A lot of interesting takeaways here but one that stands out is the frequency with which they bring up old age, as though their mortality is accepted and accommodated rather than forgotten or hidden. How often do we imagine our own lives as elders here? https://twitter.com/dilettanterypod/status/1313098012340576257

A culture that solely reacts to market-driven productivity demands only sees its elders as a depreciating burden (one of many explanations for USA’s tepid covid response) so I think we become conditioned to maintain a terror-induced emotional distance from aging

In the beginning of the pandemic, there were plenty of tweets dismissing the lethality of the virus because it was “only killing old people,” as if the death of an elder isn’t a profound loss of wisdom, memory, and, if nothing else, a life long-lived

The folks in the video spoke about old age with familiarity, with intimacy, as though they’re aware (and happy to accept) that it will, one day, happen to them too; meanwhile, it feels like we built an entire cultural apparatus around projecting immortality and valorizing youth

Most of us remain obsessed with correcting physical/mental signs of age, while pretty much all success narratives declare that we should labor tirelessly while young, that we’ll degenerate from our ideal forms as we age, rather than grow further into ourselves

This is why anti-“respect elders” discourse never sat well with me. An impt conversation about power redistribution is often hijacked by a conviction that we must only look forward, that looking back only unveils backwardness, and that there is no meaningful generational transfer

This ageist impulse also feels relevant watching this ridiculous country perform virility during its death throes; tradition is freshly reinvented for white supremacy and liberals still blindly hail our cultural products as “what’s new and next” all while the empire collapses

We have no worthwhile relationship with the past or the future (re: climate denialism), and I feel like it reveals itself in our avoidance of aging. In both cases we stay paralyzed in a nightmarish, ever-looping present, just pretending that we’re never going to die