respecting your elders

When it comes to older people I generally like asking them about their life experiences. Especially making large purchases or things which might be risky (such as a used car). I find learning about their experiences with things I don't have any experiences with to be invaluable.

I think this is where I can draw wisdom from. Listening to what they did and determining if it is valuable for me based on whether or not I jive with what I am told. It is very possible that I will disagree with how they handled a situation but I can still derive some knowledge based on their experience regardless.

lol no. Your "elders" fucking suck.

I worked for seven or eight years in social care. I ran the gamut, from escorting murdering psychopaths from hospital (state) to hospital (pleb), to emptying keich filled nappies, to staying awake seventeen hours straight with Literal Hitler (guy was fucking nuts, thought he started the second world war, can't sleep: gays will eat him). Overall, they were fine, I guess: the vegetables were about as offensive as a self-shitting turnip and the schizophrenics were at least interesting.

What drove me up the fucking wall were their families.

Entitled? Oh, yes: something about having the government pay for your fucking spousal cabbage seems to set off something in the brain, like "why does he get a cup of tea made for him? Where's MINE?" Bitch, you institutionalized your fucking husband, and I've got an entire FIELD of self-fertilizing vegetables to hoe: make your own fucking cup of tea. You shoved your loved ones into this fucking concentration camp, you don't get to complain to the staff because he's not wearing his Super Special Christmas Trousers for this state visit (PSA: he shat in them whilst singing Deutschland Uber Alles). You're not the fucking Queen, you don't get a ten gun salute and the good biscuits because you deigned to walk through the fucking door and grace us with your presence.

The way those people treated the wee lassies on staff was fucking disgusting: as fucking slave labour force to be abused and berated, no better. I still remember watching them come crumbling out of their fucking houses during covid at 6pm to stand on the side of the street and APPLAUD the NHS workers: these motherfuckers, who would cheerfully step on a carer's face on their way to complain at the nurses' station about some doubtlessly asinine shit ("My fucking mentalist wife doesn't like the taste of her fucking heart medication, change it"), holy christ, I watched this whole rotten display of virtue-signaling hypocrisy and wanted to run a volvo through the whole fucking lot of them, GTA style.

So that's part one of my experience with the elderly. The second part, I guess, comes after your shift, when you get the pleasure of interacting with them in the pub. These conversations will normally begin with them telling you how things were different in their day, before the darkies came over and started stealing all our jobs (PSA #2: the darkies are all working in the nursing home looking after their spastic kin). Of how things were better in the 70s as they sold all the national industries to fund their own pension pots. Oh how fucking poor and woe is me and how that pension pot isn't big enough to heat the house whilst simultaneously funneling thirty quid a night into the fucking pub till.

There are, of course, exceptions: the based elderly fucking rule. These come in two flavours: ancient, mad fucking proto-communists who want to nuke the whole fucking planet and start again are my favourite. I wouldn't rate them as particularly "wise", per se; but at least they can look at the system they instigated and come to the (correct) conclusion that their generation managed to fuck it all up for everyone that came after. Ancient, mad fucking university professors who have never actually been out in the real world are my second favourite: having left the faculty and being farmed back out into the community, it's amazing how shocked they are to discover that the world outside the academic sphere is not as they expected. It drives them into shithouse mouse territory, and it's amazing how soon they come to gather around the "nuke the fucking planet start over" working-class demagogues in the corner.

I'd take advice on the trades from my elders, I'd ask them about fixing a fucking cupboard door or plumbing. That's it. For morals, ethics, philosophy, dating advice or modes of government, I'd be looking literally anyplace else.