We demand to our parents that we
need internet access and laptop at our home. "Why?" they ask. We say
we need to research online for our study and assignments. They answer, "We
too studied and were abided with assigned projects in our times. We completed
our bachelors and masters under dim lights of a tuki, when there was no electricity. But we never thought of laptops
or the Internet. So, you can study and do assignments without them if you
really wish them. You complain means you don't want to do them!"
Be it in family, social relationships, work
place or business; youths complain that older people are more rigid than they
are and their rigidity stops the youths from moving forward. This is why the next
generation has to struggle with their older generations in order to adjust
around them. This is why teens find discomforts in their homes – the problem
that is popularly called "generation gap". This is why youth-led
companies are believed to make higher profits. But, why are older people more
rigid than younger ones in terms of their thoughts and behaviours? Many people
believe that it is just natural – people cannot change themselves as time
changes and they are obsessed with the older ideas.
The rigidity and flexibility dichotomy
in youth and age is so deeply rooted that it affects every walks of life. Leonhardton in The New York Times writes that youths
in the United States believe in liberal politics and they have liberal views on
previous social taboos. "The young not only favour gay marriage and school
funding more strongly; they are also notably less religious, more positive
toward immigrants, less hostile to Social Security cuts and military cuts and more
optimistic about
the country’s future. They are both more open to change and more confident that
life in the United States will remain good" (par 5).
Today's grandparents were parents some
thirty years earlier and even children some sixty years earlier. It is quite
natural to assume that the ideas and thoughts that they gained and developed in
childhood and youth were newer and different from their parents and
grandparents. They very flexibly welcomed new ideas and thoughts. In this
regard, they were not traditional and conservative in their youths. They lived
their childhood and youth with those new ideas. Okay, it is not a problem. But
what has been a problem is they are still living with the same ideas despite
the fact that the environment around them has already gone through considerable
transformations.
For people in sixties today in
Nepali society, having a contact list on their phone set is more difficult than
writing them down on a diary. It is simply because they have a long experience
of using a diary but have never updated a contact list on phone. For them,
saving all contacts on a phone and using them without a written diary is just
unnecessary because they have been living without it for years. It may mean a
pretended sophistication, an extravagant expense of budget, misuse of
resources, and an act of a show-off. Thus, they simply reject updating their
phone contacts, but keep a telephone directory in their pockets every day.
The same logic of use of gadgets works
in case of ideas and thoughts. Today's grandparents cannot understand why their
grandchildren need to shop at malls at high prices as they don't like listing
contacts on phones. Time brings many new ideas as it moves. Naturally, all
human beings cannot realise it. This lack of realisation is more prevalent in
older people as they are used to with older ideas. It is simple that one likes
the best what one is used to with. New ideas become uneasy to them because they
do not have any experience using them. New ideas seem false and negative to
them because they don't know how they work. Thus, without realising, they
vehemently reject them claiming the ideas to be "unnecessary" because
they lived long without them.
Many youths agree on this. Before
writing this essay, some youths were asked about what they think about rigidity
of older people. Gaurav Gurung, one of the informants, posted on the Facebook
that they are rigid because they don't get the exposure to the new learning.
In addition to that naivety, older
people don't see any use of being flexible. For them, life is not a thing to
interpret from different perspectives because they are exhausted of living it.
They have established many truths about life which ultimately have been wrong and
imperfect in one way or another. In other words, they have experimented with
variations of truths regarding anything; and the experimentation led them to
conclude that truth is, after all, unattainable. So, they don't see any use of
trying new assumptions about anything; but believe whatever they have known by
now.
Thus, rigidity is helpful for older
people in some cases. An informant in his twenties Chandiraj Dahal in answering
why older people are rigid said that they are rigid out of their learning. He
said, "It's all due to the learning that we won't get to stick to many
things at a time. A child may go for two opposing things but a grown up knows,
well, these are contrasting things and won't work even if s/he wants both of
them." For Shekhar KC, another informant, rigidity is for their stable and
stronger identity image. For an engineering student Prasun Shrestha too, adults
than children and aged than adults need more rigidity as "they grow deeper
in their thoughts and become more specific."
But there are many who don't believe
that people become more rigid as they grow up. Madhwee Sharma, a student in her
twenties thinks "It depends. Some people learn to accept new ideas and
consider others' opinions more as they grow." Some people, on contrary to general beliefs, see
faults on younger ones in adjustment with the senior generation. A teacher by
profession, Rajendra Pyakurel says, "People become flexible as they grow
older (but) the demand of younger generation is much higher." Emily Sohn,
a freelance journalist also finds contrary to popular belief that "Seniors
often describe themselves as being more tolerant and more open to new ideas in
their old age" (par. 2). In 2012, Jimmie Holland (84) and MindyGreenstein (40) wrote that the assumptions about older generation were alreadyproved wrong by Cicero in 44 BC thus they are not valid today. For them, "Whether in 44 BC or 2012, we elders, mid-lifers, and young
adults all have in common the same desire—to enjoy our lives and our families.
Accomplishing that requires the same mutual respect and understanding it did
many years ago" (Greenstein and Holland).
Nevertheless, younger
people frequently complain of being misunderstood or not understood by elder
people due to rigidity of their thoughts. Yet, they generally accept it and do
not revolt because there is any way out given that the transformation from
flexibility to rigidity attributes to natural flow of time and innate failure
of human beings, which no one can challenge.
Works
Cited
Holland, Jemmie and Mindy Greenstein. "New Ideas About Aging Are Really
Old." 5 Oct. 2012. Psychology Today. 24 Feb. 2013 <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-flip-side/201210/new-ideas-about-aging-are-really-old>
Leonhardt, David. "Old vs. Young." New York Times
on the Web 22 June 2012. 24 Feb. 2013.
Sohn, Emily. "Do People Really Become More Conservative
as They Age?" 19 Jan. 2012. Beta News. 24 Feb. 2013 <http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/voter-conservative-aging-liberal-120119.htm>
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