I think that people believe they’ll become wiser up to a certain point. There is no doubt that there is a large cognitive decline that is happening at very old age.

Some things simply won't matter as you age. Climate change will have zero impact if you are going to die in a decade, which wouldn't be an unreasonable estimate among the current presidential candidates. If you aren't personally impacted, no matter how wise you may be, you can't have the same level of empathy for the problem.

That's implying none of those older people care about the lives of their children and grandchildren which is not the case in my experience

Obviously you haven't been hanging around many career politicians or corporate executives.

The problem isn't that older people don't care, it's that the older people in charge don't care.

They're not dictators or petty royalty -- they didn't get into that role without having people elect them. They don't care because their electorate doesn't care; old white people in the US vote in large numbers.

> They're not dictators or petty royalty

Some of them would like to be and want to be treated as dictators and royalty.

Maybe they do in fact care, but from the kinds of decisions they make it certainly does not appear that they do.

You can care about other people, but there's nothing like experiencing a problem first-hand. It's a level of selflessness that most people don't ever realize, because it goes against human nature. If a flight loses cabin pressure, you need to put on your own oxygen mask before someone else's. Not that you don't care for other people, but if you don't care for yourself first, you will literally be unable to help others.

It's true that with age, one realizes that one won't be around much longer. And one realizes even more clearly just how little effect one person can have on the world.

But alternatively, sometimes people who are detached from a problem can do a far better job on it. And people who have seen a lot are better equipped to put things in context than those who haven't.

The point where the snake eats its own tail is when you have a lot of relatively younger people in charge of deciding which old person is the wisest.

It probably doesn't do to think too hard about things like this. You'll just hurt yourself and upset your friends.

Except young people don’t vote in nearly the same numbers as older people:

> In 2018, among those age 65 and older, voter turnout was 65 percent for women and 68 percent for men. In contrast, 38 percent of women 18-29 years old voted and 33 percent of men of the same age group voted. [0]

—-

[0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/behind-2018-u...

A lot of voter registration laws are designed to make it hard for young people to vote. They move more frequently or are at college away from their permanent address.

I've missed one major election since I turned 18, and it's because I was on internship 5 hours from where I could vote.

I’ve moved 10+ times in the past 25 years and voted in every presidential election and most midterm elections. The ones I skipped were because I was younger and didn’t realize the importance of them. It’s not that hard.

And that's great. Voting is important to me too, and it was when I was younger also. It happened that specific year that requesting an absentee ballot was not a high enough priority and I missed it. It wasn't even a presidential election year.

I'm 37 and own a house and stuff now, and move less, and change my drivers license when I do move. It's much easier for me to vote. I don't think about it in advance.

Why is it so hard to acknowledge that while it's not "hard" for young people to vote, it is slightly harder than it is for established middle age people?

Because it takes about 5 minutes extra effort to update your address or request an absentee ballot.

Not every state has reasonable rules around absentee voting or voting access

You could have requested an absentee ballot.

Yes, I didn't say it was impossible to vote. My point was that it is more inconvenient in general for young people to vote than older people, and there are things we could do to increase their participation if we wanted to. We could also hold elections on weekends.

Short of your polling location literally being along your walk to work, voting absentee takes less time than voting in person.

If you had simply googled it, you could have obtained your ballot in less than 5 minutes.

Paraphrasing 'Platoon': You have to be old in the first place to think like that.

You also have to factor in that not only are older generations further into their lives than us (I'm generalizing) younger people, with possible wisdom gained, but they are also of a different generation, raised in a different environment and with different values. That's a bigger issue to me than the fact that they're older. Of course the older generation will always be more conservative in some respects (or at least has been in recent history). Part of that is the effects of becoming older ("wisdom"), part of it is survivorship bias, and part is just that society changes, and young people now are more liberal/left-wing/"woke"/etc on average than somebody who became an adult in the 70s or 80s.

Speak for yourself, young person.

I was born and raised overseas, and have spent my entire life embedded in many very different cultures.

I come from an ivy-league family (I'm the redneck engineer) that has been almost entirely dedicated to some fairly intense public service. Most of them could have become quite wealthy, but chose to do Service, instead.

I have written open-source software, for decades, dedicated to helping some of the most downtrodden folks on Earth recover from devastating personal circumstances. It has not made me one single dime. In fact, it has cost me many thousands.

And we're all pretty darn liberal. Being mixed up with dozens of different cultures all your life tends to do that.

My experience is that many of the younger folks in my industry are incredibly materialistic. I suspect that's par for the course. It didn't start with this generation.

Once we get a bit older, we may come to reflect, and discover that so many things that were of great importance when we were younger, don't mean diddly anymore.

As for my relationship with technology; I learned to write software that lasts decades. Almost every project I've ever done has been designed as a legacy.

> My experience is that many of the younger folks in my industry are incredibly materialistic. I suspect that's par for the course. It didn't start with this generation.

I suspect that is selection bias. IT and programming have been reliable ways to make north-of-median-income for decades now, since the .com boom in the 90s. This ties in with the rise of the Bro Programmer meme for the same reason -- it's where you to to make money.

Hell, you're posting this on HN, which is the news site for a startup incubator -- which is ultimately about making founders and investors tons of freakin money. Obviously you're going to see a bias to getting that $$$ here

> it's where you to to make money.

That's a bit sad. I do it for love. I absolutely love designing and implementing software.

It's nice to be able to make a living, but all I need to do is keep the lights on, while I do what I love.

That's a rare privilege, in today's world.

No need to take it personally, they never claimed that 100% of older people are that way.

I take it that you have not had the...lovely...experience of being an older person in the tech industry, then?