I am sorry if this is offensive to any elderly, but I am getting so sick of my soon-to-pension father who does nothing but complain about other people. They do everything wrong with the undertone, but never explicitly said, that he knows better than them.
Especially journalist, oh he loves complaining about them and how they are hiding the truth because they didn’t report about something that he knows is true in a short news article or clip (often the fact he mentions is true, but it is a really niche knowledge and he has always struggled with the idea that other people don’t know everything he knows).
This has gotten worse and worse as he gets older. We used to always discuss politics and what works and what doesn’t and I enjoy those conversations, but lately he is getting stuck on topics and gets very very repetitive. He is also getting sensitive about it, getting upset and raising his voice when I don’t agree with him.
have anyone else experienced this with their beloved elders? This is common stereotype for elderly, especially elderly men, but it is so true for him! I do remember my grandpa also being like this, although he never talked about politics.
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Many reasons. The older one gets, the more stuff if not wealth one has acquired, the more one stands to lose. That has most people make a turn for conservative viewpoints if they weren’t there already.
Also, as the Peter Principle in the workplace (I paraphrase: everybody gets eventually promoted to a position they are not qualified to do well) old people get to an age where they overestimate their worldly knowledge.
Getting old is shit. Your joints hurt, hair grows out of weird spots, people around you move to farms upstate. Things you loved from when you were crisp and shiny get swept by the wayside by progress. You have a lot more to complain about now because you also have more time for it. And you wait an awful lot at doctor’s clinics.
Not all people do all of these things all the time but there average person will tick at least two of these broad boxes. There is nothing you can do really. Listen but don’t take to heart the crap. I draw a line at right-wing politics and hurtful -isms. If my parents didn’t cross into that territory I turned my head into an extractor fan.
When you were little, they wiped shit out of your ass crack and worried about you when you were sick. As a bonus they now get you annoy you. The circle of life.
Yeah, that’s what I have decided to do, to stop contradicting him with his extreme views. Just try to change topic instead. It is no use, he is too old to change now, if anything the change is just deeper into what he already was.
If I had wealth I don’t think I would become more conservative. Not that I’m ever going to but I don’t know why having enough money for a house was suddenly make me hate Mexicans
They don’t wake up one morning and yell small government. The more liberal social frog inside of you will also get boiled eventually by imperceptible temperature changes in the water over a long time. Conservative thinking isn’t generally synonymous with xenophobia. It’s more about low taxes, no handouts to anyone, tough on crime, that sort of thing. The xenophobia aspect is a perversion of that, which sadly isn’t uncommon but not a forgone conclusion generally speaking. The fact that the MAGAs have made this synonymous with conservative thinking in the US speaks to the success of their movement built on fear, lies, hate, and generations worth of people failed by their education system.
Because without conscious effort to expand your horizons, your preferences and distastes ossify around what you were exposed to growing up and in young adulthood. However, the world continues to change. Aging also can make adapting harder cognitively.
This is certainly true for him, he is both highly educated and narrowminded at the same time. He has basically no friends, only work colleagues, is quite unsocial (like me) and rarely tries to expand his horizons on things he doesn’t already agree on or is interested in. Anything he isn’t interested in is a waste of time and wrong… I never talk about my hobbies or interests with him because he has always been entirely dismissive and even judgemental about it in the past. Especially things I do for fun, because god forbid you do something fun in life instead of something productive…
Could easily be displacement of frustration and helplessness he’s feeling with other things. Is there anything else newly stressing him out since around the time you began to observe this?
Absolutely, but a lot of it is self-caused or because he doesn’t say no. He has had a lot of stress from work because they pile more work on him and he doesn’t refuse it. This mentality of just toughening things out and not try to change things is a life long thing of his that has tainted me too. You don’t talk back to superiors and tell them they are wrong, you just swallow their bullshit and keep your head down. He is the perfect corporate work slave and he thinks everyone else should be that way to, because it is more practical and productive for society… Especially now that he is at a high position in the company. Why won’t these young people stop trying to have a life outside of work? he never did, he was a good unhappy worker, so why aren’t they? Why do they have other ambitions for their lives?! A typical boomer attitude. Kill you inner-self and individuality and mold yourself after whatever society needs you to be.
So naturally he hates anything and anyone who espouses a more individualistic life style, because if they are right and more happy then he has wasted his own life working away and suppressing himself for other’s profit. Minorities should just adapt to the majority and stop asking for the right to live differently. Goes for everyone.
The elderly I expect come from a generation of school students who were not taught critical thinking. The elderly are exposed probably more to the whims of the media than young people are, and coupled with cognitive decline and lack of critical thinking, their brains are easily rewired and indoctrinated. Think about the number of voters you can sway.
The thing is, he is very critical of mainstream media. There is nothing wrong with his critical thinking of other people, it is being critical against his own thinking that is the problem!
If they bring up the perspective of someone who is negatively affected by a policy that he likes, he will say that the media are biased and are bringing it up to try to affect the public, that they have some kind of agenda. I agree that all media have agendas and bias, that is the nature of humans, of course you are going to want to bring in the perspective of someone you sympathize with! But he is getting to a point of thinking it is some kind of conspiracy and only media that reports things he likes are any good and he seems uncritical of their agendas or their agenda is good.
but lately he is getting stuck on topics and gets very very repetitive.
I used to do elder care, and this in particular could be an early sign of dementia.
In our family we are very familiar with dementia and senility. This is not it. He has always been repetitive (I suspect rather autism or OCD). For as long as I can remember he has always retold the same story in the exact same words to me, knowing full and well that he has told me it 12 times or more before. His mother was exactly the same. But it has gotten worse. Maybe it is because I have spent more time with him recently so he gets more opportunities to tell the same story.
In this family we are on the outlook for dementia etc though. But he is aware of his repetition. It is compulsive rather than forgetful. It is just that he tells his conspiracy theories more often, explaining them in the exact same details he did before. it is more annoying than worrisome.
om 61, i too am complaining about people complaining
but seriously, I can only agree , whiney old white guys are ubiquitous. as an old white guy sick of it.
I understand that someone who has seen a lot in life and have a lot of experience will be annoyed when they see someone do something the wrong way for the millionth time, which you know has never worked in the past. But the constant complaining about it and complaining about the same thing too. It isn’t like complaining about it the 311th time is going to fix it… I just had a argument with him, so I guess I am just venting.
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Says the millennial, complainingly.
