George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” While younger people might find this offensive, as one ages, it’s hard not to relate to this Irish author’s wisdom.
Mindfully American examined people’s feelings about Shaw’s words and combined some of their sentiments with data.
These are some of the biggest reasons why Americans who are no longer “the youth” tend to believe that youth is wasted on the young.
1: Failure to Recognize Youth
Like so many things in life, people often don’t realize how good they had something until it’s gone. It’s hard to blame young people for not appreciating their youth enough; it’s all they’ve ever known.
Many of our younger selves had heard from our elders about how lucky we were to have pain-free joints, wrinkle-free skin, and decades of exciting years ahead of us. Once one gets older, the “it’ll never happen to me” mentality that many young people have about those things suddenly disappears.
2: Time Appears Abundant
Time is precious, but young people often haven’t lived long enough to view it that way. You’re not alone if you feel that time has sped up as you age. Psychologists have long been aware of this subjective phenomenon, but the verdict is still out on why it happens.
Harvard published a piece on Professor Adrian Bejan who believes that one explanation could be that the rate people process visual information slows over the years, making time appear to speed up the older we get.
3: Career Opportunities
Young people have a fresh slate to choose who they want to be and what they want to do, with decades ahead of them to live, in theory, their best-designed lives. The problem? Knowing that one has so much time left to live can make some young people complacent in their careers, delaying taking action on things that make older, wiser people cringe.
That said, it’s unfair to put all the blame on young people. It’s impossible for a person to know what they truly enjoy and could see themselves doing for their career without experience working in those fields.
4: Experiences Over Future
Don’t get us wrong — enjoying new experiences has value. But as many older people can attest to, the youth often place too heavy a focus on experiences, giving little thought to how doing so could impact their future.
Case in point? If a 25-year-old invests $100 per month into a Roth IRA for 40 years, they’d have a little over $1 million dollars at age 65, assuming an average annual return of 12%. However, if that same person waits ten more years, starting at 35 years old with a $100 per month Roth contribution, their retirement savings would only sit at about $300,00.
5: Racking Up Debt
In the worst cases, not only do new experiences prevent young people from building a career and saving money for their future, but the experiences could also put them into debt.
According to Credit Karma, Gen Z has an average of $16,283 in total debt. That’s a hard number to swallow, especially since lenders typically give low loan limits to young people until they can prove their ability to make timely payments. While this is far from the case across the board, as a person in debt gets older and battles with accruing interest, they often regret taking on excessive debt when they were younger.
6: Instant Gratification
Young people aren’t alone in enjoying instant gratification. Psychologists have known for a long time that humans want to avoid displeasure at all costs and seek immediate pleasure.
The problem, as many older people know, is that frequently choosing instant gratification makes living a fulfilling life more challenging. Although it’s common for the youth to hear that they should put their time and energy into harder things that can lead to long-term success, the reality is that many seek instant outcomes, which can cause them to overly prioritize short-term validation.
7: Impulsiveness
It’s easy for older people to look at young people and tell them to slow down, think things through, and follow through with what they start. But if we stop to think about it, many of us can relate to jumping from one thing to the next when we were younger. After all, the opportunities for getting together with friends, going to a concert, and changing one’s college major with the click of a button are all too attractive.
Nevertheless, it isn’t any less frustrating when older people watch the youth waste opportunities by making impulsive decisions. Such situations often remind us of the mistakes we made that we can’t turn back time and undo.
8: Using Energy in Unproductive Ways
It’s an undeniable fact: People’s energy declines as they age. The reason for decreased energy is often that our genes and the environment physically change our cells, forcing muscles to lose mass and making activity more tiring.
Unfortunately, young people often use their energy in ways that their future older selves might not agree with. Using one’s energy to stay up until 3:00 AM playing video games just doesn’t cut it as productive for many older people.
9: Worrying About Trivial Things
There are legitimate things to worry about in life, and then there are the kind of worries that unnecessarily suck up time and energy. So, it can be frustrating for older people to watch the youth worry about trivial things.
Once people get older, they often reminisce about a time in their lives when there were less critical things to worry about. One’s health was likely better, they didn’t have kids to constantly worry about, and they hadn’t dug themselves into deep debt.
10: Lacking Knowledge
There’s a reason people associate the elderly with wisdom; the longer one lives, the more experiences they’ve had and mistakes they’ve made to learn from.
For example, professional athletes build up experience through their careers. However, there comes a time when their bodies physically can’t perform. It’s a cruel situation, given that older athletes often have a plethora of knowledge about what to do for maximum performance. Their bodies just won’t let them.
11: Unhealthy Ways
Humans are wired to be drawn to fat and sugar. But since the youth often have the perspective that they’ll be young forever, it’s common to see them downing chips, hamburgers, and sweets day after day.
Dr. JoAnn E. Manson at Harvard University says that in terms of unclogging arteries from eating poorly when you’re younger, it’s possible to reverse the damage. However, it often requires a combination of medication and major lifestyle changes. The best time to start eating healthy was in your 20s; the next best time to do so is now.
12: Critiquing Looks
You’ll never look as young as you do tomorrow as you do today. Older people know this, but young people often spend time fretting over their looks, nitpicking every part of their body instead of appreciating the natural peak of their youth.
Many older people would be more than happy to jump back into the younger body they used to critique so much.
13: Hanging on to Relationships
Relationships, whether it be friendships, romantic, or, in some cases, among family members, aren’t always healthy to maintain. There are many reasons the youth hang on to unhealthy relationships too long, including but not limited to because it’s what they’ve always (in their short lifetime) done, and they don’t know how to recognize when a relationship is bad.
With age, people can often spot toxic or non-beneficial relationships early on. That, coupled with older people typically caring less about what other people think, makes it easier for them to weed out relationships that aren’t healthy for them.
14: So Much Drama
Many young people spend their days worrying about what their friends will think of them if they change their wardrobe, fretting about a barely noticeable look that their girlfriend gave a guy, and the likes. To make things worse, social media allows people to create and partake in not only their own drama, but that of others.
As many older people come to learn, drama isn’t worth the emotional toll. If they could go back, they’d use the time they spent wrapped up in drama on more productive things.
15: Too Much Risk
Young people often make riskier moves than older people. While that can sometimes pay off, it often becomes an embarrassing story they’d rather not tell when they’re older.
Cryptocurrency investments are an excellent example of this. While crypto investments work for some, a 22-year-old YouTuber learned the hard way that taking on too many risky investments can do a number to one’s finances; the formerly 18-year-old millionaire lost around 90% of his cryptocurrency portfolio on paper, though at the time he hadn’t sold his investments. In true young person’s fashion, he said he’d continue to invest in crypto. Perhaps that will work out for him, perhaps it won’t.
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