in the last months of their lives (no mention of how many individuals were included in this anecdotal research, but it's enough that she's writing a book about her findings), and the most common sentiments follow below.

1. I wish I had been more true to myself
2. I wish I had worked less
3. I wish I had expressed my feelings more
4. I wish I had kept better contact with my friends
5. I wish I had let myself be happier

The theme that flows beneath this collection is clear to me.  We all walk a negotiated boundary between our articulated sense of self and our sense of the expectations and norms of the society in which we live.  This list of regrets sends a clear message: Embracing conformity to the world's expectations is not the path to a life well-lived.  Working more, bottling up our feelings, transforming ourselves after gauging others' expectations, these are things we all do in the modern world, and while it helps grease the wheels of capitalist production, it's making us miserable.  I must ask again, why on earth are we so fixated as a country on economic growth, on protecting the means of wealth generation, when doing so comes at the expense of our happiness and sanity?

My (millennial) generation has been occasionally labeled as lazy and self-absorbed; a cultural discussion about how to persuade millennials to work harder has arisen in the wake of this digital debate about the character of today's crop of young American adults.  Maybe we're just wise enough to realize that there are bigger fish to fry in the finite allocation of time we've been given on earth than satisfying all the whims of our corporate overlords.