Question Arm Chair Philosophy

Come in, drop a quarter in the box and wait for the change. Today, I posit:

Why do we worship youth?

30 years ago my philosophy professor asked 17 year old me that question and off and on I've pondered this question over the years. As my body changed in ways that both delighted and terrified me, as my eyes were opened to magnificent wonders and unspeakable horrors and the mind numbing drudgery that fills life in between every few years I would come back to that question in a way that, perhaps if he knew, would give satisfaction to that professor I studied under all those years ago.

If he is still alive.

And in that thought, which fearfully I admit strikes me more and more often when I reflect on my youth and the people that shaped me, I find the answer to his question. We worship youth because we are terrified of death. When we are young we have no real concept of anything as permanent as Death. There will always be a tomorrow to fill with hopes and dreams and plans...

Until there aren't any new tomorrows.

This was a lesson I thought I had learned by that most harsh of schoolmarms, Combat when my twenty one year old self looked down on the corpse of the man I had killed and I realized what a completely PERMANENT thing I had done. There were no more tomorrows for this man whose eyes I had watched fade from life as I killed him inches from my own face as we fought for control of my rifle.

I won, he lost.

And there has been no more tomorrows for him for twenty six years, and there will be no more tomorrows for him ever. He is bones and rotted flesh and now exists only in my memory as a corpse that was no longer a man; laying in a pool of his own blood. But I was young and there were many tomorrows for me and I forgot the lesson Mistress Combat taught me. When I was forty five and my body began to rebel against my minds control and all the scientists and doctors could not determine why I couldn't breathe, and why it felt as though I was constantly having a heart attack. For a year and more I went to sleep not knowing if I would wake up the next day. Would I have a tomorrow? Then Death which had for decades seemed far away and beyond comprehension now was very close and very, very real.

We worship youth because we can remember when Death didn't seem so close and we live vicariously in the youth around us, staving off that fear of our mortality if only for a little while so we can forget the aches and pains and remember when our bodies didn't hurt and there was no line between thinking and doing.

As we age that line appears and it gets thicker and blacker every day and we see the Grim Reaper, perhaps not at our shoulders, but every day lived is a day closer to him, when something we did without thought twenty years ago now takes effort and some day... Someday will be beyond us.

And Death is coming; none of us are going to make it out alive.

So we worship youth and remember when we didn't remember someone, only to realize they were probably dead now. Like that philosophy professor who asked a 17 year old who knew everything why we worship youth, and had to wait thirty years for his answer.

I'd say that death is not the root fear. The two most omnipresent fears are fear of loss and fear of the unknown. Death just happens to be the ultimate expression of both of those.

Which is possibly a semantic point, except that I think that the worship of youth derives primarily from the fear of loss, but not fear of the unknown. If we were all immortal, but continued to age until we were tiny desiccated husks, I don't think we would glorify youth any less. On the other hand, if we maintained twenty-year-old bodies up until the point we died, but lived the same lengths we do now, what would happen? My instinct is that youth would be less important than before, but I have nothing to support that.

That said, I have never really faced death and I'm still in my mid-twenties, so it's possible that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

JG wrote: My flippant response for the day:

We have enough youth, can we find the fountain of smart?

It was drowned by the fountain of stupid.
Or in less poetic terms no amount of smart can overcome stupid.

Personally I believe that people worship youth because they believe there are only a limited number of years available to people before life comes to a complete stop at death, and nothing is a greater antidote than the sense of power and possibility and available time of youth. In my experience, when people have a sincere belief that life does not end at death there is a lot less worshipping of youth going on.

Myself, I think it's much simpler than that. I spent my weekend with my parents. They are still very active people... for their ages. But it sorta hurts remembering the stuff that they were able to do, and can no longer enjoy. And it hurts a lot more realizing that even the vitality they still have can easily be robbed of them at any time. I would love to give them back their youth and health, but I can't. We worship what we can't have.

It was said to me many times that youth is wasted on the young, how that by the time a person had built up wisdom they'de squandered their lives and not achieved any worthwhile goals.
Why so many look back at the good old days - wishing they could do it over again ... with less mistakes and take the opportunities missed.
Youth haven't made blunders yet, so regret perhaps.